People Before Profit blog

For Haitians, first there’s God, then Cuban doctors

Mon, 03 May 2010 20:16:00 +0000

Cuban health workers' remarkable contribution to recovery efforts in Haiti following the January 12 earthquake rates meager coverage by the corporate-controlled U.S. and European media. It's old news, of course, to those who follow these things. Yet recent expressions of appreciation for Cuba and Cuban doctors bear an intensity of feeling that should have pierced the censorship blanket, especially if fairness prevailed.

Following a recent meeting in Croix des Bouquets, Haiti, with the Cuban and Brazilian health ministers, Haitian President René Preval, for example, told Prensa Latina, "For the Haitians first there is God and then the Cuban doctors. And it's not just me saying that, one who is convinced, but also poor people in the communities, the very poorest citizens."

Brazilian Health Minister José Gomes said, "What Cuba does here in regard to health care is an example for the whole world, a most eloquent model of disinterested help." Edmond Mulet, the Brazilian head of the UN mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) testified to first-hand knowledge gained over several years of Cuban doctors' contributions throughout Haiti. Since the earthquake, he said, "I have run across Cuban doctors working, at times in truly terrible conditions: no water, no electricity, with only the equipment they carried with them, because the health facilities in Haiti are very, very precarious."

Prensa Latina cited the observations of veteran diplomat Marcel Young, Chile's ambassador in Haiti. "It's rewarding," he observed, "to see the Cuban doctors work because they do it with total abandonment, with limitless altruism and generosity." He recalled that Haitian political factions "attack and provoke each other, but none want the Cuban doctors to leave. They take care of them."

The story was told of a 10-year old Haitian boy Keven Cemens, who was severely injured when during the earthquake a wall fell upon him. Cuban surgeons had amputated his left leg.

All was not lost, however, because Cuban rehabilitation specialists were on hand. Responding to a reporter's question as to why he was visiting the specialists, Keven Cemens replied, "I am coming for a leg to be able to play football." He received a prosthetic leg, but expressed surprise on learning that to accommodate growth a new one would be made for him and provided periodically.

Less surprising for many Cuba watchers is that just as Cuban health workers attend to prevention to ward off potential needs for curative care, they follow up on the latter, when appropriate, with rehabilitation. And the record shows that Cuban medical assistance worldwide involves more than beating an early exit after emergencies have passed.

Cuban medical collaboration with Haiti did begin in response to death and destruction caused by Hurricane George in 1998. But almost 12 years later, teams of Cuban health specialists are still there. The services they provide are comprehensive and farsighted enough that new left legs can be envisioned for a young football player.

World Notes: Turkey, Cuba, Australia, India

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:50:00 +0000

Turkey: People speak out on genocide anniversary

Citizens gathered April 24 in Istanbul to memorialize the beginning 95 years ago of a massacre by Turkey directed against the Armenian people. In Taksim Square, hundreds staged a sit-in while police monitored counter-demonstrators. Others gathered at the Haydarpasa train station, departure point for deported Armenians who would never return. Their petition called upon "those who feel the great pain" to grieve, although the term "Great Catastrophe" was used, not genocide. "The genie is out of the bottle," said academic Cengiz Aktar, quoted by Province.com. "These broken taboos concern not just Armenia, but also other hidden subjects such as the rights of minority Kurds." In Yerevan, tens of thousands of Armenians also marked the anniversary amidst signs that Turkish-Armenian reconciliation attempts are floundering.

Cuba: Millions vote in local elections

Elections on April 25 to 169 municipal assemblies resulted in 15,093 delegates being chosen from 34,766 candidates. Election participation exceeded 93 percent of the voting age population. A run-off vote takes place on May 2 between the two most popular candidates in districts where no candidate gained at least 50 percent of the vote or where candidates were tied. Municipal assembly delegates have the chance later on to become members of the provincial legislatures or National Assembly. The Juventud Rebelde ("Young Rebel") newspaper cited the National Electoral Commission to the effect that "a vote for the merits, capacities and competence of candidates will be an unequivocal message of Cubans' confidence in their political system and of their will to maintain and improve it."

Australia: Union condemns asbestos exports

The Manufacturing Workers Union (MWU) revealed recently that Canada continues to export asbestos to poor nations. Union activists marked the International Workers Day of Mourning on April 28 by joining widows of asbestos victims outside the Canadian embassy in Sydney. Maree Stokes told Herald Sun news that her husband died of mesothelioma caused by asbestos and that exportation of the deadly material is "disgusting." "All they are interested in is making money in their country," she emphasized. MWU President Paul Bastian pointed out that as the worldwide movement to ban asbestos gains strength, Canada's production and export of asbestos is "morally corrupt." China, India and Russia also export the material, the use of which Australia banned seven years ago. The dangers of exposure to asbestos have been known since at least the 1930s.

India: Left-led protests target price rises

A one-day "hartal," or national strike, on April 27 closed down transportation, education and trade activities in West Bengal and Kerala, two states with left governments. Ramifications of the action called by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and three left allies extended to other northeastern states. Joined by nine regional or caste-based parties, the strike was aimed at government-mandated price rises impeding access to food, gasoline, diesel and fertilizers. According to the Times of India, protesters focused particularly on Congress Party control of the national government. While wholesale prices have risen at a 10 percent annual rate recently, retail prices are up by 17 percent. The strike unfolded amidst a recent flourishing of large labor actions.

Photo: Protesters block a passenger train from moving during a demonstration and strike against rising prices in Patna, India, April 27. (AP)

Class inequality widening in Israel

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:16:00 +0000

A new report from Tel Aviv highlights growing class inequality in Israel, and the issue is getting national attention there.

Over the past nine years, and especially in 2009, employers' share of Israel's national income has grown, while workers' share has dropped, says the report, issued by the Adva Center on April 29.

"The blunt of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 hit employees, not employers," the social-justice-oriented Israeli research center said.

Most significantly, in 2009, the salaries of directors-general (CEOs) in companies listed on the Israeli Stock Exchange rose by approximately 9 percent, while employee wages declined by about 3 percent. The jump in CEO compensation is striking "in view of the fact that it occurred in the midst of a world financial crisis," the report notes.

Apparently this is kicking up a fuss in Israel. On Wednesday, Knesset Finance Committee chairman Moshe Gafni said excessive salaries paid to banking and corporate executives are widening the gaps in Israeli society, the Jerusalem Post reported.

"Eli Yones, the CEO of Bank Mizrahi-Tefahot, earns NIS 1.5 million [about $403,000] a month," Gafni said. "What planet does he live on? I'm not envious of people and their salaries. But if a whole community could be supported with a monthly salary of one person, and the cleaning staff of the same bank Yones manages earn minimum wage, it widens and deepens gaps in our society."

"Bank Mizrahi-Tefahot is an example of how we are destroying our society with our own hands," Gafni said. Gafni is a member of the ultra-orthodox party Degel HaTorah.

Momi Dahan, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's School of Public Policy and a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, told the Jerusalem Post, "The Israeli experience is similar to the U.S. or the UK, where over the past three decades senior managements' salaries have increased out of proportion to widening inequalities in the economy and society."

A bill has been introduced in the Knesset to limit executive pay, and the government has established a commission to look into the issue. Others advocate raising tax rates on top incomes.

The Adva Center report says that between 2000 and 2009, Israel's national income grew by 30 percent. But the employees' portion grew by only 17 percent, while the employers' chunk grew by 59 percent.

The shift in income from employees to employers meant that Israeli workers lost out on average by more than $3,400 a year.

In the same period, worker productivity grew while hourly pay declined, and this disparity sharpened in 2009.

Another report by the Adva Center, released April 1, documents growing class, ethnic and religious inequality and separation in Israel's education system. Titled "Separation, Inequality and Faltering Leadership - Education in Israel," this report links the increase in education inequality to the erosion of public financing, increasing privatization and weakening of teacher unions.

Photo: Israeli Arab and Jewish excavation workers protest against exploitation by a company that is a subcontractor for the Israeli Antiquities Authority, in Jaffa, Israel, June 16, 2009. The banners, in Arabic, Hebrew, Russian and Amhary languages, are held by workers who speak these languages. (WAC Maan, photographer Jonathan Ben Efrat http://www.flickr.com/photos/dblackadder/ / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Student strike shuts down University of Puerto Rico indefinitely

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:20:00 +0000

Over 3,000 assembled students at the main campus of the University of Puerto Rico, at Río Piedras, on Tuesday, April 13, voted overwhelmingly in favor of a tentative 48-hour campus occupation the following week, to be followed by a full-fledged "indefinite strike" if the administration refused to negotiate in good faith.

The occupation began on Wednesday, April 21, and became a strike at midnight the following day, after a meeting between the students' Negotiating Committee and UPR President Ramón de la Torre. De la Torre and campus Chancellor Ana Guadalupe had failed to show up at meeting after meeting with the Negotiating Committee, while attempting to speak exclusively to the centrist Student Council, which initially opposed any strike action (but is now part of the Negotiating Committee).

In addition to Student Council, the 16-member Negotiating Committee, created by the Assembly for that purpose, includes representatives of grassroots groups formed within the campus over the past year or so to address numerous issues facing students, ranging from privatization and budget cuts to homophobia in the surrounding community.

Demands

Upon leaving the meeting with De la Torre, student negotiators informed that he refused to budge on any of their demands. The students' main demand is the repeal of Certification 98, a diktat of the Board of Trustees that paves the way for eliminating fee exemptions for athletes as well as university employees and their families. Students have also denounced potential budget cuts of up to $100 million, as part of the current government's "austerity measures", and they demand that the university open its financial records to public scrutiny.

Early in its term the far-right, pro-statehood administration of Luis Fortuño, elected with a broad margin as a result of the previous, centrist, pro-status quo government's deservedly huge unpopularity, approved the infamous Law 7, which among other things allows the sacking of tens of thousands of public sector employees. Puerto Rico faces a severe fiscal deficit since at least two years prior to the current world economic crisis, but UPR students and other opponents of the measures claim it has only worsened the crisis while further impoverishing the poor and the working class. Indeed, economic indicators, including both unemployment and "growth", continue to decline steadily. Despite much posturing about a "general strike", however, and with few but notable exceptions, a bureaucratized, domesticated, and fragmented labor movement has shown itself terminally inept at opposing any serious resistance to the neoliberal offensive.

Although Law 7 technically does not apply to the UPR, it allows the administration to take its own "austerity measures", and eliminates budget items that previously fed into the university's constitutionally-mandated budget. Instead, students argue budget shortfalls, in the short term, should be compensated (among a long list of other alternatives they have included with their demands) by reducing the budget of the President's Office, which include unjustifiable luxuries and "assistants' " salaries often occupied through political or personal favors.

Showdown

The historic Río Piedras campus is surrounded by a gated fence. Students camped out inside the campus overnight, and proceeded to perfectly execute a carefully designed plan, storming the gates from within as the sun rose on April 21. After a brief melee with confused and surprised security guards, several hundred students shut themselves inside the campus, and have remained inside since. Shortly thereafter, however, Chancellor Guadalupe declared an administrative lockout, and the notorious Police Riot Squad was ordered to custody the outside perimeter of the campus, while awaiting for the courts to resolve a request for injunction by university administrators against student leaders.

Tenured and non-tenured employees have been supportive of the students, joining the labor stoppage during the initial occupation, and refusing to cross picket lines afterward. Professors and administrative personnel have their own demands to add to the students' list, and have been very active in both protecting the students, organizing food and water covoys, as well as support demonstrations outside the campus.

All but two UPR campuses are now on strike. The majority are being occupied by students for 48 or 72 hours, while the initial 48-hour occupation of the Río Piedras campus has become a full-fledged strike, to be ended only through negotiation or force.

At the Mayagüez campus, the UPR system's second largest, the student body was split during a massive assembly plagued with irregularities on the part of the Student Council President, an operative of the governing party. As a result, campus operations have not been shut down, although militant students are organizing resistance. At the Arecibo campus, similar dirty tricks on the part of the Student Council were nearly successful, but students were able to turn the tide, and a campus occupation is now ongoing. At the Bayamón campus, the Rector attempted to impede the Assembly by replacing it with an electronic "referendum", but students upheld their rights and approved a 48-hour occupation.

On Monday, April 26, the fourth day of the indefinite strike, and the sixth since the initial occupation, protests by labor unions and community groups of the governor's yearly budget address were held outside the main gate of the Río Piedras campus, in solidarity with the students, rather than at the Capitol building, as customary. This is significant, since the labor movement has been highly fragmented in its response to the current government's onslaught. This year, unlike the last, leaders of all the major unions and coalitions shared the same podium. All of the speakers stressed the importance of the student movement as an example of both militant initiative and unity in action. This observer estimates an attendance of at least 3,000.

The governor's message itself contained no "surprises" concerning the UPR, although the way he urged students opposed to the strike to scab and provoke was irritating even for the most jaded observer of Puerto Rico's rotten governing elite.

Meanwhile, negotiations with university administrators are ongoing. President De la Torre has passed the students' demands on to the Board of Trustees, which in turn has created a committee of its own members to "study" the demands. Said committee, however, appears to be dragging its feet, arriving at no conclusions after three days.

What's Next?

All in all, however, the students' position seems much stronger at present than at the outset, as the strike process has become nearly system-wide, and the tide of public opinion seems to have turned in favor of the students.

This is due in some part to the fact that the right is in office (the "center" tends to opportunistically support and co-opt oppositional movements when not in power), but primarily to the high degree of discipline and organization that the students have displayed and maintained throughout the process. Students occupying the campus have held numerous teach-ins, artistic events, clean-up squads, a highly participatory democratic decision-making process, and communal living arrangements that have so far received surprisingly good press.

The Riot Squad, however, remains at the gate, awaiting the order to enter and sweep the campus clean of striking students. A judicial order, however, in response to two requests for injunction filed by the administration and pro-strike law students, respectively, has ordered mediation between the parties, which in theory buys the students time, making it difficult for the government and the administration to play such a risky hand, at least for now.

The next few days will be crucial to the outcome. Support is urgently needed and much appreciated.

Photo: by Josian Bruno http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_MmYWWef9zfw/S9ieKWjJ68I/AAAAAAAAACA/4ebrS-gBe9k/s1600/PUBLICO+TEMPRANO+EN+LA+TARDE.jpg

World Notes: Greece, Honduras, Western Sahara

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:05:00 +0000

Greece: Workers reject wage, social security cuts

The general strike April 21-22 of civil servants protesting government-ordered austerity measures was smaller than general strikes earlier this year joined by private sector workers. The conditions under which Greece's social democratic government will be receiving $60 billion in EU and IMF loans, as requested on April 23, include wage, pension and hiring freezes; benefits cuts and tax increases. The striking unions, mostly affiliated with the Communist Party, were dissenting from widespread trade union acquiescence in social support rollbacks. Government debt has risen to 11.3 percent of GDP, a six-year high. Unemployment has reached 11.3 percent, while 20 percent of the population lives in poverty, according to Al Jazeera. The George Papandreou government retains a 33 percent approval rating.

Honduras: New U.S. base in the works

U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens announced recently that Washington will be providing $2 million toward construction of facilities near the Nicaraguan border serving as a base for four naval vessels and "advisors." The advertised purpose, according to Resumenlatinoamericano.org, is drug interdiction. The Honduran navy and the U.S. Army's Southern command will be exerting joint operational control over the base located in the poverty stricken Mosquitia region. On hand for the announcement, current Honduran President Porfirio Lobo characterized plans for the base as "a magnificent contribution." Bloomberg Businessweek reported recently that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is on the verge of restoring ties with Honduras, broken in the wake of the military coup last year that removed Lobo's predecessor Manuel Zelaya.

Western Sahara: Human rights abuses continue despite UN monitoring

Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel recently joined Argentinean human rights activists in demanding that Morocco release Western Saharan political prisoners and protect human rights in Western Sahara. The prisoners, on hunger strikes for 40 days as of April 22, face possible military tribunals and the death penalty for trying to visit refugee camps in Western Sahara, according to rebelion.org. At the same time, Polisario Front leader Mohamed Abdelaziz conferred with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in New York, obtaining the latter's pledge that UN monitoring of the ceasefire between the Front, which has fought for Western Saharan independence since 1976, and the Moroccan government would continue. The ceasefire came about in 1991 only after both sides agreed upon a self- determination referendum, which Morocco since then has blocked.

Photo: Unemployed teachers protest government cuts during a demonstration by public workers outside the Greek Parliament in Athens, April 27. (AP/Thanassis Stavrakis)

Bolivia hosts alternative summit on people and Mother Earth

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:54:00 +0000

Bolivian President Evo Morales earlier this year called for an international conference to deal with the structural causes of climate change and to propose "alternative models" for humans to live in harmony with the natural world. The First World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (WPCCC) took place April 19-22 near Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Some 18,000 people were on hand, including, scientists, intellectuals, lawyers and official representatives from 94 countries, among them the presidents of Ecuador, Venezuela, Paraguay and Nicaragua. The Cuban vice president and the prime ministers of Antigua and Barbados were present. Social movements from 132 countries were represented. A complete schedule of events is available online.

The conference came about in reaction to last December's failed UN Copenhagen Climate Conference. Dim prospects for a 17th UN Climate Conference in Mexico next December were confirmed at an interim UN climate conference in Bonn earlier this month.

The Copenhagen Summit missed in meeting its obligation under the 1997 Kyoto Protocols to establish numerical goals for reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by individual nations. A handful of industrialized nations, led by the U.S. government, commandeered the proceedings, finishing them off with a brief statement of generalities.

Sociologist Raul Prada, Bolivia's vice minister for strategic state planning, indicated that the Cochabamba summit would pay attention to a range of causes of climate change rather than focus on greenhouse gases alone. The agenda, he said, would include "environmental depredation," understood as wastage of renewable resources, "ecological disequilibrium," and environmental contamination.
Inaugurating the conference, President Morales stated, "We have only two roads, Mother Earth or death. Either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies." Earlier in Copenhagen, he had observed, "We are the ones called upon to head this struggle for the defense of Mother Earth ...The debate [is] between the culture of life and the culture of death."

This was not new for Morales. At an indigenous congress in 2007 he called for "national and international decisions to save Mother Nature from the disasters provoked by capitalism in its decadence." At the United Nations in April 2008, he announced "10 commandments to save the planet, humanity, and life."

The United Nations last year made good on his proposal to name April 22 the International Day of Mother Earth. According to Mercosurnoticias.com, "Climate change [for indigenous peoples] is a problem not only of atmosphere, technology, or financing, but one of the western model of life, of the ambition and greed of capitalism." Some 7,500 indigenous people attended the Cochabamba conference.
The names given to 17 conference working groups suggested the broad range of topics undertaken. They included: structural causes, harmony with nature, the rights of Mother Earth, climate migrants, indigenous peoples, climate debt, climate change adaptation, forests, agriculture and food sovereignty, Kyoto Protocol requirements, development and transfer of technologies, "shared vision" for action, financing, action strategies, and "carbon market dangers." Morales' proposals for a climate justice tribunal and a world referendum on climate change filled out the list. Crammed into four days were 164 two-hour presentations carried out on the initiative of environmental, indigenous, energy, peasant and food sovereignty groups at the summit.

The gathering took on the colors of a "people's summit," reflected in commentary by one participant that "Confrontation on climate change had to proceed from the bottom up." Social movements dominated at the WPCCC, just as they have done in the new Bolivia. "It's not by accident," explained writer Eduardo Galeano, unable to attend, that this "summit of mother earth" took place in "this nation of nations."

The Bolivian setting for the summit indicated world recognition of Evo Morales' expanding leadership role in popular struggle. The United Nations last August named him a "World Hero of Mother Earth," identifying him as the "leading exponent and paradigm of love for mother earth in this world."

The WPCC's message ultimately came down to the idea expressed by Galeano: that "human rights and the rights of nature are two names for the same dignity." The People's Summit unfolded on the anniversary of popular victory marking Cochabamba's "Water War." Ten years ago, street clashes with security forces ended up dumping water privatization plans set in motion by U.S.-based Bechtel Corp. From then on popular mobilization grew, leading to the election of Morales' socialist government in 2005.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/otravezmehicemujer/ / CC BY 2.0

World Notes: Venezuela, Hungary, Tanzania

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:14:00 +0000

Venezuela: Financial and energy agreements signed with China

On April 17, Chinese officials visiting in Caracas signed financial accords with Venezuela, providing for $20 billion in initial financial support for "diverse works of development." The new loan, China's largest foreign financial commitment in 60 years, complements earlier bilateral investments worth $12 billion. Agreements were also reached on cooperative oil extraction projects and construction of four supertankers. Venezuela is on track to become China's fourth largest oil supplier, eventually delivering one million barrels of crude oil daily, according to VTV News. Thanking China for confidence in his country's future, President Hugo Chavez identified "this newest bilateral tool" as "opening the road" for regional assistance. Chinese Energy Minister Zhang Guobao spoke of "elevating the Chinese-Venezuelan strategic alliance to the highest level."

Hungary: Reactionaries win

In parliamentary elections on April 11, the center-right FIDESZ party took 52.8 percent of votes cast, while the ruling socialists could muster only 19.3 percent. FIDESZ will likely achieve a two-thirds parliamentary majority after second-round voting on April 25. The report on rebelion.org attributes the socialists' decline to the generalized assumption that foreign lenders have the upper hand in an economy that last year contracted by 6.3 percent. In a surge fueled by 11 percent joblessness and full-throated anti-Gypsy, anti-Semitic rhetoric, the nationalist Jobbik Party took 16.7 percent of the votes and probably 26 parliamentary seats. The Hungarian Communist Party, reeling from a government-backed anti-communist media campaign, gained a mere 0.11 percent. Many young adherents switched allegiance to Jobbik.

Tanzania: Historic decision on refugees

"One of the world's most protracted refugee situations" ended April 16 when Home Affairs Minister Lawrence Masha announced the granting of citizenship with "all the rights of every Tanzanian" to 162,000 internees, those identified as the "1972 Burundian refugees." After fleeing civil war violence that killed 200,000 people, the mostly Hutu refugees lived in three specially reserved areas in Tanzania. As part of naturalization processes that began in 2008, 50,000 Burundians chose repatriation. Joining Masha at the Katumba settlement for ceremonies, top UN refugee official António Guterres lauded Tanzania's "unprecedented generosity and courageous decision." The UN News center indicated that in the wake of regional civil wars, by 2000 Tanzania "had the largest refugee population in Africa with 680,000 people in camps."

Photo: Member of the controversial Hungarian Guard, wearing paramilitary-style uniform, listens to the election results at the headquarters of Jobbik, Hungary's far-right party, in Budapest, April 11. (AP/Timea Fauszt)

World Notes: Peru, Australia, Cuba

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:23:00 +0000

Peru: Police kill protesting miners

Highway blockade in Chala by 6,000 miners belonging to the 60,000 member FENAMARPE union ended April 4 when police shot five miners and a bus rider. Nationwide labor actions have been under way on behalf of legislation allowing unlicensed, mainly gold miners to obtain permits. Because only 5,000 informal miners hold concessions, they can hire and exploit tens of thousands of their unlicensed counterparts. Ten months have gone by with no vote on completed legislation. Strikers also want revocation of decrees passed earlier that, favoring large mining interests, were aimed at implementing the U.S.-Peru free trade agreement. The IPS report cites parallels between this deadly clash and that in Bagua last year when 33 demonstrators and police were killed.

Australia: Rudd government reverses field on immigration

In what Amnesty International calls "an appalling political move," the Labor government on April 9 suspended asylum applications from Sri Lankan and Afghan refugees. Naval ships have intercepted 100 boats carrying refugees since 2007, with almost 1,900 boat people arriving so far this year. The suspension came as the rescue of 70 refugees aboard a sinking boat became news. Insisting the new policy is legal and temporary, Immigration Minister Chris Evans pointed to improving situations in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. The Sydney Morning Herald diagnosed a "humiliating backdown" for a Labor Party buffeted by Conservative criticism as to softness on border protection. Seized refugees will go on being transferred to a detention center on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean.

Cuba: Energy sources and savings on the agenda

Granma newspaper reported recently that community discussions on a "culture of saving" were producing results. Diminished first quarter electricity use in Havana led to a 21,000 ton cut in oil required for electricity generation, with savings of $11 million. Positive energy news came also from oil drilling operations along the northern Matanzas coast that reached productive depths in an area previously regarded as exhausted. But the emphasis of the 9th International Workshop on the Promotion of Renewable Energy convening April 7 in Bayamo was on solar energy. Enrico Turin, representing EUROSOLAR, warned that profligate use of current energy sources threatens human survival, while Cuban Academy of Sciences president Ismael Clark assured 100 delegates present from 12 countries that for the sake of sustainability, global consumption patterns needed to change.

Photo: Miners in Casapalca, Peru. (Humberto Jesus Paz Burkli http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/w5RFTmbuSOfqnGlSpMCcxg)

World Notes: Senegal, Kyrgyzstan, Israel

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:30:00 +0000

Senegal: French military to leave, maybe

On April 5 President Abdoulaye Wade announced plans for removing all French bases from his country. Logistical arrangements for the military exodus apparently are in the works, although Al Jazeera characterizes the move as mainly symbolic. An agreement was reported recently on the future departure of 1,200 French troops from an airbase near the capital, Dakar. The nation this year celebrates 50 years of independence from France. French troops never left, however. Responding to Wade, French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised continuation of "a policy of military, bilateral and regional co-operation in Senegal, in support of regional stability." With military installations also in Djibouti and Gabon, France remains the only European country with bases in Africa.

Kyrgyzstan: Coup leads to Afghan fallout

"Power is now in the hands of the people's government," proclaimed former Foreign Minister Rosa Otunbayeva, now heading a six-month interim government that took power April 7 amidst riots that killed almost 100 people and wounded 1,500 more. She promised a new constitution, elections and return to state ownership of privatized properties. The coup came in response to rising prices, corruption and arrests of opposition leaders, the BBC reported. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had visited deposed President Kurmanbek Bakiyev a week earlier to urge protection of human rights. Otunbayeva promised continued hosting of Russian and U. S. air bases. The U.S. military temporarily curtailed flights to Afghanistan from its Manas base, crucial to troop and material resupply there.

Israel: Nuclear weaponry remains despite talks, accords

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled plans at the last minute to attend a 46-nation Washington summit April 12-13 aimed at blocking the spread of nuclear weapons. He thereby evaded expected Arab demands that Israel sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The report by Agence France-Presse also cited recent British analyses placing Israel's nuclear capabilities at around 200 nuclear warheads deliverable via missiles, tactical weapons and U.S.-supplied fighter jets and submarines. Nuclear danger in the region stems too from pains taken by Washington to maintain its nuclear threat against Iran, undiminished by the recently signed U.S.-Russia Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. PressTV notes that some 90 U.S. nuclear bombs are expected to remain deployed at Turkey's Incirlik Air Base.

Photo: Celebration of the 50th anniversary of Senegal's independence from France. http://www.flickr.com/photos/seneweb/ / CC BY 2.0

Death of South African rightist highlights ongoing problems

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:24:00 +0000

The death of far-right South African white supremacist Eugene Terre'Blanche, beaten and slashed on his farm near the conservative farming town of Ventersdorp on April 3, highlights the problem that South Africa, the wealthiest, most industrialized and urbanized country in sub-Saharan Africa, still faces in dealing with rural labor relations and land issues, as well as the fruits of deep-seated racism against the Black majority.

News of the murder has set off a political storm. The white right wing has accused the government of President Joseph Zuma, of the African National Congress, of failing to protect white farmers and of allowing the head of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, to engage in provocative anti-white rhetoric that encourages violence. Zuma and his government moved quickly to defuse the situation by expressing condolences to Terre'Blanche's family and promising full prosecution of the murderers, while also calling for an end to provocative rhetoric and actions on both sides.

The agrarian problem in South Africa has been long in the making. When Europeans first settled at the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th century, under the auspices of the Netherlands East India Company, Dutch governors could not or would not control what turned into a rampaging land hunger on the part of Dutch, French Huguenot and other European settlers. The African population of the Cape area was quickly overrun or displaced from their lands. Those who survived ended up as virtual serfs on the large white-owned farms.

After the British Empire took over from the Netherlands in 1815, sections of the Dutch-speaking settler population broke away from the original Cape Colony, partly because they were angered by the abolition of slavery. These "trekboers" fought a series of wars with African kingdoms, and set up two small white-ruled republics in the interior. Many African farmers and cattle raisers were pushed off their lands, which became large-scale white-run farms worked by heavily oppressed Black labor. Particularly galling was the settlers' custom of kidnapping African children and bringing them onto the farms to work as "apprentices."

But the hands of the British were far from clean. The most influential British adventurer, politician and business leader in South Africa, Cecil Rhodes, pushed through the 1894 Glen Grey Act which made it much easier for whites, whether Englishmen or Afrikaners (as the descendents of Dutch and French settlers came to be called), to shove even prosperous Black farmers off their land. The two "Boer" wars, in 1880 and 1899-1902, brought little benefit to Black South Africans. The displacement and the exploitation continued after South Africa whites got dominion status (similar to Canada and Australia) from the United Kingdom in 1910. In 1913, the government passed the Native's Land Act, setting the stage for further displacement.

When the Nationalist Party came to power in 1948, laws controlling the work and movements of the Black majority were made more onerous still, under the apartheid system. But there were always people who wanted to go even further. One was Dr. Albert Herzog, the politician and son of former hard-line Prime Minister Barry Herzog. Herzog junior thought that the apartheid regime of John Forster, a Nazi sympathizer during the Second World War, was making too many concessions to the Blacks. So he split from the ruling National Party and formed the Herstigte (reformed) National Party, hoping to get the support of the Afrikaans-speaking poor whites who had been displaced or oppressed by industrialization and who bore a grudge against the English-speaking white business establishment. Both the National Party and Herzog's group played on racial prejudice and anti-British feelings left over from the Second Boer War.

Out of Herzog's group there developed, starting in 1973, a splinter group yet more extreme, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) or AWB, which promotes an ideology that is extreme even by white South African standards. Eugene Terre'Blanche, whose name means "white land" in French, became the AWB's main leader, claiming that the apartheid regime was too liberal and that the Boers (Afrikaner farmers) should split off from South Africa and form their own state or states, essentially recreating the two little Afrikaner-ruled republics suppressed by the British in 1899-1902.

The idea of splitting off tiny, right-wing Christian and ethnically pure agrarian republics is hardly new in South Africa. But what Terre'Blanche added was the methodology and trappings of 20th century fascism. The AWB's symbol is similar to the Nazi swastika, and the organization trained and mobilized violent stormtrooper units which even attacked the apartheid government. Like the old Ku Klux Klan in the United States, the AWB terrorized Blacks who tried to defend their rights.

In 1994, after a long struggle carried on by the ANC, the South African Communist Party and others, apartheid finally came to an end with the first non-racial democratic vote in South Africa's history and the election of liberation hero Nelson Mandela as president. But the AWB and other white extremist groups vowed to block, by force if necessary, efforts by the new government to undertake the herculean task of dismantling the political, administrative and cultural mechanisms of apartheid. The AWB regarded the white farming population as a key part of their national constituency.

Today, there are about 50,000 white farmers in South Africa. The post-apartheid government has opted not to abruptly chase them off the land and divide it among the Black rural poor, as some wanted. But it did restore land to some African communities who could prove that the land had been taken from them since the 1913 law (which was repealed). It also redistributed some government land. A plan of helping Black farmers to buy land from whites on a "willing seller-willing buyer" basis moves with agonizing slowness. Lately, the government has been planning the confiscation of land, with compensation. It has also developed labor codes to improve the treatment of farm labor, but evidently there are serious enforcement lapses, with many documented abuses including beating and killing of farm laborers.

Eugene Terre'Blanche had faded from prominence, after having done a stint in jail (three years) for administering a crippling beating to a former employee and assaulting a gas station attendant. But he was still the head of the AWB, and upon his death, the most right-wing elements mobilized against the government and the ANC. There have been many murders of white farmers in recent years (at least 1,500, maybe more). These attacks appear to result from a boiling up of anger of against local conditions perceived as oppressive, as well as common crimes, rather than a centrally orchestrated campaign, and government officials have pointed out that in fact there have been many assaults on Black farm workers by their white employers. Initial police reports indicate that Terre'Blanche was killed by two of his employees in a wage dispute. However, the reinvigorated AWB, who were out in force at the funeral on April 10, and others on the right are using the incident as an organizing tool, accusing the authorities of not protecting the farmers. They also accuse the ANC of promoting hatred against Afrikaners. In particular, they accuse the leader of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, of stirring up hate by his flamboyant rhetoric and particularly his insistence on singing one of the songs or chants of the anti-apartheid resistance movement. The song, "The Cowards are Frightened," includes lines such as "shoot, shoot" and "kill the Boers."

The vast majority of the 3 million Afrikaans-speaking whites are not farmers, but blue and white collar workers, small businesspeople, professionals etc. However, there is a strong cultural attachment to the memory of the farm, the legends of the "Groot Trek" and the suffering inflicted by the Boer Wars. The white ultra-right, plays on these feelings of nostalgia and victimhood, the latter of course stimulated by the farm attacks, as an organizing tool. Understanding this, the government of President Zuma has taken a conciliatory approach following the death of Terre'Blanche, ordering swift prosecution of the culprits. The ANC ordered Malema and other members to stop singing the "Cowards are Frightened" chant, to which he grumpily acceded.

But the root cause of the farm killings has to be dealt with. As the South African Communist Party (SACP), which along with the ANC and the COSATU trade union federation constitute the governing Tripartate Alliance, put it:

"If the allegation that Terreblanche's [sic] murder arose out of a wage dispute is true, it calls upon all of us, especially government, to strengthen the effective regulation and the labour inspectorate on farms. Over a period of time the SACP has strongly campaigned for building the capacity of our Department of Labour to inspect and enforce legislation protecting the vulnerable. This ought to be attended to urgently given continuing reports of abuse of especially the most vulnerable workers, farm-workers and domestic workers. The SACP calls for a speedy solution to the challenges facing our broader land and agrarian reform, including the convening of the long overdue summit of farm-workers and farm-dwellers."

Dennis Lauman contributed to this article.

Photo: Apartheid-era sign on display at District 6 Museum, Cape Town, South Africa. http://www.flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/ / CC BY 2.0

Vatican praises Beatles, sidesteps growing scandal

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:10:00 +0000

Maybe the Catholic Church just needs a break these days amid sweeping allegations and controversial reports surfacing about decades of child sex abuse by its priests worldwide.

And maybe that break comes in the form of honoring the Beatles.

That's right, the Vatican in its newspaper L'Osservatore Romano paid tribute to the Fab Four in its weekend editions, praising the rock stars with two articles and a front-page cartoon reproducing the crosswalk immortalized on the cover of the band's album "Abbey Road."

The tribute marked the 40th anniversary of the band's breakup.

However some suggest that perhaps by "making peace" with the one of the world's most famous rock bands of the 1960s and '70s, the Vatican is trying to divert from the public scandal that continues to unfold.

The Vatican said that although the Beatles used drugs, led "dissolute" lives and even claimed that they were bigger than Jesus, these were all in the past - while their music lives on.

"It's true, they took drugs; swept up by their success, they lived dissolute and uninhibited lives," said L'Osservatore Romano. "They even said they were more famous than Jesus," the paper added, recalling a 1966 comment by John Lennon that outraged many Catholics and others.

"But listening to their songs, all of this seems distant and meaningless," the paper added. "Their beautiful melodies, which changed forever pop music and still give us emotions, live on like precious jewels."

L'Osservatore noted that the Beatles' songs have stood the test of time, adding that the band remains "the longest-lasting, most consistent and representative phenomenon in the history of pop music."

Giovanni Maria Vian, editor in chief of L'Osservatore, told the Associated Press he loves the Beatles.

He said that at the time of Lennon's sensational statement, the paper "commented that in reality it wasn't that scandalous, because the fascination with Jesus was so great that it attracted these news heroes of the time."

But critics say the real scandal is the Catholic Church's response to the sex-abuse crisis.

The Vatican may have forgiven the Beatles over the weekend for their "satanic" messages, but Ringo Starr, the band's legendary drummer, told CNN he couldn't care less.

"I think the Vatican, they've got more to talk about than the Beatles," he said.

Photo: John Lennon of the Beatles, center, apologizes for his widely publicized remark that "the Beatles are more popular than Jesus," at a Chicago news conference in 1966. At left is George Harrison, at right is Ringo Starr. (AP file photo)

Recalling the Holocaust

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:31:00 +0000

"Counsellor Smirnov: Tell me, Witness, did you yourself see the children being taken to gas chambers?

"Shmaglevskaya: I worked very close to the railway which led to the crematory. Sometimes in the morning I passed near the building the Germans used as a latrine, and from there I could secretly watch the transport. I saw many children among the Jews brought to the concentration camp. Sometimes a family had several children.

"The Tribunal is probably aware of the fact that in front of the crematory they were all sorted out. Women carrying children in their arms or in carriages, or those who had larger children, were sent into the crematory with their children. The children were separated from their parents in front of the crematory and were led separately into gas chambers.

"At that time when the great number of Jews were exterminated in gas chambers, an order was issued that the children were to be thrown into the crematory ovens or the crematory ditches without previous asphyxiation with gas.

"Counsellor Smirnov: How should we understand that? Were they thrown into the ovens alive or were they killed by other means before they were burned?

"Shmaglevskaya: The children were thrown in alive. Their cries could be heard all over the camp."

The haunting testimony of how the children cried from inside blazing ovens was given by Severina Shmaglevskaya, a Polish woman who had managed to survive the Auschwitz concentration camp from the day she was put there (Oct. 7, 1942) until its liberation in January 1945.

At the Nuremberg trial she described the "selection" process by which some Jews were sent to the labor camp, whereas most - including all women with their children - were taken off to an immediate death. Smirnov was a prosecuting lawyer.

President Barack Obama marked Holocaust Remembrance Day today with a statement honoring the memory of "those who endured the horrors" of the Nazi atrocities during World War II.

The president said the Holocaust calls on all people to renew their commitment to prevent genocide and to confront anti-Semitism and racism "in all its forms."

It was 65 years ago that hundreds of concentration camps across eastern Europe were liberated by Soviet troops. Several large camps in Germany were liberated by American troops, and the prisoners in Buchenwald, one of the most notorious of the camps, liberated themselves.

At least 11 million Jews, Czechs, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, Germans, gays, Communists and other political prisoners perished in the death camps, with many millions of others also killed by the fascists. Poland lost 25 percent of its population. Over 20 million Soviet citizens were killed in the war and the U.S. lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

The Nazi's "final solution," which aimed to wipe out the entire Jewish population, succeeded in killing a third of world Jewry.

Israel ground to a halt yesterday as citizens stopped everything they were doing to observe two full minutes of commemorative silence.

Mohammed Barakeh, a member of Parliament and a leader of the Israeli Communist Party, was the only Arab in a contingent of Israeli parliamentarians and government ministers, including Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, at Auschwitz earlier this year to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the camp's liberation. He had been invited to attend by the speaker of the Knesset. Right-wing legislators had lobbied unsuccessfully to have him barred from the commemoration.

Barakeh said his participation at the memorial was not an endorsement of right-wing Israeli officials who might try to use remembrance of the Holocaust to gain support for occupation of Palestinian territories, but an attempt to show "full sympathy with the Jewish people for their suffering in the Holocaust."

Photo: Flowers placed on a memorial during a ceremony marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, April 11. (AP/Eckehard Schulz)

Paraguay’s president in tough spot

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 09:54:00 +0000

Between a rock and a hard place: that describes the precarious situation of Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo.

Taking office on August 15, 2008, Lugo, the first president in 60 years who did not come from the Colorado Party, was harbinger of a new era. "Red Bishop kindles hope in Paraguay" was how the UK Guardian a week earlier had titled an interview with Lugo. "I do believe we will resurrect this country, a country deeply drowned in misery, poverty, and discrimination," Lugo stated, adding, "[W]here there is sweat, where people are shoeless, we will be there." The former church leader had campaigned at the head of a center-left coalition.

On April 7 this year, Lugo was in Colombia at the Fifth World Economic Forum for Latin America, a conclave of heads of state and 500 business leaders. The agenda covered "roads toward economic recovery," "reduction of inequalities," and openings to Asian economies.

Media reports highlighted Lugo's warm meeting there with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. "Paraguay," Lugo said, "looks favorably upon actions Colombia has taken against narco-trafficking, against the FARC, against criminality and its efforts to reestablish public order and peace in the country."

In Paraguay, old power brokers rule in the Parliament, Army, and the media. Luismi Uharte describes media obsession with the kidnapping October 15, 2009, of wealthy right-wing rancher Fidel Zavala by an insurgent group, the Paraguayan People's Army (EPP). Parliament and the media are working overtime to portray the Lugo government as weak on terrorism and incompetent. Their campaign continues even though a $550,000 ransom payment allowed Zavala to go free on January 17.

The media has skipped over important developments like the government's renegotiation of a treaty with Brazil over use of the bi-national Itaipú hydroelectric project, rumblings of Parliamentary coup plotting, and the campaign to release hundreds of peasants from near-slavery conditions. The resulting outpouring of sympathy for Zavala, one that crossed class lines, weakened popular support for the Lugo government, according to Uharte.

Interior Minister Rafael Filizzola, seen as a U.S. resource, has used social democratic credentials to insinuate a "police presence" within the peasant movement, a step feeding into its criminalization by the media. Filizzola also pleased Lugo's opponents by reaching out to Colombia for help with policing and by accepting Colombian allegations of ties between the FARC and EPP.

An already riled up opposition had a field day over Defense Minister Luis Bareiro's letter to U.S Ambassador Liliana Ayalde, taking her to task for meetings with civilian and military opposition figures, among them prime Lugo rival Vice President Federico Franco. That rebuke coupled with Bareiro's dim view of the government's "anti-terrorist" cooperation with Colombia came across as mildly anti-imperialist. This created a pretext for a barrage of media and parliamentary negativity toward Bareiro, reported Uharte. The government is portrayed as "subordinated to Chavez and the Bolivarian bloc."

Lugo is taking shots also from the left. Former electoral coalition partners show signs of division. Some are silent in the face of rightist attacks and others are tending toward political independence. And government difficulties in moving toward promised agrarian reforms have alienated some peasant groups.

Late in March thousands of peasants demonstrated in Asunción, demanding land redistribution and progress toward equitable health care, education and housing. National Campesino Federation leader Odilón Espínola told reporters, "We can't speak of change if 80% of the fertile land in the country is in the hands of 1% of the population, while 85% of the campesinos have access to only 6% of all the land." Speakers threatened land takeovers and blockades of highways unless the government helps peasants.

Yet the movement inspired by Lugo still has a hold on long-term supporters, exemplified by veteran peasant leader Elvio Benítez. Recently interviewed by La Nación, Benítez opined that "the right wing underestimates the popular sectors." He refused to dismiss the threat of a coup against the democracy, suggesting that it is real and, if realized, would represent a "backward step." He said, "The people are paying attention, are prepared and alert in circumstances where they may have to take a stand and defend against whatever attack is directed at turning back this process."

Photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fernando_Lugo.jpg

Amidst election setbacks, Italian left urges unity

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 02:39:00 +0000

The votes in the Italian regional elections reflected a strong sense of political frustration in Italy. The ultra right Berlusconi Government had increased unemployment and social problems in Italy. It had undermined democracy and labor union rights. Plus, the government was characterized by continual political scandals and constant internal squabbles.

However, the Italian public remains frustrated over the internal divisions that plagued the 2008 center-left government, The Union, and thus took its frustration out by abstaining from voting. This enabled the Berlusconi government to survive and increase its share of regional governments.

That frustration with the Union government and the unusual decision of the center left Democratic Party to not continue its alliance with the left, including its Communist Parties, has led to a disintegration of the previous voting block that had led the Union government to victory.

The left itself began splitting and then reuniting in new reconfigurations with the Federation of the Left (including Rifondazione and PdCI - the two Communist Parties) and The Left Ecology and Liberty alliance (former Rifondazione and Green Party elements). Together these two formations received 6.2% of the regional vote. Both the Democratic Party and the left reconfigurations have suffered loses among the working class population. Amidst this confusion is the emergence of the extreme chauvinist and racist Northern League in working class communities. The Northern League was the only party that increased its vote, making it more important than ever in the ultra-right Berlusconi government.

In the region of Puglia all the parties of the left, with the exclusion of the tiny Trotskyite Workers Communist Party that had opposed the Union Government from the beginning, came together to give regional election victory to the incumbent administration led by Nichi Vendola, former Rifondazione leader and now leader of the Left Ecology and Liberty party. The incumbent Vendola not only united the left but also received support from the Democratic Party.

Paolo Ferrero, secretary of Rifondazione and spokesperson for the Federation of the Left, has singled out unity as the way to reconstruct the social block that supported the Union government and could block the ultra right. This unity, he argues, should start with an alliance between the Federation of the Left and Left Ecology and Liberty, but, he continues, should become more than an electoral alliance. It should build its organization at the grassroots on the problems facing the Italian public.

Despite strong differences on policies, the Federation of the Left urged votes for the DP in most regions to stop the ultra-right onslaught. The Left Ecology and Liberty actually formed electoral configurations with the DP in several regions.

Photo: Prime Minister Silvia Belusconi as The Joker. Vinco/CC

In a rare show of unity, Indian unions demonstrate together

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 02:00:00 +0000

Nine major trade union federations of India demonstrated together last month on five essential issues that affect a vast majority of Indian people. On March 5, the union federations, representing 50 million members, marched and demanded price controls on essential commodities,and food grains, government steps against job loss and economic crisis, social security fund for unorganized workers, implementation of labor laws and an end to divestment of the public sector. The nine union federation leaders marched shoulder to shoulder in a rare show of trade union unity.

In India, like many countries of Asia and Europe, unions are affiliated to political parties. The largest union federation in India is the National Trade Union Congress, which is affiliated to the ruling Indian Congress Party. They claim a membership of 15 million.

A surprise move was the BMS labor federation, associated with the extreme-right, Hindu party called the BJP, joined the protests. They claim a membership equal to the National Trade Union Congress.

The two Communist-affiliated federations, which were in the forefront of calling for the demonstration, have a total membership of 17 million. The Communist Party of India's union federation, AITUC (All India Trade Union Center) is the oldest labor federation in the country, has a membership of 11 million. The Communist Party of India-Marxist, which split from the CPI in the 1960s, is associated with the 6-million-member Center of Indian Trade Unions. In addition to these four, there were five other union federations, called centers in India.

Numerous observers found the unity of the unions "heart warming" and a promise for the future. The workers showed a marvelous strength in struggle, observers said. The united national action was simultaneously reproduced in almost every state, district and county headquarters. For example, in the state of Tamil Nadu, an estimated 100,000 members from 179 locales demonstrated and courted arrest.

This joint action in India is a new phenomenon, born out of life experiences of Indian working class. The economic crisis affecting Indian workers and families is marked by massive privatization, a one-way opening of Indian markets to global private capital investment and unbearable price rise of basic food commodities.

The INTUC chief met the prime minister of India before the massive demonstration. But nothing was done to relieve the pressure on workers and their families. Therefore the INTUC chief said that the struggle will continue on March 5 and beyond. There were arrests on March 5, but the government maintained cool and the arrested were released soon after detentions.

The Indian corporate and government world is watchful and tense after such cross-party unity among trade unions leaders and the rank and file. A massive restructuring is happening to the Indian economy. A large section of public sector employees are affected by a "contractor system" being introduced and practiced to augment profits and avoiding government responsibilities. Many employees are being declared part-time wagers to avoid benefit payments.

The government also seems to be rushing efforts to increase GDP. They want to prove that the corporate sector can do beat out the competition, especially with next door neighbors like China. So the government offers concession after concession to corporations, and stimulus packages are doled out with hopes that some benefits might trickle down to people.

The unions are asking the government to link the corporate stimulus to retaining and increasing jobs. Otherwise you are only enabling the non govt employers to fatten themselves at the cost of public exchequer, they say.

This struggle enables the nine trade union centers to do a review of their respective strength and weakness in their fields. The reality is two-thirds of the workforce is yet to be enrolled in unions. If the nine centers decide in their next meeting to try to approach the unorganised work force, the political importance of the class will gain immense power in extent and intensity.

Photo: Union members and supporters from Tamil Nadu. Teresa Albano/PW

Palestinians and Israelis call for nonviolent people power to end occupation

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:49:00 +0000

A meeting between Israeli and Palestinian Communist leaders last month highlighted a new approach that is gaining favor among Palestinians as the path to achieving a state of their own alongside Israel.

"Depending on the sole option of negotiations has exhausted its purposes," leaders of the Palestinian People's Party and the Israeli Communist Party said March 25, following a meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah, "and ... it is necessary now to activate and develop other strong factors in the Palestinian position."

Fed up with the increasingly aggressive Israeli far-right and frustrated with U.S. hesitancy to confront it, Palestinian leaders of varied political views are emphasizing nonviolent mass action by the Palestinian people to push back against Israeli settlement encroachments and the occupation's repressive measures.

The aim, they say, is twofold: to arouse the world community to press Israel to end its occupation, and simultaneously to create "facts on the ground" that will make a Palestinian state an inevitable and speedy reality.

This approach, called "sumud" (steadfastness), was highlighted by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad last month, when he joined residents in planting trees in a village near the West Bank city of Qalqilya, where the Israeli separation wall surrounds the city and blocks farmers' access to their land. Fayyad told about 1,000 people gathered to hear him, "This is our real project, to establish our presence on our land and keep our people on it."

"Steadfastness must be translated from a slogan to acts and facts on the ground," he said.

In a recent interview with Asharq al-Awsat, Fayyad said his approach "is based on the peaceful daily expression, in a non-violent manner, of opposition to occupation and settlements, boycotting the products of the settlements and invigorating the popular movement against the wall." Such a movement, he said, should be matched by stepped up international involvement "to strip away legitimacy from everything that has any connection to the Israeli colonialist scheme."

Resistance and intifada (uprising) should not be defined narrowly as armed actions, Fayyad said. "The entire Palestinian people today are in an intifida peacefully in resisting the settlements, the wall and the occupation. If this resistance does not meet the specifications of some [it is because] it does not have boys who are killed."

"I am not ashamed to say that I am against sending children to the barricades so that they would be slaughtered for the sake of issuing a statement," he said. "Resistance without blood is also resistance."

Last week, Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, visited Bil'in, a West Bank village slashed by the Israeli wall, whose residents have become international symbols of the Palestinian nonviolent resistance movement, holding weekly protests against the wall since 2005. The movement has spread to other Palestinian villages. "What happens in the village is a model for contemporary nonviolent popular resistance," Gandhi said during his visit. By awakening the conscience of the world community, this movement, he said, will spur an end to the "persecution and occupation" of the Palestinian people, and the Israeli settlements and separation wall "will disappear."

On April 14, Martin Luther King III is scheduled to speak at a conference on nonviolence in Ramallah, sponsored by Realizing the Dream, a group founded by King and his mother Coretta Scott King, and two Jerusalem-based organizations: Middle East Non-Violence and Democracy and the Center for Democracy and Community Development. The event's objective, the sponsors say, is to bring together, strengthen and enlarge Palestinian nonviolence efforts in order to end the occupation.

Israeli peace advocates are joining with Palestinians in many of these efforts. On March 6, several thousand Israelis and Palestinians demonstrated in East Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood against Israeli authorities' eviction of Palestinians from their homes to accommodate Jewish settlers. The event drew wide international media coverage.

The Palestinian People's Party and Israeli Communist Party leaders emphasized the need for "escalation of popular struggle and resistance" among the Palestinian people and for activating the "peace moves in the Israeli street that opposes occupation, settlements and provocations in Occupied East Jerusalem, just like what happened in Sheikh Jarrah recently." They pointed to "the adamant popular resistance against the Apartheid Wall in Bil'in and Ni'lin, which has become a unique model and symbol of the struggle."

At the same time, they stressed the need for "comprehensive political moves at the international level" to push Israel to stop settlement construction, abide by international laws and United Nations resolutions, and end the occupation.

Their statement gives their views on a range of pressing issues, including Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, the U.S. role, the East Jerusalem settlement crisis, Gaza, the demand for Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, democratic struggles within Israel, and the splits within the Palestinian movement. It is available in English on the Israeli Communist Party web site.

Photo: Scene at a 2008 protest in Bil'in. (Friends of Freedeom and Justice Bilin)

FARC releases prisoners as prelude to exchange

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:55:00 +0000

Leftist guerrillas released prisoners Josue Daniel Calvo on March 28 and Pablo Emilio Moncayo on March 30, thus bringing to 12 the number of hostages the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia has released since 2008, not counting last year's army hijacking of a FARC release of 15 other prisoners. Unilateral hostage release is regarded as preliminary to "humanitarian exchange" of prisoners between the FARC and the Colombian government. That in turn is seen as a necessary prelude for seeking political solutions to 40-plus years conflict.

The FARC announced its planned release 11 months ago. The government only recently allowed the group Colombians for Peace, led by liberal Senator Piedad Cordoba, to make arrangements, stipulating involvement of the Catholic Church.

A Brazilian Army helicopter delivered Calvo to Villavicencio in Meta Department, en route to a hospital for care of wounds suffered during his capture 11 months ago. On April 1, the FARC delivered the remains of Julián Guevara to his mother. The army major died in 2006 after eight years in FARC hands.

Pablo Moncayo, a 19 year old draftee when captured 12 years ago, was one of the longest held FARC hostages. The efforts of Gustavo Moncayo, his father, converted Pablo into a symbol of hostage family grieving. From his home in Nariño Department, the high school teacher walked 712 miles in 2007 to Bogota, along the way calling for liberation of prisoners and peace in Colombia. As the "Peace Walker," Gustavo Moncayo walked in Colombia, Venezuela, and Europe, where he conferred with the Pope.

After Pablo Moncayo stepped out of a Brazilian helicopter in Florencia, Caqueta province, he cut off the chain joining his father's arms, long worn to symbolize Pablo's captivity. For the flight, a FARC officer earlier had delivered Pablo to Piedad Cordoba, officials of the International Commission of the Red Cross, and a priest. Cordoba reported delays occasioned by the unscripted proximity of Colombian Army units.

Interviewed by teleSUR, Gustavo Moncayo anticipated "a new era, a new stage of reconciliation, of looking for solutions," adding that, "We can not pass our lives in continuing conflict, in this permanent war stigmatizing persons, imprisoning persons, kidnapping persons, displacing, maybe killing, thousands of them." He and Pablo will visit Venezuela, Ecuador and Brazil to thank their presidents for helping with the release.

A FARC statement March 30 expressed appreciation for Brazilian logistical assistance. It attributed government foot- dragging to obsession with military rescue of hostages. Crucially, the FARC stated, "With this unilateral gesture, the FARC-EP considers that the road is cleared for the immediate exchange of prisoners of war as the only viable way for prisoners in the jungle to be liberated without danger to their physical well-being." Simon Trinidad and Sonya, two prisoners in U.S. jails known by their noms de guerre, were included in the proposed exchange.

Responding, Colombian president Alvaro Uribe conditioned prisoner exchanges on released insurgents not rejoining the FARC. Iván Cepeda, affiliated with Colombians for Peace, welcomed "more flexible conditions, on the part of the FARC as well as the government." No longer was the FARC requiring establishment of a demilitarized zone for talks. And the government seemed willing to consider exchanges.

Cepeda lost his father to assassination in 1994. Congressperson Manuel Cepeda, editor of the Communist Party newspaper Voz, was one of 5,000 Patriotic Union adherents killed over several years. Current Voz Director Carlos Lozano is associated with Colombians for Peace.

The FARC now holds hostage 20 Colombian soldiers and policemen, and the Government retains 500 FARC guerrillas as prisoners. For Voz writer Nelson Lombana Silva, the regime has "the syringe to inject peace or violence." He anticipates an uphill struggle with a "government resting on the dung heap of corruption, infamy, the crude exploitation of man by man, and the barefaced hand over of national sovereignty to the United States."

Analyst Azalea Robles takes exception to media harping on the 20 remaining FARC prisoners. She anticipates "distracting maneuvers" by the government aimed at rendering humanitarian exchange of prisoners impossible and at keeping a "second phase' of prisoner release out of public view, that of political prisoners. There are 7,000 of them, she writes. Most are "people who spoke out, social activists, students, peasants, unionists, teachers, and community leaders."

Photo: Colombians demonstrate against all kidnappings. Frank Ballesteros/CC

Ciudad Juárez: voyage to the end of globalization

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 17:31:00 +0000

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico (Giornalismo partecipativo and Brecha) -- The dream of industrial globalization has turned into a nightmare. Ciudad Juárez, the home of "maquiladoras" ["twin plants"] and the murder of women, standing between the global north and south, is now the most violent city in the world. In the last two years the war between drug cartels, which has now drawn in the army, has caused 4,600 deaths and 100,000 refugees.

As we were arriving in Ciudad Juárez from the south, the last hour of our increasingly anxious flight was over one of the driest deserts in the world. It wasn't always that way, say the few native residents. Juárez had a population of 30,000 in 1930, 300,000 in 1970, 1.5 million in 2000. The city has lost several battles for control of the waters of the Rio Grande to El Paso, which since 1848 has belonged to Texas.

In the ancient and once-fertile Juárez Valley, only the names remain. Among them is the "Cotton Field" where in 2001, authorities found the remains of eight women, victims of the city's wave of murders. Last November, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned Mexico for "indifference." It seemed that the women who were raped and murdered, youth of humble working class backgrounds, were worth nothing. Since the seventies, and even more so since the signing of NAFTA in 1994, an uncountable number of women have come to Juárez to work in the "maquilas," the foreign-owned export factories that receive special tax benefits, offer workers rock-bottom salaries and few benefits, but provide some hope for a better future.

The deaths meant nothing, just like the 4,600 casualties that Juárez has registered since the beginning of 2008 when the war for control of the city broke out between the Juárez and Sinaloa drug cartels and the Army arrived to play its own part. El Universal reporter Ignacio Alvarado tells Brecha that "65 percent of those involved are younger than 25, and are children or grandchildren of maquiladora workers." This figure, which sketches a revealing ethnographic profile of the current massacre, also testifies to the utter failure of a model of development. Elizabeth Avalos, a labor union activist and former maquila worker, confirms that "today, for the half million young people who live in Juárez, globalization offers nothing: not education, nor health, nor jobs. They see the drug trade as their only possibility for earning a living and gaining social recognition." Drawn in by the cartels, they are pursued by the Army, which arrests them, kidnaps them, tortures or kills them, or simply settles accounts with them at gunpoint. And all this takes place in a completely lawless context, in which the complete breakdown of the judicial system goes even further than impunity, where there are currently only 150 open murder cases currently under investigation.

And what about those other 4,450 dead bodies? This is the question Brecha asked to jurist Oscar Maynez. "If the murder was committed with automatic or semiautomatic weapons, we take it as a given that we're dealing with a quarrel between drug traffickers and we don't open a case." Another witness, who prefers to remain anonymous, calculates: "In 2008, 80% of the casualties were murdered by occupation troops [the Mexican Army]. The percentage went down a bit in 2009 because the local drug traffickers, who had been displaced but not defeated, were mounting a counteroffensive." Human rights organizations have proven military involvement in at least five cases of "disappearances" of individuals, and there are hundreds of complaints of crimes committed by uniformed troops. "In Juárez," continues the witness, "it's not a war between drug cartels where the State has stepped in to restore order, but rather a massacre committed by an army that was sent in to replace one drug cartel with a different, more easily controllable one." Here, the legal duty of the state to punish crime isn't even honored in the breach. The State has simply declined to punish, because it, itself, is involved in the violence.

So, says Maynez, killing has become the simplest way to solve practical problems. "If you owe 20,000 pesos (about $1,700) to someone, it's cheaper to pay a hit-man 3,000 pesos. Today it's really easy to free yourself from a troublesome spouse or lover. A little while ago they killed an ex-chauffeur in his bed. The guy was a quadriplegic due to a traffic accident. Everything indicates that his employer had him killed in order not to have to pay him workers' compensation. But, they haven't opened a murder investigation on his killing."

Nor is there any open investigation of the death of Alfredo Portillo, the son-in-law of Marisela Ortiz, leader of "Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa" ["Bring Our Daughters Home Again"]. Marisela, who spoke to Brecha at the school where she teaches classes, is considered the "Mother of the Plaza de Mayo" of Juarez, due to her struggle against the murder of women. Alfredo, along with university instructor Manuel Arroyo, farmworkers' leader Armando Villarreal, journalist Armando Rodriguez, Josefina Reyes and seven other human rights workers, together with uncounted nameless neighborhood organizers and social activists, labor unionists, students and dissident youth, make up the list of the dozens of "political assassinations" in Juárez that neither the government nor the media admit or investigate.

The murder of these social activists is falsely blamed on "random shootings" or "private quarrels." "They must have done something" is all that is said about them. Those responsible for these crimes are often not drug traffickers or common criminals, but rather the Army itself. Human rights organizations have proven military involvement in at least five cases of "disappearances," and there are hundreds of complaints of abuses committed by troops.

Modernity

Juárez is enormous. Urban sprawl out into the desert is unlimited. Dozens of Army and Federal Police patrols run up and down the broad avenues, each pickup truck carrying eight men wearing ski masks, armed to the teeth and aiming in all directions. Troops patrol in camouflage, while Federal Police are almost all dressed completely in black. Their presence is oppressive, and roadblocks obstruct traffic in a city where the wish for normalcy clashes with reality. I hadn't even been in the city for two hours before armed troops forced me out of my car for a body search.

Most private automobiles don't have license plates but do have tinted windows, which only helps to increase the constant sensation of danger. On the streets, there are old U. S. school buses that come to end their lives in Juárez. The faces of the passengers are a mixture of all the different indigenous peoples of the entire country. Any trip is long, between residential neighborhoods, giant shopping centers, and enormous vacant lots that one finds even in or near downtown. It takes hours for city residents to get to their jobs. Almost certainly, many of them participated in the important community struggles that took place years ago to get basic services. Lights, water, and little else: that's all that remains of the "Juárez dream."

The Columbian urban expert Edwin Aguirre, a researcher for the Colegio de la Frontera Norte [Northern Border College], offers an interesting perspective: "Since the seventies, the population of Juárez has quintupled. In those four decades, not one single new preparatory school has opened. All we have are the ones that existed in the seventies." In the Mexican school system, preparatory school is the equivalent of high school, and gives access to the university. What seems clear is that nobody even imagined that first and second generation newcomers to the city could ever achieve the social mobility to dream of university studies. "They were never even seen as citizens," says Oscar Maynez. "The whole city was grown based on the interests of a few great families."

People don't live where it would be best to live, but rather where it is convenient for the owners of the city: the Zaragoza's, the Fuentes', the Vallina's. In 21^st century Mexico it is easy to recognize the outline of the "oligarchic republic" which characterized 19^th century Latin America. For Ignacio Alvarado, "PRI or PAN [Mexico's two largest political parties], it doesn't matter. All the mayors, governors and police chiefs are always creatures of the Chamber of Commerce." When, in the seventies, drug trafficking replaced traditional border smuggling, "it was a business for young people of the upper middle class, subordinated to the DNS [the PRI party's political police]." The drug industry in Juárez thus functions as the structural expression of the city's ruling class, as just another form of primary accumulation, along with money laundering and smuggling. You export drugs, you import weapons, and you pay bribes on every bit of it.

In the historic downtown, along the banks of the Rio Grande and the wall that George Bush built and that no Barack Obama will tear down, the majority of the old hangouts (bars and night clubs) are closed. Even up to 2006, the shell of old Juárez was the center of a binational night-life scene. Thousands of Americans crossed the border to have fun, get drunk, lose money in the casinos, or buy cheap sex in the brothels. When we cross the bridge to El Paso (which boasts of being the second safest city in the United States), we have to wait two hours in line in order to undergo humiliating border formalities. When we return to Mexico they don't even check our passports.

In El Paso, Brecha met with Gustavo de la Rosa, a human rights defender who was threatened with death and has been a refugee there for the last several months. Gustavo is the object of an Amnesty International solidarity campaign, and continues to work full time for his city. "Water consumption figures don't lie. In the last two years, about 100,000 people have left Juárez. The upper middle classes have moved to El Paso. The workers have returned to the rest of Mexico, to Oaxaca, Durango and Veracruz." Some 25% of the houses in Juárez now stand empty.

Elizabeth Avalos warns, "Hunger is stalking the poorest 'colonias' (shantytowns), something that was previously unheard-of here. The violence is destroying jobs in every sector, including informal employment, which in other times of crisis was the fallback for many people. The maquliladoras that are left are paying salaries of 500 pesos a week (about 40 dollars) and hiring people on 15 day contracts."

In two years, 80,000 jobs have been lost in the maquilas, out of the 280,000 that existed only a couple of years ago. This is not just a fluctuation, like the crises of 1982 or 2000. As a result of the neoliberal destruction of the job market and the international crisis that Mexico is suffering (Mexico's Gross National Product fell by 6.5% in 2009), in the midst of an economy that is totally dependent on the United States, Juárez sums up the tangled limits between legality and illegality, politics and crime, business and drugs. The city no longer represents any kind of hope for the exploited landless farmworkers of the country's interior.

State of siege

From the moment he was elected president, Felipe Calderón has declared war on drug trafficking. His strategy was not one of investment in civil society and in legality, but one of militarizing territory, making use of the controversial Mexican Army. The Army has recently faced internal issues, and has been repeatedly accused of being deeply involved in drug trafficking itself. This was proven by the fact that on December 16, 2009, in Cuernavaca, hundreds of kilometers from the sea, in the state of Morelos), the U.S. DEA had to resort to the Navy in an operation to arrest and liquidate "ABL," alias "the Chief of Chiefs." That same night, [alleged cartel boss] Beltrán Leyba was waiting to have supper with an army general, the region's military commander.

Starting with operations in 2007 in the states of Michoacán, Guerrero and Baja California, going on to Chihuahua in 2008, 45,000 soldiers were mobilized around the country. The lynchpin of this strategy is Juárez, the country's main drug center, where almost 40% of the casualties in the drug war have occurred, without in any way stopping the bloodletting.

January 31, 2010 was a turning point in the history of the war in Juárez. Fifteen young students were murdered at a birthday party in a poor neighborhood to the south of the city. One or more of them were allegedly "involved in something," but most of those gunned down were "normal kids." This time public opinion, which had been terrorized into silence by the daily escalation of the situation, finally reacted.

Calderón and his Minister of the Interior, Fernando Gómez-Mont, on their repeated visits to the city during the past month after years of absence, were confronted by major protest demonstrations in which they were accused of being politically and judicially responsible for the Juárez catastrophe. The president offered even greater militarization of the city, as well as a few million pesos of investments after decades of oblivion. Too little, too late, commented the right-wing Mexican dailies.

On the other hand, major international media have avoided getting mixed up with this country, a faithful ally of the United States. This is the case with El País, of Madrid, Spain, which regularly praises Calderon's "triumphs" in the drug war. Calderon's policy is one of "high-level simulation," responds Marisela Ortiz. During his visit to Juárez, the president was dressed-down by Luz Maria Dávila, mother of two of the young students who were murdered, a symbolic act helping to show that "the emperor has no clothes."

Forced for the first time to show their faces, Calderón and Gómez-Mont claimed, without anyone believing them, that the army is not one of the principal causes of the violence. Nonetheless, every one of the experts that Brecha interviewed in Juárez agreed that the Army and the Federal Police not only take sides in the war, but have imported new forms of criminality such as kidnappings and the "protection" racket, crimes which only work to aggravate the economic crisis and have contributed to the closing of over 5,000 small businesses.

Today in Juárez, economic, social and political life is simply unviable. Nobody expects anything from the upcoming gubernatorial and mayoral elections, and the PRD, the center-left party which gained 20% of the vote in 2006, was down to 2% by 2009. UNESCO has condemned the fact that even schools are forced to pay "protection money" for each student, if they don't want their classrooms to be riddled with bullets. Young hit-men train and demonstrate their manliness by shooting random victims in the street. In the school where Marisela Ortiz works, a giant sign invites students to use the buses: "Don't risk your life." Even the funeral industry, the biggest growth-industry in town, is in crisis after numerous cases of threats, attacks, kidnappings and murders during funeral services. "Secret" burials are becoming common. Elizabeth Avalos concludes, "Thirty years ago, we in the social movements warned that this model of development couldn't lead anywhere else except to the present situation. They never listened to us, and this is what they sowed."

"El Chapo" Guzmán's war?

It is not easy to sum up the present state of the drug war, or to foresee the duration of this out-of-control violence. What is clear is that the government is doing precious little against the Sinaloa Cartel.

Joaquin Guzman Loera, born in 1954, known as "El Chapo," chief of the Sinaloa Cartel, is probably the biggest drug lord in the world. According to the American magazine, Forbes, he has accumulated a fortune of more than a billion dollars, and he is among the 40 most influential people in the world. Arrested in 1989, he managed to escape from the high-security Puente Grande prison in 2001, just after the rightist PAN party gained power in Mexico. The one who could have arranged his escape could well have been the Attorney General of Mexico under the Vicente Fox administration, Eduardo Medina-Mora. Now, it appears that the U.S. DEA is the only agency interested in his capture, while Calderón, a president who has never mentioned corruption in one of the most corrupt countries on the planet, seems to be in no hurry to arrest him.

The logic of the "joint operations" [of army and police] in Chihuahua and in other states theoretically follows the strategy that was agreed upon with the DEA during the opening days of the Felipe Calderón government: exterminate the smaller cartels, and "control" the major ones. Nonetheless, the Mexican government "misinterpreted" the DEA line, and rather than "controlling" the Sinaloa cartel, seems to be collaborating with it.

Multiple investigations and testimony collected by Brecha tell the story of a war where El Chapo's side sets foot in Juárez only when it can count on military support. The Army, the governing party, the PAN, and the Federal Police in Juárez may be, according to different takes on the question, either allies or subordinates of Guzmán, and only with this aid can they place their own people into positions formerly occupied by now-largely liquidated gangs, such as the "Aztecas." What is certain is that whoever decided to unleash the war for Juárez-El Chapo, Calderón, the Army, or the DEA-two years and 4,700 deaths later they have not yet managed to win.

If "El Chapo's" cartel is considered the businesslike, professional side of the drug trade, the Juárez Cartel, implicated in a number of murders of women, appears to be a traditional criminal structure that lacks the capacity to manage the country's biggest business. Nonetheless, the Juárez Cartel is still the home team, and the price of betrayal is death. Being that it still controls the local police and an infinite supply of cannon-fodder in the sons and grandsons of the maquila, they have been able to resist the first onslaught and even to counterattack, using guerrilla tactics. In this context, the meaning of the massacre of the students on January 31 would be to create a media event so that their "ally" Calderón would put an end to the militarization of the city. With a Juárez flooded with soldiers (as much as 50,000, according to some sources), it would be possible to do away with the Juárez Cartel, but at a cost in deaths, rapes and disappearances perhaps unprecedented in the violent history of the country.

Meanwhile, the levels of violence continue to escalate, and in Juárez a mother may die simply for having a car that resembles one that belongs to a drug trafficker wanted by hit-men. There are even those who say, "It would be best for Juárez if El Chapo would win, and then pacify the city his way," like the Viet Cong in Saigon. Of course, the death-toll would be in the thousands, with hundreds of thousands more as refugees. But this is open warfare that the world media complex is not interested in reporting, because it reveals the reality of globalization, with civil society completely demolished. If anything that makes a profit is good, victory will smile on the Chapo Guzmans of this world, the world's most modern globalized business-leaders.

Translated by O. Williamson

Photo: Mexican security force in Juárez. Jesus Villaseca P/Latitudes Press/CC

Satan, child abuse and the pope: an Irish view

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:41:00 +0000

To say that the revelations concerning child abuse in the Catholic Church has rocked it to its very foundations would be an understatement.

It certainly has led to countless comments and articles in newspapers, with the example of the Irish News, reports aside, having five of its feature writers making contributions to the issue in one week.

Having said that, this is my second take on the matter.

The thing wasn't dying down and the pope's letter to Catholics in Ireland certainly made sure it wasn't dead.

Patrick Murphy, one of the Irish News writers, compared the letter to the old joke about an airliner flying over the ocean which develops technical difficulties.

The pilot's voice comes on the intercom saying, "If you look out of the left-hand windows, you will see a small dinghy below. I am speaking to you from that dinghy."

Murphy comments that following his letter many also believe that the pope is the pilot on the dinghy.

He further wrote under the heading, "Pontiff is remaining detached," that this was "a point in history" when he needed to say, "Look, I'm in charge here, the buck stops with me and this is what I propose to do."

Of course he didn't and in a "wonderful sense of detachment," the pope wrote about, "these egregious crimes."

This led Murphy to ask, "Is anyone who uses the word egregious really serious about communicating with a broad mass of people?"

Apparently the 14-point letter consisted of one part introduction, one part Irish Church history, (which led to Murphy rather sarcastically commenting, "wasn't St. Columbanus a grand man,") 12 parts on his views on the cause of clerical child abuse and one part solution.

Murphy writes that the pope's letter was "tempered" with the observation that child abuse was not peculiar to the Catholic Church.

This prompted Murphy to write, "No, You Holiness, but covering it up and allowing it to continue in some cases for decades were peculiar. That is why the church is in crisis. It may not have been newsworthy in Rome, but it made all the papers over here."

Similar sentiments to the pope's were made by a Monsignor Dooley while being interviewed on television in the Republic [of Ireland].

Such was the uproar, he was diplomatically told to get offside.

Murphy goes on to write that the pope, "effectively" traced the problem back to Vatican II in the early 60s.

Vatican II is described by Murphy as a 'modernization trend," in the church at the time which has been opposed by the present pope all his life.

"He appears to claim, like Margaret Thatcher, that all our social ills originate from the sixties and that child abuse did not exist before that date.

"Indeed," Murphy says.

In the letter, the pope claims that Vatican II "triggered" changes, one of which was the secularization of society.

This leads Murphy to ask, "In that case, is he seriously claiming that clerical child abuse thrived because clerics had less influence in civil society? You have to work that one out for yourself," he adds.

The "real" problem in Ireland, according to the Pope, was a failure to apply canon law to the abuse inquiries, Murphy writes.

Murphy, along with another Irish News contributor, Brian Feeney, argues that canon law is part of the problem.

The fact that canon law, in the cases of child abuse, was put above civil law proves this.

As Feeney put it in his column, canon law is the church operating to its own legal system.

Rather than repeal the thing, the pope, according to Feeney, wants canon law to retain its primacy.

What has really angered many Catholics in Ireland is the "solution" to the problem.

This was taken up by Breidge Gadd in her Irish News column when she wrote: "The Holy Father's answer to victims' prayers is that they should renew their faith in the church as an institution as well as individual trust in Jesus Christ."

Others should devote Friday penances for one year and discover the sacrament of reconciliation (confession).

This boils down to suggesting that the laity atone for the sins of the priests by doing penance and confessing their sins, Gadd says

Another ludicrous suggestion came from Bishop of Ferns Denis Brennan who asked parishioners to help pay legal bills and compensation arising from child abuse cases.

You have to admire his cheek.

Last word goes to Antonio Riboldi, an Italian bishop, who described the criticism of the pope as the state of war "between the Church and the world; between Satan and God."

Who is Satan though?

W. Owl writes a media review column for Unity, a weekly Belfast-based publication of the Communist Party of Ireland.

Photo: meironke/CC/some rights reserved

Iraq elections: a tale of big money and ugly politics

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:37:00 +0000

Many Iraqis had hoped that the March 7 elections would advance a united national consensus to build a sovereign and democratic Iraq, free of foreign occupation.

But it appears that struggle has a ways to go.

In fact, the election campaign revived the sectarian polarization that fueled bloody violence in 2006-2007, and that had been subsiding since then.

Announced results gave former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's slate a thin lead over the slate of current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. With Allawi's slate getting 91 seats to Maliki's 89 in the new 325-seat Parliament, both are far from being able to form a new government and will have to win support from others. That is expected to be a protracted process. The vote tallies continue to be disputed as well.

Allawi's slate included splinter groups from the former Sunni Islamic Accord, some tribal groups and former Baathists. Allawi, a secular Shiite and former Baathist, presented himself as representing all of Iraq's Sunni population, while using code language appealing to Baath supporters. (Sunnis make up about 20 percent of Iraq's population, Shiites about 60 percent, Kurds 20 percent, with other small religious/ethnic groups.) At the same time he campaigned as a secularist, appealing to the wide Iraqi disillusionment with religious-based parties, and he drew votes on this basis.

Maliki's slate, which campaigned on a secular platform and won big in last year's provincial elections, included his own Shiite Islamic Dawa party as well as other Shiites and a number of independent and Sunni figures and tribal leaders.

Some believe Allawi, who has a reputed history of CIA connections, is considered by at least some U.S. circles to be a more cooperative "partner" than Maliki. Maliki has struck an independent nationalist stance on issues related to the U.S. troop pullout and Iraq's oil. Some Iraqis see Allawi's slate as serving U.S. interest in countering Iran's influence in the area.

Coming in third with 70 seats was a Shiite Islamic slate that included the Islamic Supreme Council and cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's group. It is seen as having ties to Iran.

Fourth with 43 seats was the Kurdistan Alliance, which included the two historically dominant Kurdish parties and others including the Kurdistan Communist Party. A new independent Kurdish party, Change (Gorran), won 8 seats.

In the view of Salam Ali of the Iraqi Communist Party, the U.S. wants to ensure that whatever government emerges will be a "fragile balance that they can manipulate." While he thinks the U.S. prefers "somebody other than Maliki," Ali said, "they can influence all these blocs, including those close to Iran."

This election was conducted under a controversial law adopted with heavy pressure from the U.S. Its formula for awarding parliamentary seats, many warned, would disenfranchise smaller slates and further entrench existing dominant parties.

That is exactly what happened. The Iraqi Communist Party, which had 2 seats in Parliament and, with its coalition partners, held one of the largest campaign rallies in the country, drawing some 15,000 people, will have no seats in the new Parliament. Most other smaller slates also wound up with no seats.

The Kurdistan Alliance and the Shiite Islamic slate are now key players in determining who will lead Iraqi's government.

Vast sums of money, on a scale never seen before in Iraq, much of it from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, played a major role in the election. All the big slates had their own satellite television stations which promoted their campaigns. One such station, Al Sharqiya, in effect a mouthpiece for Allawi, reportedly has Saudi funding, and another, Al-Arabiya, which also backed Allawi, is partly Saudi-owned.

The flow of cash funded a flood of giant campaign billboards. The disconnect between their glowing slogans and the reality of everyday life - electricity outages, joblessness, inadequate public services - infuriated many Iraqis.

Allawi benefited from a pre-election de-Baathification crisis.

Under a 2008 law adopted by Parliament, a de-Baathification commission disqualified about 500 among thousands of candidates due to alleged Baathist involvement. Maliki had re-integrated thousands of lower-level former Baathists into political and social life as part of the country's efforts to overcome past divisions. His Shiite Islamic rivals used the issue to attack him. To maintain his own Shiite base, Maliki strongly backed the Baathist disqualifications. Allawi, in turn, accused Maliki of seeking to marginalize Sunnis.

Ali of the Iraqi CP said the U.S. "interfered in a very blunt and open way," pressing to postpone resolution of the candidates' status until after the elections. The U.S. role "caused a lot of displeasure," Ali said.

The furor boosted voter turnout among Allawi's base.

One disillusioned Iraqi in the UK commented on a blog, "How many people could have been fed, clothed, housed, employed, or treated with all the money and effort that continues to go into this game of musical chairs ...?

Noting that President Obama hailed the elections as a big success, British political scientist Toby Dodge, writing in the UK Guardian, says, "The ramifications of the 7 March vote are still unfolding and are starting to look much less positive than Obama had hoped."

Ali said a priority is building a mass movement for electoral reform. The current law is "designed to suit the big blocs and perpetuate them in power," he said. "All of them say they are opposed to sectarianism. In reality, all of them have come to power through this system. The election law effectively maintains this system."

"Change," Ali said, "has to come from below."

Photo: Election campaign posters cover a Baghdad streetcorner before the March 7 elections. (AP/Khalid Mohammed)