People Before Profit blog

Nepal's parliament elects nation's first female president

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 13:24:00 +0000

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) - Nepalese lawmakers elected Bidhya Devi Bhandari, a longtime women's rights campaigner, to become the country's first female president Wednesday, as the Himalayan nation pushes for more gender equality in politics and work life. She had previously served as the defense minister of the government of Nepal from 2009 to 2011. As president, she is supreme commander of the armed forces.

Bidhya Devi Bhandari, the 54-year-old deputy leader of Nepal's Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), had lobbied actively for the new constitution to require that either the president or vice president be a woman. She was chair of All Nepal Women Association.

Nepal has been trying to shift from a traditionally male-dominated society, where women are mostly limited to working at homes or on farms, to one in which women have equal access to opportunities and legal rights.

Lawmakers cheered as Bhandari's name was announced as the new president. Earlier this month, Nepal's parliament chose its new prime minister, KP Sharma Oli. An ally and party colleague of the Prime Minister, Bhandari had been considered the favorite for the largely ceremonial job. The President is the ceremonial head in Nepal while the Prime Minister is the nation's leader.

Bhandari said her election -- by a vote of 327-214 against Congress party leader Kul Bahadur Gurung -- marked a first step toward assuring the new constitutional guarantees of equality are fulfilled. The constitution, adopted last month, also requires that one-third of the country's lawmakers be women, and that women be included in all government committees. And last week, Onsari Gharti was elected as the country's first female Parliament speaker.

Bhandari has been a leading political figure since 1993 when her late husband, Communist party leader Madan Bhandari, died in a car accident which was alleged to have been a case of murder and is unsolved till date. She led demonstrations against the former King Gyanendra in 2006, helping drive the country toward ending his authoritarian rule and restoring democracy.

Bhandari is Nepal's second president since then. She replaces President Ram Baran Yadav, who was elected in 2008 for a two-year term that was extended when efforts to draft a new constitution stalled over seven years. The constitution defines the majority Hindu nation as a secular republic divided into seven federal provinces.

Nepal, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is located in South Asia. With a population of approximately 27 million, it is located in the Himalayas and bordered to the north by China and to the south, east and west by India. Kathmandu is the nation's capital city and largest metropolis.

The mountainous north of Nepal has eight of the world's ten tallest mountains, including the highest point on Earth, Mount Everest (Nepali: Sagarmāthā). More than 250 peaks over 20,000 ft (6,096 m) above sea level are located in Nepal, while the southern region is fertile and humid.

Barbara Russum and Wikipedia contributed to this article.

Bidhya Devi Bhandari of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist waves after she was elected as Nepal's new president in Kathmandu, Nepal, Oct. 28. Bhandari, 54, who has long campaigned for women's rights was elected Wednesday as Nepal's first female president. | Niranjan Shrestha/AP

UN General Assembly once more rejects U.S. blockade of Cuba

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 12:39:00 +0000

The United Nations General Assembly on October 27 voted on Cuba's resolution calling for "an end to the economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America against Cuba." Approval was almost unanimous: 191 nations voted in favor and two nations, the U.S. and Israel, voted against. There were no abstentions.

This was the 24th year for such a vote and the 24th time overwhelming approval was expressed. Cuba's Foreign Ministry had earlier provided delegates and the international media with a comprehensive summary of the blockade's harmful effects on both Cuba's economy and people. The report, issued every year, indicated the U.S. blockade violates both Cuban independence and international law. Taking inflation into consideration, its authors say that the half-century-long blockade has deprived the Cuban economy of $834 billion.

Voting this year took place under new circumstances. The U.S. and Cuba in July re-established diplomatic relations after having exchanged key political prisoners. The U.S. State Department in May removed Cuba from its list of terrorist-sponsoring nations, and restrictions on U.S. travel to Cuba have been eased. Certain U.S. financial institutions and businesses, particularly telecommunications ones, operate legally on the island now.

Although Presidents Raul Castro and Barack Obama on December 17, 2014 jointly announced their shared goal of improved binational relations, Cuba has declared that for normalization to occur the U.S. must end its blockade. Pres. Castro made that point in his address to the UN General Assembly on September 28 and declared also that territory occupied by the Guantánamo Naval Base must be returned, U.S. attempts to build a political opposition inside Cuba must stop, and U.S.-instigated human and economic damages must be compensated.

In the weeks prior to the Assembly's vote, reports circulated that the U.S.might abstain. That posture would have been consistent both with Pres. Obama's announcement on December 17 and with his urging the U.S. Congress to exercise power gained with the Helms Burton Law of 1996 to end the blockade. Congressional Republicans opposed the idea of abstention, and Cuban diplomats refused to modify their resolution to suit U.S. tastes.

In the weeks preceding the vote, Cuban media critics of the blockade had a field day. "The blockade is the air," claimed one of them. He explained that since 1959 "130 radio stations sponsored by 43 Florida-based counter-revolutionary organizations" or by the U.S. government have been broadcasting to Cuba. The U.S. government's "Televisión Martí" broadcasts began in 1990. The International Telecommunications Union of the United Nations condemns such radio and television broadcasting as violating international norms.

Cuban spokespersons emphasized that education, accounting for 13 percent of Cuba's GDP, is under the gun just as are the medical and financial sectors. The necessity to import education supplies from distant countries instead of from the United States leads to increased costs, for example, $771,600 between April 2014 and March 2015.

Critics have focused on blockade manifestations newly evident during the past year. A Cuban reporter indicated that "from March 2014 to the same month of 2015, the U.S. blockade has cost Cuban agriculture... $451,520,000 dollars." The U.S. Gen Tech Scientific company recently refused to sell gaschromatography units for use by Cuban researchers and medical diagnosticians. In June 2015 Sigma-Aldrich Company refused to supply essential chemicals to Cuba's Quimimpex Company and the Colombian Boiler Company denied Quimimpex the pressurized containers it needs for shipping chlorine used for water purification.

In late 2014 the Commerzbank of Germany agreed to pay a $650 million fine to the U.S. Treasury Department because of its financial transactions with Cuba, and withIran, Myanmar, and Sudan. Similarly, U.S. authorities in October 2015 announced a $787 million fine imposed against the French bank Crédit Agricole for forbidden transactions with the same countries. New York District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. explained that "financial institutions must comply with sanctions against rogue nations."On the day of the vote, AFP news service described children dying of cancer in Cuba who need chemotherapy agents available only from the United States.

In the end, the UN vote marks the beginning of one more year of the blockade hanging on despite wholehearted worldwide rejection, also despite majority disapproval in the U.S. Analyst Sergio Rodríguez had already highlighted the contradiction between the General Assembly's expected approval of the Cuban resolution and Pres. Obama's talk. It would have been better, he indicated, if the U.S. had abstained or if its delegates had left the chamber. U.S. opposition to the resolution will serve as "an expression of the weakness that has been manifest in [Obama's] recent foreign policy decisions."

Well-known Cuban political writer Esteban Morales looked farther afield. He condemned "the historic messianic tendency of the United States and its high-handedness allowing it to regard the rest of us as fools. They are so used to manipulating others...that they sometimes end up displaying a foolish diplomacy."

Photo: In his talks with President Obama, Cuban President Raul Castro has made it clear that Guantanamo, where the U.S. operates a military base and prison, must be returned to Cuba. | wemu.org

Cocoon: The story of Dominga

Wed, 28 Oct 2015 12:50:00 +0000

In October 2014, Dominga discovered she could fly.

Alone with her baby, she was waiting for her husband. Another terrified night. He would not like the humble food again. His voice would rise and the beatings come. Dominga's head had scars where the hair would not grow. Her body was a canvas of furious brushstrokes, the colors of fire and despair.

When her first baby had left the womb, a great puddle of blood and guts on the floor, she started to hate him.

There were knocks on the door. She was all trembling legs, arms ready to defend her son from his father's fury.

The door was kicked from the outside, and fell, frail and desolate. First came the guns, followed by teenage monsters dressed in discarded green uniforms. They destroyed and kicked and pointed guns at her, at the baby that screamed desperately on the only bed. They were asking for money. She took a few coins out of a box she was hiding from Him. They wanted more. They wanted pay. They took her with rage, with fear, the blows she did not feel as she swam into unconsciousness.

Another kick woke her up. It was Him. Drunk. He saw her body, infinitely small and lost in its own darkness, where he could not reach her. He lifted her with one hand and hit her with the other. Then he fell on the floor, in a loud sleep, cursing, kicking, crying, begging the ghosts of his misery to go away.

Dominga woke up from her despair, laid her baby on her back and covered him with the rebozo, tying it around her. He was safe in his cocoon, warm and forever safe. She took the coins left by the boy soldiers and ran, through the thick darkness of the wet jungle, around a mountain, a trail learned since childhood. A river cut her path, and when she entered the dangerous waters, she swam with her cocoon firmly holding onto her back, two lost beating hearts in the night.

Then she heard her dogs and the echo of the voice. Calling her, calling her tortured body, her loyal patience, because she knew no other destiny. The rain intensified as if to protect her. Her feet were not fast enough to save her. And then they were numb, her heart running away from her. She closed her eyes and asked her god, her mysterious god inside her chest waiting to be revealed at her death. She asked for her child. She even asked for the man. So that his anger would not kill him.

And then, she was lifted from the ground, not a miracle, but her right. She flew, first softly, like a bird about to find her way North, she flew faster and faster until she was out of the territory of the Voice, out of the harsh rain, on to a destiny she didn't know.

Night turned into day. Dominga felt light, pure, at peace.

She saw changes in the landscape, from green to plantations of different colors. She passed over unimaginable large stretches of buildings and people running to some unknown goal; vehicles like the ones that roamed her town driven by men in black, in green, in hatred and greed.

She looked in horror at the blood of people begging and crying in lost places. In their last breath, they looked at the sky expecting to find God, and saw her. They died believing she was a wingless sunlit angel.

She passed by a great city, its ancient temples barely visible through a thick layer of black smoke, and pointing to the sky a tall tower where angels lived. She heard chanting and smelled anger.

And then, coming out of a forest, she saw the most terrifying, incredibly beautiful beast. She followed her crawling over mountains, valleys, through towns and cities. The beast was adorned by glowing eyes, thousands of eyes that looked up to the firmament. They discovered the angel powered by a cocoon and their eyes were scared and their eyes were full of misery. They believed, and they beckoned her to save them. She landed roughly on the back of the beast. People looked at her in wonderment, and made for her a soft place to sit and feed her baby.

At some places the beast would slow her pace to let women and men, children and barking dogs coming out of a village, carrying baskets of food, to get close. The food would fly to their hands and the blessings would fall on theirs.

They finally arrived at a high gate. She and other women crossed and were greeted by tall, great men she had only seen in the novelas she watched on her old TV.

Some kind, some angered by their arrival. Into a cold room, and an uncertain future.

But nothing that happened from now on would destroy Dominga. She had experienced the height of freedom. Her baby would leave his safe home and find her, a mother who would never again fear the night. She had flown with no wings, powered by a blessed cocoon.

Photo: A woman, one of several fleeing Central American refugees in this photo, is helped from one train car to another, atop a train that is going north. | Rebecca Blackwell/AP

Today in history: Birthday of South African liberation fighter Oliver Tambo

Tue, 27 Oct 2015 13:06:00 +0000

Oliver Reginald Tambo, South African anti-apartheid politician and revolutionary who served as president of the African National Congress (ANC) from 1967 to 1991, was born on this date in 1917. Fondly known as O. R., he was born in the village of Nkantolo in Bizana in eastern Pondoland in what is now Eastern Cape.

Tambo attended Holy Cross Mission School, and then transferred to St. Peters in Johannesburg. He qualified to do his university degree at the University of Fort Hare. In 1940 he, along with several others including Nelson Mandela, was expelled from Fort Hare for participating in a student strike. In 1942 Tambo returned to his former high school in Johannesburg to teach science and mathematics.

Tambo, Mandela and Walter Sisulu were the founding members of the ANC Youth League in 1943, and O.R. became its first national secretary and later a member of the national executive. The youth league proposed a change in tactics of the anti-apartheid movement. Previously the ANC had sought to further its cause by actions such as petitions and demonstrations; the Youth League felt these actions were insufficient and proposed their own program of action, which advocated boycotts, civil disobedience, strikes and non-collaboration.

In 1955, Tambo became secretary general of the ANC after Walter Sisulu was banned by the South African government under the Suppression of Communism Act. In 1958 he became deputy president of the ANC and in 1959 was served with a five-year banning order by the government.

In response, Tambo was sent abroad by the ANC to mobilize opposition to apartheid. He settled with his family in London, where he lived until 1990.He was involved in the formation of the South African Democratic Front. In 1967, Tambo became acting president of the ANC, following the death of Chief Albert Luthuli.

The post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)in 1997-98 identified Tambo as the person who gave final approval for the May 20, 1983 Church Street bombing, which resulted in the deaths of 19 people and injuries to 217. In a 1985 interview, Tambo was quoted as saying, "In the past, we were saying the ANC will not deliberately take innocent life. But now, looking at what is happening in South Africa, it is difficult to say civilians are not going to die."

The ANC's submission said that the bombing was in response to a South African cross-border raid into Lesotho in December 1982 which killed 42 ANC supporters and civilians, and the assassination of Ruth First, an ANC activist and wife of Joe Slovo, in Maputo, Mozambique. It claimed that 11 of the casualties were South African armed forces personnel and hence a military target. Although the case was robustly contested, the TRC ultimately granted amnesty to the militants.

Such was the conundrum facing the democratic movement when all legal avenues of advancement had effectively been closed.

In 1985 Tambo was re-elected president of the ANC. He returned to a much changed South Africa on December 13, 1990, after over 30 years in exile.

The strong fight against apartheid at home needed proactive public representation abroad, and Oliver Tambo eloquently filled that role. He nurtured many intense international relationships. In 1977 Tambo signed the first solidarity agreement between ANC and a municipality, the Italian town of Reggio Emilia. Tambo served as a spokesman and advocate before the world, encouraging legislative motions and demonstrations of support for black South Africans, and working with the socialist countries to arrange for military training and the supply of arms at a time when the capitalist world stood firmly aligned with apartheid. The moral and material solidarity offered in the spirit of socialist internationalism should never be forgotten.

Tambo died of a stroke in Johannesburg on April 24, 1993, at the age of 75, missing by a year the election of his old friend and law partner Nelson Mandela to the presidency of the new South Africa.

Johannesburg International Airport was named after O. R. Tambo with a formal ceremony on October 27, 2006, so that virtually all visitors coming into the country will be familiar with his name.

The grave of Oliver Tambo and his wife Adelaide was declared a National Heritage site in October 2012.

Nelson Mandela's says a great deal about Tamboin his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. In a passage about his early days as a lawyer in Johannesburg, before setting up a legal practice together, Mandela says, "Oliver Tambo was then working for a firm called Kovalsky and Tuch. I often visited him there during his lunch hour, and made a point of sitting in a Whites Only chair in the Whites Only waiting room. Oliver and I were very good friends, and we mainly discussed ANC business during those lunch hours. He had first impressed me at Fort Hare, where I noticed his thoughtful intelligence and sharp debating skills. With his cool, logical style he could demolish an opponent's argument - precisely the sort of intelligence that is useful in a courtroom."

Adapted from Wikipedia and other sources.

Photo: Wikipedia (CC)

Venezuela's experiment with socialism under siege from the right

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 15:51:00 +0000

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's socialist government is under siege from business-oriented right-wingers. Voting on Dec. 6 for National Assembly delegates will be a test of strength.

The process pioneered by the late President Hugo Chavez from 1999 on created new realities for the many and they are the basis for hopefulness by socialists today.

Three recent reports offer specimen views of political experiences of people hoping for much who joined the process and realized expectations. They and presumably others acquired loyalties and now they are preparing a culture of resistance.

Venezuelans are having to endure shortages of essential items, long lines at stores, and increasingly worthless currency. Money is stashed abroad, distributors hoard merchandise, and profiteers sell state-subsidized food and gasoline in Colombia.

The opposition uses Colombian paramilitaries and violent street demonstrations to promote destabilization. The U.S. government funds right-wing agitators.

In October, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) said Venezuela's economy would fall by 5.5 percent during 2015; the International Monetary Fund indicated a 10 percent decline.

Pessimism is not universal, however. On August 31, 2012, workers at the Intercerámica factory in Barquisimeto heard the company's owner, speaking to them on Skype from Madrid, tell them their factory was closing and would be demolished. The workers went on to occupy the factory for 19 months. Confronting blackmail and threats, they protected the machinery and installations. Only 19 workers were still there at the end.

Those few reactivated the plant on October 28, 2013 as "Alfareros del Gre" (Stoneware Potters). Venezuela's 2010 Organic Law for "Promotion of the Communal Economic System" had created the entity of a "Company as Communal and Social Property" (Spanish- language initials are EPSC). The workers sought training and gained administrative savvy from neighboring collectives.

Production began in March 2014 of red, tubular clay blocks used for housing construction - no longer flooring tiles and ceramic baseboard made for export. Output in October 2015 was 10,000 blocks per day.

There are currently 85 workers, most under 25 years of age. They expect that soon 150 workers will be producing 35,000 blocks each day. The government's "Great Venezuelan Housing Mission" buys 70 percent of the blocks.

Community councils take another 15 percent for their own building projects, and local hardware stores buy the rest. Earnings are shared equally. Pedro, one the original 19 workers recalls that formerly, "two hours each day were for the producer and six were for the boss."

Officially, an ESPC is a "socio-productive unit" that, within the territory of one or more communities or communes, is created to benefit "participants and the collective through social reinvestment of surplus income." Alfareros del Gre is a "direct" ESPC which signifies that "the means of production are social and communal property."

The lives of Colombian refugees living in Venezuela are also looking up. Threats and forced dispossession of land and homes caused 5,600,000 of them to move to Venezuela over the last 40 years. Journalist Marco Teruggi reports that they've received 25 percent of the housing units of the "Great Venezuela Housing Mission and "111,000 [Colombians] are now studying [at the university level] under Mission Sucre; 60,000 students have completed the [remedial high school course] of Mission Ribas."

Juan Carlos Tanus heads the Bolivarian Movement of Colombians for Peace. He told Teruggi that, "The development of Chavista culture has reached the saturation point" in migrant committees created through Venezuela's Organic Law for Community Councils." Tanus elaborates: "Chavista culture is when you go to a hospital to ask for help so that a brother, a compatriot with a calamity, might be cared for and you receive it at whatever level of attention. Compare this with the Colombian model: subsidized health care that doesn't work, hospitals neglected, the population abused, people dying in hospitals because of no medicines."

New arrivals in Venezuela "undergo cultural shock," he said. In Colombia, "educational levels are so low and they deal with people one by one; here they speak of collectivization ... The Bolivarian concept, a free America, emancipation of the peoples, collective construction: all this is different from what we learned in Colombia, which was about academic, individual, and citizen competition."

The experience of Colombian refugees in Venezuela dedicated now to political change presumably extends to Venezuelans who also reject precarious living and who think President Nicolas Maduro's Bolivarian government is worth fighting for.

In an interview with TeleSur, socialist Blanca Eekhout, a National Assembly delegate, had more to say about why the "Chavista" movement retains popular backing. "For the first time," she stated, "we ... are going into these elections with gender equality. In our primaries, half of our candidates were also young people under 30." The interviewer explains: "political parties have to have an equal number of male and female candidates, and must alternate them on their lists."

As regards the upcoming vote, Eekhout was explicit: "[W]e want the revolution to continue to have a majority in the National Assembly], because if the right-wing wins, it will want to prevent the people from having access to all the revolution's achievements, and to block their participation, to make the revolution fail."

Photo: Indigenous peoples close ranks to defend with all their might the revolutionary process and establish the "Makunaymu Indigenous Revolutionary Front." Francisco Rangel Gomez the mayor of Gran Sabana, Manuel Valles the president of the Bolivarian Indian Institute, and Avar Fernandez of the indigenous people of South formed the powerful alliance to defend the Constitution, national territoriality and for peace. Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, Facebook.

Guatemala: Comedian Jimmy Morales is elected president

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 14:36:00 +0000

On Sunday October 25, slapstick comedian, actor and political outsider Jimmy Morales scored a landslide victory in the run off presidential election over former first lady Sandra Torres. But what this means politically is very much up in the air. One thing that is certain is that Guatemala's political nightmares are not over.

Morales, from the National Convergence Front (Frente de Convergencia Nacional), racked up 68.52 percent, with a total of 2,699,977 votes, while Torres, of the UNE (National Unity for Hope) party won 31.48 percent with a total of 1,240,408 votes, on a turnout of about 54 percent.

It was thought that Torres, who had been popular when she was in charge of social programs for the poor in the administration of her husband, President Alvaro Colom, might do better in poor and indigenous areas to make up for Morales' advantage in urban areas. Also, Morales' crude comedy routines are often criticized for making fun of indigenous and African-Guatemalan people.

But evidently the corruption issue outweighed everything else for voters.

Morales had campaigned entirely on the theme of stamping out corruption (campaign slogan: "Neither corrupt, nor a thief"), for which he says, as president, he will have "zero tolerance." Massive scandals have rocked the country since the springtime, leading to the resignation and arrest of the vice president, Roxana Baldetti, and then the President, Otto Perez Molina.

They are accused of heading up a scheme whereby customs officials would take bribes from importers in exchange for fraudulently lowered import taxes and fees, with the bribe money shared among officials including the president and vice president.

Guatemala's Social Security Institute has also been found to be riddled with corruption. Among other things administrators of the Institute made a crooked contact with a company that was supposed to provide kidney dialysis to poor patients, but turned out not to be competent to do so, resulting in a number of deaths.

Crooked officials harvested at least $2.7 million in bribes in exchange for letting this contract. There have been many arrests for this scandal also.

For a while it looked as if another candidate, right wing populist Manuel Baldizon of the LIDER party, could win the presidential election but then more revelations in the corruption investigation, carried out by prosecutor Thelma Aldana and the U.N. sponsored Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (C.I.C.I.G.), revealed a pattern of politicians accepting campaign money from criminals, including drug dealers, with Baldizon's vice presidential candidate as a named suspect. So Baldizon was edged out by Torres for the runoff. But the investigations also revealed shady dealings involving Torres' UNE party.

Morales promised to keep corruption-buster Thelma Aldana as attorney general and not dismantle the C.I.C.I.G. as Perez Molina had wanted to do. Apart from that, there is some mystery as to what his policies will actually be, other than being against corruption and abortion and in favor of the death penalty.

The party on whose ticket he ran, the National Convergence Front, is rooted in networks of retired army officers, some of whom appear to have been heavily involved in some of the worst atrocities of Guatemala's civil war, including the massacres of Ixil Maya indigenous people in the 1980s.

A key role in the choice of Morales as the Convergence Front's candidate and in his presidential campaign appears to have been played by Colonel Edgar Justino Ovalle Maldonado, who was also elected as a congressman in the first round of the elections on September 6.

According to declassified U.S. government documents, Ovalle held an important position in military operations in the Ixil Triangle area of Guatemala in 1981-198, under the successive military dictatorships of Generals Romeo Lucas Garcia and Efrain Rios-Montt. Ovalle is another product of the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, in Fort Benning Georgia, as was the now disgraced and jailed former president, Perez Molina, who also had been involved in army operations in the Ixil Triangle area in the 1980s.

The Guatemalan Civil War, which had its roots in the overthrow by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) of the moderately left wing President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, caused the death of at least 200,000 people, most of them unarmed civilians from the country's large indigenous Maya population. Ninety three percent of the killings were carried out by the military or government aligned right wing death squads and supported by the United States, especially during the Reagan administration.

There were hundreds of massacres in which entire village communities were wiped out, and a large number of refugees fled over the border into Southern Mexico. The war ended in 1996, but Guatemala is still one of the most violent countries in the world and is mired in poverty exacerbated by racist oppression of the indigenous population.

These things, plus a drought and a coffee blight that are badly impacting Guatemala's small farmers, have caused a sharp increase in the number of poor Guatemalans who migrate to the United States to find work.

During the period in which Ovalle was involved, there were scores of documented massacres in the Ixil Triangle alone. Former dictator Lucas Garcia died in 2006, but in 2013, a courageous prosecutor managed to put ex-President Rios Montt on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. He was convicted and sentenced to 80 years in prison, but the conviction was quickly reversed on technical grounds, and it appears likely that the old dictator will never be punished. Ex-President Perez Molina, plus the acting President Alejandro Maldonado Aguirre all have claimed there was no genocide. Given Jimmy Morales' closeness to retired military officers like Ovalle, it is not surprising that he repeats that claim, though he admits that human rights were violated.

Corruption in Guatemala also is rooted in the long period of impunity under military rule, so in voting for the anti-corruption candidate linked to figures from that period, Guatemalans may be in for a disappointment.

Motorcycles with signs in support of Jimmy Morales at a campaign rally in Guatemala City, Oct. 22. The signs read in Spanish "Privileges? Never again." AP Photo/Luis Soto

Liberal election victory in Canada holds lessons for Americans

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 12:43:00 +0000

TORONTO - On October 19, Canadians poured into the polls to dump the right-wing Harper Conservatives from power after nearly ten years. The centrist Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau, rose from third party status to win a comfortable majority government.

The social democrats of the NDP (New Democratic Party), meanwhile, suffered a major setback and tumbled from first place in the polls at the outset of the election to a distant third when the ballots were finally counted.

By Canadian standards, the election was long, with 78 days of marathon campaigning. The long-sought ouster of Harper represents a major defeat for the most reactionary sectors in Canadian politics, and it is an ideological loss for the forces of neoliberal economics.

Beyond those important aspects, however, the election also holds some useful strategic lessons for American progressives as we head into 2016.

The Campaign

Seeking to preserve his hold on power, Harper ran an ugly campaign. With a recession looming and oil prices dropping, the Conservatives could no longer tout their economic management credentials with the same effect as in elections past.

Of course they tried to replay that message, with a quick 'balancing' of the budget just before the election through selling off the government's GM shares and raiding the surplus reserves of the unemployment insurance system.

Then, in the final weeks, Harper tried stoking racial and religious fears to prop up sagging Tory numbers. With rhetoric that mirrored the anti-immigrant tactics of the Republican Party, it appeared as if he and Donald Trump might have been swapping ideas.

The Conservatives relied on dog whistle calls to 'old stock Canadians' and Islamophobic scare tactics about how Muslim women were threatening democracy with their niqabs (traditional dress). In a last desperate measure, even Rob Ford, the former Toronto mayor of crack-smoking fame, was called on to help bring out votes. In all, it was a divisive campaign that showed the worst of what the ultra-right is capable of.

The most important strategic lessons, however, are to be found in an analysis of the NDP and Liberal campaigns. As a rough guide for Americans looking to understand Canadian politics, imagine if the centrist and progressive wings of the Democratic Party were organizationally separated.

The managerial, big business-oriented faction of the Democrats would equate to the Liberals, and the trade union and social movement-based progressive group would be roughly comparable to the NDP.

Now, imagine if liberal Democrats suddenly pledged loyalty to balanced budgets and fiscal discipline while centrist Democrats started promising to increase taxes on the rich and invest in infrastructure. While that is an overly simplistic picture, such a flip-flop of positions is roughly what happened in the Canadian election campaign.

The NDP started in a position of strength. Coming off its historic achievements of 2011, which saw the crushing of the separatist Bloc Quebecois party and the stealing of many Liberal voters, the NDP was in first place when the election was called more than two months ago.

It appeared to be on the verge of achieving its dream of winning the federal government for the first time and displacing the Liberals as the default home for center-left voters.

Party leader Tom Mulcair ran on what was a nominally progressive platform that included a national childcare program, a $15 federal minimum wage, the creation of a prescription drug coverage program, an increase in corporate taxes, opposition to the TPP, and the institution of proportional representation. Though modest in the scale of its proposals, the platform stood squarely in the long social democratic tradition of the NDP and appeared to have broad popular appeal. So what happened?

Among many complex factors, a major one was the way Mulcair tried to work around the fact that the NDP is always between a rock and a hard place when it comes to perceptions about its ability to manage public finances. Though the party has a record of 'prudent' fiscal management on the provincial level, there is still a widespread perception of it as spendthrift.

In an attempt to counter this reputation and reach out to non-NDP voters, Mulcair made a promise to balance the budget even if the economy went into recession. He coupled this with a pledge not to touch personal income taxes for the wealthy.

Lessons to take away

Essentially, Mulcair committed the NDP to follow the economic logic of neoliberalism. It was an adoption of the 'third way' form of social democracy of the 1990s - but twenty years late! This turned out to be a major misreading of what people were looking for at a time of economic instability. The strategy probably cost the NDP many votes in the urban centers, and it is highly unlikely that the party gained any support among those actually concerned with balanced budgets.

Labor unions largely stuck by the party throughout the campaign, but there was much grumbling among activists about the promises of fiscal discipline. With this blatant abandoning of traditional left strengths - social investment and tackling inequality - the Liberals moved quickly to fill the void and poach disappointed NDP supporters. As one Liberal put it, "The NDP had their foot on our neck and then let go."

The great success of the Liberal campaign was achieved by presenting the party as a modern progressive force willing to make investments in infrastructure to create jobs and economic growth, raise income taxes on the richest Canadians in order to fund services for those at the bottom, and democratize the political system by bringing in a ranked ballot voting system.

Trudeau managed to transform his own public image from that of an inexperienced son of political royalty to a symbol of a new generation of leadership that contrasted sharply with both Harper and Mulcair. Planting seeds of doubt about the NDP's ability to fulfill its promises, Trudeau said only the Liberals could bring 'real change.'

Before getting too excited about the Liberals, there is a need for a dose of reality here. Given that the Liberals were the ones most responsible for the cuts and downsizing of the 1990s, there are reasons to doubt whether Trudeau will be the progressive reformer that he claims.

His party has a notorious habit of signaling left during elections and then turning right once they are in government. This is, after all, the same party that voted in favor of Harper's anti-Islamic "Barbaric Cultural Practices Act" and Bill C-51, which threatens privacy rights and civil liberties.

That being said, it is still important to look at what can be learned from the Liberals - at least from a campaign perspective. On a rhetorical level, the party managed to effectively challenge the austerity mantra that has dominated governments around the world for more than three decades. With clever and easy to understand ads, the Liberals dismissed the idea that government and public services must be cut during a recession.

Trying to walk up a down escalator in his TV commercial, Trudeau said it symbolized how people have struggled for years but just can't get ahead in the current economy. He declared, "We can do more for the people who need it, by doing less for the people who don't." In effect, the Liberals were mounting a defense of Keynesian economics in a form simplified for mass consumption.

The Liberal campaign demonstrated that it is possible to win on a platform of progressive economics today. They provided proof that the public is interested in an anti-austerity message. The Democratic Party needs to be unafraid of embracing a bold platform of public investment, job creation, and progressive taxation.

The NDP campaign, meanwhile, shows the importance of not misreading the political moment and watering down demands that broad majorities of people may be ready to embrace. It is no longer necessary to tack toward the right in order to win, as Democrats did in the 1990s. After decades on defense, the American left is only beginning to find its footing again in recent years. That has to be helped along, not held back.

And looking at the situation from the perspective of 2016, both campaigns remind us of the importance of left-center unity and of building the broadest possible coalitions of labor, African-American, women, immigrant, youth, and other movements.

Though the Liberals scored a major win in Canada, they did so with only 39.5 percent of votes. The NDP captured 19.7 percent, and the Conservatives still managed to score 32 percent. Had the center-left vote not coalesced around Trudeau in the closing days of the campaign, Harper might very well have been returned to power yet again.

What this means for the U.S. left is that whatever the outcome of the Democratic primary race, it must not be allowed to become a point of division for the broad coalition opposed to the ultra-right Republicans. The Clinton-Sanders competition must not devolve into a split or a dampening of political action once either of these candidates is selected.

American progressives must keep their finger on the pulse of where people are moving. What issues are motivating people into action? What are the demands around which unity can be built? The political atmosphere is shifting leftward. Progressives have to not be too timid in proposing new alternatives and making demands for fundamental change. At the same time, we have to put forward those demands in a way that contributes to building unity and moving ever-greater numbers of people into action.

Photo: Prime minister designate Justin Trudeau speaks to supporters at a rally in Ottawa, Ontario, Oct. 20. Trudeau became Canada's new prime minister after beating Conservative Stephen Harper. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press via AP)

Today in history: Pelé, greatest soccer player ever, turns 75

Fri, 23 Oct 2015 10:55:00 +0000

Pelé, the now retired Brazilian professional soccer player widely regarded as the greatest player of all time, was born on this date in 1940 in Três Corações, Minas Gerais, Brazil. His full name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento.

"I was born to play football, just like Beethoven was born to write music and Michelangelo was born to paint," said Pelé. He was a member of three Brazilian World Cupchampion teams. Pelé became a superstar with his performance in the 1958 World Cup, and played professionally in Brazil for two decades.

Pelé moved with his family to the city of Bauru in the state of São Paulo as a young boy, and grew up in poverty. Still, he developed a rudimentary talent for soccer by kicking a rolled-up sock stuffed with rags around the streets.

As an adolescent, Pelé joined a youth squad coached by Waldemar de Brito, a former member of the Brazilian national soccer team. De Brito eventually convinced Pelé's family to let the budding player leave home at 15 and try out for the Santos professional soccer club.

Pelé signed with Santos and scored the first professional goal of his career before he turned 16, led the league in goals in his first full season, and was recruited to play for the Brazilian national team.

The world was officially introduced to Pelé in the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. Displaying remarkable speed, athleticism and field vision, the 17-year-old scored three goals in a 5-2 semifinal win over France, then netted two more in the finals, a 5-2 win over the host country.

The young superstar received hefty offers to play for European clubs, but Brazilian President Jânio Quadros had Pelé declared a national treasure, making it legally difficult for him to play in another country. The Santos Club ensured that its star attraction was well paid by scheduling lucrative exhibition matches with teams around the world.

In the 1962 World Cup in Chile, Pelé suffered an injury and sat out the final rounds, but Brazil still went on to claim its second straight title. In 1966 he was again sidelined with leg injuries, and Brazil did not advance in the World Cup.The 1970 World Cup in Mexico marked a triumphant return to glory for Pelé and Brazil. Pelé scored four goals, including one in the final to give Brazil a 4-1 victory over Italy.

After his announced retirement from soccer in 1974, he was lured back to the field the following year to play for the New York Cosmos in the North American Soccer League. Temporarily the NASL became a big attraction. He played his final game in an exhibition between New York and Santos in October 1977, competing for both sides, and retired with a total of 1281 goals in 1363 games.

The decades since have not diminished Pelé's public profile. In 1978, he was awarded the International Peace Award for his work with UNICEF. He has also served as Brazil's Extraordinary Minister for Sport, and a United Nations ambassador for ecology and the environment.

Pelé was named FIFA's "Co-Player of the Century" in 1999, along with Argentine Diego Maradona. To many, his accomplishments on the soccer field will never be equaled, and virtually all great athletes in the sport are measured against the Brazilian who once made the world stop to watch his transcendent play.

Soccer players who witnessed him in action stumbled to find superlatives to describe him. England's 1966 FIFA World Cup-winning captain Bobby Moore commented: "Pelé was the most complete player I've ever seen, he had everything. Two good feet. Magic in the air. Quick. Powerful. Could beat people with skill. Could outrun people. Only 5'8" tall, yet he seemed a giant of an athlete on the pitch. Perfect balance and impossible vision. He was the greatest because he could do anything and everything on a football pitch. I remember [João] Saldanha the coach being asked by a Brazilian journalist who was the best goalkeeper in his squad. He said Pelé. The man could play in any position."

Known for his generosity and amiability, he was surrounded by crowds wherever he went. A reporter once asked him if his fame compared to that of Jesus, and Pelé quipped, "There are parts of the world where Jesus Christ is not so well known."

Feliz aniversário, Pelé!

Sources: biography.com, Wikipedia.

Photo: Brazilian President Lula and Pelé in commemoration of 50 years since the first World Cup title won by Brazil in 1958, at the Palácio do Planalto, 2008. | Wikimedia (CC)

Portuguese president re-appoints right wing minority government

Fri, 23 Oct 2015 10:49:00 +0000

On Thursday, Oct. 23, the President of Portugal, Anibal Cavaco Silva, re-appointed Pedro Passos Coelho as Prime Minister, rejecting an offer by the majority in parliament to form a center-left government.

Cavaco Silva and Passos Coelho both belong to the Social Democratic Party, which, in spite of its name, is a right wing party in Portugal. Passos Coelho's coalition, which pairs the Social Democratic Party (PSD) with the also conservative CDS-People's Party (CDS-PP), came to power after the 2011 elections in which voters punished the incumbent Socialist Party for having signed onto harsh austerity measures demanded by the "Troika" of the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission (the executive of the European Union).

Unsurprisingly, the right wing coalition government went ahead and imposed harsher austerity on the Portuguese people, with a typical program of privatization, budget cuts, cuts in wages and pensions and attacks on labor rights. Portugal currently has a 12 percent unemployment rate and a 20 percent poverty rate, with a much worse situation for young workers, many of whom have been forced to emigrate. Yet it still carries heavy debt.

In the Oct. 4 elections, the governing coalition got 38.6 percent of the popular vote and 107 seats in the 230 seat parliament, a considerable loss since 2011 and not a majority but still a plurality. The Socialists gained ground, getting 32.3 percent of the popular vote and 86 seats in parliament.

Parties to the left of the Socialists made significant advances: The Portuguese Communist Party and its Ecological Green Party allies got 8.3 percent of the popular vote and 17 seats in parliament (one more than previously), and the Left Bloc swept forward with a popular vote of 10.2 percent and 19 seats in parliament, nearly doubling their previous representation. So among them the Socialists, Communists-Greens and Left Bloc have 122 seats, as opposed to Passos Coelho's 107.

In Portugal, the president is supposed to work with the representatives of the parties in the legislature to put together a workable government. In theory he should be a facilitator and not a partisan. But Cavaco Silva signaled, early on, that he wanted to see the current austerity policies continued.

He first tried to get Prime Minister Passos Coelho to form a governing coalition with the Socialist Party, but Socialist Party Secretary General Antonio Costa complained that the prime minister wanted to do this on a "take it or leave it" basis without making any concessions on austerity. So Costa turned to the Communist-Green alliance and Left Bloc, and worked out an agreement with both whereby they would guarantee support for a Socialist Party government, only on condition that the Passos Coelho government be ousted, and that stronger efforts be made to turn back austerity.

Both the Communists and the Left Bloc are in favor of Portugal leaving NATO and the Euro currency zone, but did not make this a condition of their support for Costa and the Socialists.

Costa then presented Cavaco Silva with this agreement, whereby he would form a new government with Communist-Green and Left Bloc support. Today, Cavaco Silva angrily rejected the offer and re-appointed Passos-Coelho's coalition as a minority government.

The President called for parliamentarians from the Socialist Party to dissent from their party's instructions and support this government. Almost immediately, Costa announced that he would present a motion in parliament to bring this government down. He will certainly have Communist-Green and Left Bloc support for such a motion. He must make sure, however, that his own parliamentary caucus holds firm.

Cavaco Silva said that the plan for a government of the Socialist party, supported by the Communists, Greens, and Left Bloc, was undemocratic because the PSD-PP coalition had got a plurality in the elections, even though the socialists and their allies actually had a majority in parliament and a small majority in the popular vote.

A big objection was that the Communists and Left Block want Portugal to get out of NATO and out of the Euro currency zone. This is true, but they had explicitly told Costa that this would not be a condition for their supporting his government, so it is a pretext. Cavaco Silva saw withdrawal from NATO as a betrayal of Portugal's honor. The Portuguese government brought the country into NATO under the nasty "New State" regime of dictator Antonio D'Oliveira Salazar.

Cavaco Silva's reason for defying the parliamentary majority and reappointing the Passos Coelho government reflected his own right wing and anti-communist political views, but also pressure from European Institutions. In the weeks after the election, the Troika had demanded that the Portuguese government present a budget for its review right away, to make sure austerity measures were strong enough. Portugal is not in as bad shape as Greece, but the Troika still has some power to do this. Portugal also signed onto the European Stability Pact, which requires that members of the European Union adhere to very strict limits on running budgetary deficits. Jeronimo de Sousa, the Secretary General of the Portuguese Communist Party, has called this drastic instrument the "pact of death" because it forces harsh austerity measures on poor countries like Portugal.

It and the other austerity mechanisms have been the focus of recent mass labor and people's protests in Portugal and other European countries. The rhetoric that Cavaco Silva used emphasized the need for Portugal to keep its commitments to "Europe", lest it face fiscal and economic disaster. So both the president and the prime minister are on a collision course with a considerable sector of the public.

In Portugal there is a presidential election in January 2016, in which Cavaco Silva's actions will surely be an issue.

Photo: Despite the fact that the majority of Portugal's voters supported either Left or Centrist candidates, the country's president, Anibal Cavaco Silva, reappointed the existing right-wing government, which opponents now vow to bring down. | AP

Who are the political prisoners in Colombia?

Thu, 22 Oct 2015 14:36:00 +0000

Political prisoners do exist in Colombia. In the current context of peace negotiations between the government and the FARC-EP guerrillas, and prior to the eventual beginning of talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN), recognition of such is absolutely necessary. It would be incomprehensible if an agreement to end the conflict does take place while thousands of political prisoners still remain behind bars, not to speak of those who were convicted unjustly - the convicted innocent - and who did not have the possibility of their cases being reviewed and, in this way, to be remedied, late though it may be.

Data on the extreme violence of Colombia's long, internal armed conflict suggest that the condition of those imprisoned today as political prisoners is becoming more and more complex. It's not a matter exclusively of those men and women who joined the insurgencies as combatants and who are defined as prisoners of war under international law, but rather of the great majority of Colombian political prisoners who are drawn from the non-combatant majority population. They are political prisoners of conscience and political prisoners in connection with the internal armed conflict. The latter belong to the unarmed political opposition.

They are defenders of human rights, critical thinkers, or take part in social movements, labor unions, the student movement, small farmer organizations, and groups representing indigenous or African- descended Colombians.

This tragic reality, among others, is quite understandable as the result of a politics that distorts the idea of political crime and converts the universal right of rebellion into a crime. And the latter is used as a weapon for persecuting those in the opposition, whether they are under arms or are legal. In this way thousands of political prisoners are not even being tried or sentenced for political crimes as strictly defined like rebellion, sedition, rioting, and crimes related to these as established by the Colombian criminal justice system. Instead they face charges that are beyond the realm of political crime and quite separate. We are speaking of common crimes like terrorism, kidnapping, forced displacement, forced recruitment of minors, and narco-trafficking. Additionally, through false allegations of this last crime, that of narco-trafficking, some political prisoners have ended up being extradited to the United States, although the Colombian Constitution prohibits extradition for political crimes.

Mutilation, terminal illness, women and children, inhuman conditions

This goes to show that we are looking upon a panorama in which students and academicians are seriously portrayed as being terrorists, labor union leaders as financiers of terrorism, and innumerable rural people and social justice activists as narco-traffickers. But also there are hundreds of political prisoners, prisoners of war actually, who, many of them, are suffering from severe mutilations incurred at the time they were captured, or terminal illnesses that clearly deserve treatment in accordance with international humanitarian law. Others of them are facing lengthy judicial processes and sentences while existing under inhuman conditions. Many of the female political prisoners are mothers, some having been armed combatants, others not. Furthermore, several are single - mother heads of families, a situation carrying special requirements that are almost always ignored. And many of them have children with them in prison who are less than three years old. For them, the penitentiary and incarceration system and the judicial apparatus operate in favor of men. Justice is differentiated by gender, and despite various laws gained for women by women, justice in practice is non-existent.

Not all political prisoners find themselves deprived of freedom inside prison walls. Some, a few, live under detention in their own homes and others in prison homes, and although their conditions are substantially improved compared with those living under degrading prison conditions, deficiencies and perversions of the judicial system do remain.

But also there are the former political prisoners who are at partial liberty: those free having completed their terms, free provisionally, and free on various conditions. The ones in this situation suffer harassment, stigmatization, persecution, denial of judicial benefits they've earned, and lack of opportunities to rebuild their lives.

However, it's necessary to understand also that, especially in the case of political prisoners, sentences aren't limited to being physically deprived of freedom. Accessory penalties are imposed also, like removal from public office, or administratively being declared unfit to fill this type of office, or being required to pay onerous fines. A "victims' unit" usually imposes such fines, and thus victims are converted into victimizers.

All of this is backed up by a judicial apparatus that applies criminal law to political opponents as if to an enemy and a prison society that is one of the results of manipulation by the official mass media. Each one ends up serving to legislators who, on the one hand, approve more punitive laws and new penal standards and who, on the other, justify the de facto denial of basic principles in the implementation of justice, among them due process, presumption of innocence, and technical defense etc. Taken together, they make the situation of thousands of Colombian political prisoners more onerous.

How many prisoners are there?

As if this overview did not suggest enough difficulties, even now - and as a result of such difficulties - a really accurate census of how many political prisoners there are, prisoners of conscience and prisoners of war alike, does not exist. The institutions base their census almost exclusively on who is being processed for the crime of rebellion. Among the organizations defending political prisoners, and among the political prisoners themselves, there is no consensus in regard to how many there really are. Some partial counts do exist - They vary according to the type of political or social organization - but there is no unified national census of all political prisoners. Some organizations speak of 4,500 political prisoners drawn from both armed combatants and civilians, and others mention around 9500. The FARC-EP spokesperson Iván Márquez holds that of the total number of political prisoners, around 90 percent are people who are non-combatants or prisoners of conscience. In other words, political prisoners of war add only 10 percent to the grand total.

That's why it's so important that a census or a sufficiently rigorous report on the situation of political prisoners exists within the framework of any agreement on justice for the situation of political prisoners. And such a tally must be sufficiently inclusive so that none of the political prisoners or ex-political prisoners who are convinced they were unjustly convicted can be excluded from alternatives being considered in an agreement between the parties on justice. They may be called pardons, amnesties, revision, or whatever may end up being approved. That is an urgent task and requires a great effort of collective formulation.

What is required?

A favorable end of the conflict requires not only that political prisoners, combatants, and collaborators of the insurgencies regain their freedom, but also - and especially - that thousands of political prisoners of conscience and prisoners for reasons related to the conflict are freed also. The entire society must furthermore be prepared to receive them in constructive and positives ways as part of a scenario where construction of a Colombia in peace is taking place. Opening up discussion and tolerating differences are part of that.

For the purposes of this article, the author speaks of political prisoners as representing the full gamut of persons who, as the result of political motivation, have been deprived of their liberty due to their thinking, their legal political actions, or their resort to arms.

Liliany Obando is a sociologist, a defender of human rights and former political prisoner.

W. T. Whitney Jr. translated

Source of original version in Spanish on the International Network in Solidarity with Colombia's Political Prisoners: http://www.inspp.org/news/political-prisoners/quines-son-los/as-prisioneros-polticos-colombianos

Photo: Agencia Prensa Rural

After 42 years, crimes of Chile coup perpetrators continue to surface

Thu, 22 Oct 2015 12:35:00 +0000

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. liked to quote an old abolitionist saying: "The Arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Both the victims and the perpetrators of the coup d'etat in Chile, carried out with U.S. support on September 11, 1973, are finding out the truth of this.

On Oct. 5, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivered previously classified documents to Chilean President Michelle Bachelet that show that former Chilean diplomat and Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his U.S. assistant, Ronni Moffitt, were murdered on September 21, 1976, on the direct orders of the dictator of Chile, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. The Institute for Policy Studies, for whom Letelier and Moffitt worked at the time, issued a statement lauding the release of this information.

Letelier had been captured during the September 11, 1973 coup against socialist president Salvador Allende, and tortured. Later he was able to get to the United States. He was one of thousands who suffered such a fate; at least 3,000 people-union, student, indigenous and political activists-were murdered or "disappeared" while hundreds of thousands had to flee into exile.

Several other exiles were also murdered in countries where they had sought refuge. The killings were carried out under the aegis of "Operation Condor," a secret assassination program organized by the South American right with the connivance of U.S. officials.

These included the former head of the Chilean army, General Carlos Prats Gonzalez, who was murdered along with his wife in Argentina in 1974. Former Brazilian president João Goulart, also a leftist, was poisoned by operatives of Operation Condor in December, 1976 while in exile in Argentina.

Former Bolivian President Juan José Torres Gonzalez, another leftist who had been overthrown by a coup in June 1976 was also murdered in Buenos Aires. There were many more.

Pinochet's chief hit man, DINA (National Intelligence Direction) head General Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, who died on Aug. 7 of this year while serving a 529 year prison sentence, arranged these and many other murderous attacks. He was first convicted for the Letelier - Moffitt murder in 1993, shortly after the end of the dictatorship. There followed other indictments.

In 2005, Contreras claimed that he had carried out these murders on the direct order of Pinochet, with the support of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and using the services of right-wing Cuban exiles in the United States. Contreras was also a notorious liar, but the newly declassified materials prove that in this case, he was telling the truth. The new information suggests that Pinochet, who died in 2006 without ever having been brought to book, was even willing to have Contreras Sepulveda killed to cover his own tracks.

This has been a bad year for Chile's military murderers. During the summer, the government of President Bachelet initiated prosecution of military personnel accused of the 1986 burning death of Rodrigo Rojas, a photojournalist who had been born in Chile but had moved to Washington D.C. with his family.

Rojas had returned to Chile and had been photographing an anti-Pinochet demonstration when he was captured, doused with gasoline and then burned to death, allegedly on the orders of army Lieutenant Julio Castañer, who is now on trial.

And in July of this year prosecution also advanced for the murderers of singer-songwriter Victor Jara, killed in the days immediately following the 1973 coup. The killing of Jara, a member of the Chilean Communist Party, was exceptionally sadistic. His tormentors smashed his hands, sneering that he would not be able to play his guitar again, before riddling him with bullets.

Judge Miguel Velazquez formally charged three former army officers-Hernan Chancon Soto, Patricio Vazquez Donoso and Ramon Melo Silva-in the Jara murder case, with more to come. However, Jara's family is trying to go after another former army officer, Lieutenant Pedro Barrientos Nuñez, a U.S. citizen who lives in the United States, via a civil suit in U.S. courts. So far efforts to get him extradited to Chile have not succeeded.

So the arc of the moral universe is bending toward justice, but needs to bend a lot more. The Chilean government has been trying to get parliament to pass a law abolishing an amnesty that Pinochet got approved in 1978 to shield his henchmen and himself from prosecution.

What did certain U.S. leaders know, and when did they know it? That former Secretary of State George Schulz and President Ronald Reagan knew as early as 1982 that Pinochet had ordered the killing of Letelier, is revealed by the new documents. But Letelier and Moffitt and many others were murdered during the Nixon administration, which had an obvious hand in the Pinochet coup and Operation Condor.

Dr. Henry Kissinger, who had been Nixon's National Security Advisor at the time of the 1973 coup, was Secretary of State from 1972-1977, the two roles overlapping for a while. According to a 2015 book by Greg Grandin, professor of History at New York University, Kissinger had known about Operation Condor and had been warned by Assistant Secretary of State Harry Shlauderman that murders of exiled Chilean leaders were being planned.

Kissinger then drafted a warning to the Pinochet government against such murders. But then, writes Grandin, Kissinger withdrew the memorandum before it could be delivered. Five days later Letelier and Moffitt were murdered in the middle of Embassy Row in Washington D.C. (Grandin, Greg, 2015: Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman. New York, Henry Holt, pp. 151 - 152).

U.S. citizen Michael Townley, who had hired the team of Cuban exile assassins who actually planted the bomb under Letelier's car, was allowed to go into a federal witness protection program after serving 62 months in prison. According to some reports, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, Cuban exile leaders and former C.I.A. operatives with known terroristic backgrounds, were in on the planning. Bosch died in 2011 but Posada lives openly in Miami Florida.

Chile's murderers and terrorists are belatedly being made accountable. How about our own?

Photo: Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar (April 13, 1932 - Sept. 21, 1976), assassinated in Washington D.C. by agents of DINA, the Pinochet regime's secret police, in 1976. | Wikipedia (CC)

Canadian unions cheer as voters toss out right-wing Prime Minister Harper

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 12:56:00 +0000

TORONTO - Canadian unions cheered as, in a resounding rejection of a decade of radical right politics, voters decisively tossed out Tory Prime Minister Stephen Harper, giving a large parliamentary majority to the Liberal Party and its leader, Justin Trudeau.

Results from all House of Commons ridings (districts) show the Liberals won 184 seats with 40 percent of the vote, keyed by sweeps in Canada's largest cities, Toronto and Montreal. The Tories won 99 seats and 32 percent. Harper had led a plurality government from 2011-15.

The even-more-progressive New Democratic Party - which unions backed when it was the official parliamentary opposition - won 44 seats and 20 percent of the vote. Minor parties won 11 seats. The Tories lost 67 seats, and the NDP lost 59. The Liberals gained 150.

In his decade in power, Harper made a target of Canadian unions.

Taking a page from the U.S. right wing playbook, Harper used parliamentary maneuvering in the Canadian Senate earlier this year to push through an anti-labor law that forced unions - and only unions - to disclose spending on everything from organizing to lawyers' fees to salaries to paper clips. Violators would be fined and sent to jail.

And Harper's government let U.S. Steel "take over some of the most modern and efficient steelmaking facilities in North America, based on commitment to workers, pensioners and communities. The Conservative government allowed U.S. Steel to starve our operations, export our work...and break its commitments," by eliminating health care for 20,000 pensioners, four days before the election, said USW Local 8782 President Bill Ferguson.

Harper was so anti-union that UFCW Canada launched a meme on social media with Harper's face and his finger pointing at voters. "Only you can stop my re-election" its slogan said. It went viral, UFCW added.

"Canadians have soundly rejected the Conservatives' politics of fear and division and have voted for change, and we look forward to working to ensure the Trudeau government delivers on the real change it has promised for working Canadians," said Canadian Labour Congress President Hassan Yussuff.

He added the CLC hopes "the new government will act swiftly" on a wide range of pro-worker measures, including repeal of the "fundamentally flawed ideological anti-labour bills" Harper pushed through Parliament this year. On other issues, the CLC praises the Liberals' stand for enhanced pensions, restoring Old Age Security, and significant increases in training, apprenticeship and infrastructure spending.

But the Liberals and Canadian unions are not in total agreement. Like U.S. workers and unions, Canadian unions and workers strongly oppose the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) "free trade" pact with the U.S. and 10 other Pacific Rim nations.

"The new government must take action to protect our supply management system and Canadian jobs - including auto sector jobs - that are under serious threat from the TPP as it stands," Yussuff said. Trudeau, son of famous former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, has equivocated on the TPP.

And the CLC also wants the Liberal majority in the new Parliament to repeal Harper's anti-terror legislation, which Yussuff calls "an affront to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms," its Bill of Rights.

Photo: Canadian unions say they will hold the Liberal Party, which has taken control of the nation's Parliament, to all of its campaign promises. | Wikimedia (CC)

Turkey's election turmoil will have global impact

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 14:13:00 +0000

As Turkey gears up for one of the most important elections in its recent history, the country appears, as one analyst noted, to be coming apart at the "seams":

Longstanding tensions with the country's Kurdish population have broken out into open war.
A Kurdish-led left political party is under siege by right-wing nationalists and the terrorist organization, the Islamic Front.
Independent journalists have been attacked by mobs led by leading members of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Erdogan, his family, and leading figures in the AKP have been entangled in several major corruption schemes.
The economy has stalled, inflation is on the rise, unemployment is at a five year high, tourism is tanking, and the Turkish lira is plunging, driving up the national debt.

All Turkey lacks these days is a rain of frogs and rivers of blood, but there is still time before the Nov. 1 election.

Some of these plagues are long standing, but most are the direct result of Erdogan's determination to reverse the outcome of last June's election that saw the AKP lose control of the parliament, and the president's grand plan for an all-powerful executive - run by him - died aborning.

In the June 7 election, Erdogan's AKP lost its absolute majority in the legislature. The defeat was mainly due to a breakthrough by the Kurdish-led, leftist, People's Democratic Party (HDP) that took 13.1 percent of the vote and won 80 seats, seats that in the past usually went to the AKP.

Repression, attacks, suicide bombings

Almost before the final tallies were announced, Erdogan moved to prevent the formation of a government and force another election. Key to this has been an all-out campaign to suppress the HDP and prevent the party from getting at least 10 percent of the vote, the required threshold for representation.

And in true Old Testament fashion, he has unleashed the furies.

First, he ended negotiations and a two-year old ceasefire with the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) and began bombing Kurds in Syria and Iraq. He also charged that the HDP was a front for the PKK and demanded that the HDP's dynamic leader, Selahattin Demirtas, be charged with supporting terrorism. HDP offices have been targeted by right-wing nationalist mobs from the AKP and the extreme rightist National Action Party.

Several anti-Erdogan newspapers and magazines were also set upon, attacks that the government either ignored or belatedly condemned.

The kind of suicide bombings that plague much of the Middle East have made an appearance. Some 32 leftist Kurdish activists were killed July 20 in the border town of Suruc, and on Oct. 10 a peace demonstration in the capital, Ankara, organized by the HDP was bombed, killing more than 100 people and wounding hundreds more.

While the culprit in both cases was likely the Islamic State, paranoia is running rampant these days. Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu blamed the PKK - extremely improbable, given that the rally was protesting the war against the Kurds - and HDP leader Demirtas blamed the government. Others charge it was the work of the National Action Party's "Gray Wolves," a shadowy death squad that killed thousands of Kurds and leftists in the 1980s and '90s.

Not only did the government remain silent for several days after the massacre, Turkish security forces broke up memorial demonstrations in Ankara and Istanbul.

A decade ago, Turkey was at peace with its neighbors, its economy was humming, democracy was flowering, the country's coup-minded military relegated to the barracks, and the 40-year war with its Kurdish population appeared to be over. Turkey, with its efforts to find a peaceful solution to the nuclear crisis with Iran, had also become an international player.

Today, Turkey is engaged in an unpopular war in Syria, its economy is troubled, its people are polarized, its relationships with Egypt and Israel are hostile, the Kurdish peace is shattered, and democracy is under siege. It has alienated Russia, Iraq and Iran, and even failed to get re-elected to the UN Security Council.

What happened?

Two fateful steps

Much of it goes back to the man who has dominated Turkish politics these past 12 years, and who would like to run the country for another decade, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He bears limited responsibility for some of this. For instance, the economy is bad, but so are most economies worldwide. But much of what has happened in Turkey - for good and bad-is in large part due to his creation of a moderate Islamic regime that curbed the power of the military and the secular elites who had dominated Turkish politics since the nation's foundation in 1923.

Erdogan and his allies - allies he has since fallen out with - reined in a military that had carried out four coups since 1960. He also made peace with the Kurds, ending a war that took 40,000 lives and cost $1.2 trillion. A side benefit for that was that many rural and religious Kurds migrated into the AKP, giving it a significant edge over all other parties in the parliament.

But things began to go off the rails in 2010, when the Arab Spring took the Middle East by storm and Turkey made two fateful steps: backing insurgents trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The first step trapped Ankara in a quagmire, wrecking its relations with Russia, Iraq and Iran, and the second was a bad bet: the Egyptian military, bankrolled by Saudi Arabia, overthrew the Brotherhood in 2013.

It is all this sturm und drang that makes these elections so critical for the AKP, and Erdogan in particular. A failure to win an outright majority will be seen as a repudiation of the Kurdish war and Ankara's Syria policy, and may resurrect the corruption changes that the AKP has managed to dodge so far. "For him, this is existential," one former Turkish official told the Financial Times. "There is still accountability in this country and he knows it."

This "existential" nature of the Nov. 1 vote is the reason why Erdogan has pulled out all the stops, but polls show that the outcome is likely to be much like last June's election. The AKP may pick up a percentage point or two, but it will fall far short of the majority it requires to push through its constitutional changes and create an all-powerful presidency.

The polls also show that Erdogan's major pre-election target, the HDP, may do slightly better this time around, in part because he has totally alienated the Kurdish community. The Kurds make up 20 percent of the population and about 17 to 18 percent of the voting population.

If the polls are correct, Turkey will have a divided government, and that will create its own dangers.

Dangers loom

First, there is the president's increasingly authoritarian strategy.

Erdogan, for instance, says he is no longer bound by the constitution because he is the first directly elected president in Turkish history. He won that post with 52 percent of the vote in 2014. Presidents are normally appointed by the parliament and are supposed to be non-partisan. Abdurrahim Boynukalin, the leader of the AKP's youth wing and a deputy in the parliament, said recently, "Whatever the results of the election on November 1, we will make him [Erdogan] the leader."

Second, the AKP may form an alliance with the ultra-right-wing National Action Party, which would almost certainly mean an escalation of the war against the Kurds and put into positions of power an organization that celebrates violence and is openly contemptuous of democracy. While the merger would still not give the AKP the 400 seat super-majority it needs to amend the constitution, it would have a chilling effect on political activity.

There is also the possibility of a "grand coalition" government with the secular People's Republican Party, the second largest in the parliament. But that would require sharing power, not one of Erdogan's strong suits.

There are, however, strong counter-trends.

In spite of Erdogan's flirtation with authoritarian rule, Turkey is still a democracy, and its military shows no interest in intervening in civil affairs. Indeed, there is some unrest in the military over the Kurdish war, and the government has been denounced at several military funerals. The military has also made it quite clear that they have no interest in getting involved in the Syrian civil war.

Erdogan calculated that re-igniting the Kurdish war would unite the country behind him, but it has not turned out that way, and his international allies are lukewarm about the whole endeavor. While saying that Turkey had the right to defend itself, the Europeans and the U.S. called for a "proportional" response, not the massive bombing Ankara has launched on Kurds in Northern Iraq and Syria.

Of course, the allies' discomfort is a reflection of the fact that while the AKP government draws no distinction between the Islamic State (IS), the PKK, and the latter's Syrian offshoot, the Kurdish Democratic Union, the allies consider the Kurds their most reliable and effective forces against the IS. The Turks recently complained to Russia and the U.S. about their arming of Syrian Kurds, a complaint that neither country is likely to pay much attention to.

The Syria war has been a disaster for Erdogan. Some 63 percent of Turks oppose the AKP's Syria policy, and only 20 percent back overthrowing Assad. Over 65 percent oppose one of Erdogan's fixations, the formation of a buffer zone inside Syria.

And, while in the past the AKP can say it delivered on the economic front that is a hard sell these days.

The next few weeks

The next few weeks will be fraught with danger. The AKP and the ultra-nationalists will try to suppress the vote, particular in Istanbul and the Kurdish east and south. The PKK declared a ceasefire for the election, but the Turkish government has ignored it. Will Erdogan use the war as an excuse to cancel the election in the Kurdish regions?

Erdogan may even refuse to accept the results of the election if the AKP does poorly, and he has already demonstrated his willingness to use violence. His brutal crushing of the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations is a case in point.

But Erdogan can no longer claim the support of a majority of the Turks, and what he does internally will be watched closely by the international community, focused as it is on the refugee crisis that the Syrian war has generated.

In less than two weeks, the Turks will vote in an election that will have major regional and international implications. Its outcome may decide whether the Middle East slides deeper into war and chaos, or begins to move in the direction that the Arab Spring originally envisioned.

This article originally appeared at Conn Hallinan's blog Dispatches from the Edge.

Photo: A week after a peace demonstration in Ankara organized by the People's Democratic Party (HDP) was attacked by suicide bombers, killing 102 people and wounding hundreds more, a crowd stands in silence at the same spot to commemorate the victims. The commemoration started at 10:04 a.m. (local), the time the bombs went off on Oct. 10. AP/Burhan Ozbilici

Today in history: Half a million Communists massacred in Indonesia

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 13:53:00 +0000

Fifty years ago, the Indonesian killings of an estimated more than 500,000 people in an anti-communist purge had risen to its height. The massacre, following a failed coup of the 30 September Movement, led the country into a "New Order" and the elimination of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) as a political force. The upheavals led to the downfall of President Sukarno and the commencement of Suharto's 30-year presidency.

The failed coup released pent-up communal hatreds which were fanned by the Indonesian Army, which quickly blamed the PKI. Communists were purged from political, social, and military life, and the PKI itself was banned. The massacres began in October 1965 and continued for the next several months into early 1966 throughout the archipelago nation. Thousands of local vigilantes and army units killed actual and alleged PKI members.

Sukarno's balancing act of "Nasakom" (nationalism, religion and communism) unraveled. His most significant pillar of support, the PKI, had been effectively eliminated by the other two pillars - the army and political Islam; and the army was on the way to unchallenged power. By 1967, Sukarno was stripped of his remaining power by Indonesia's provisional Parliament, and Suharto was named Acting President. In March 1968, Suharto was formally elected president.

The killings are skipped over in most Indonesian history books and have received little introspection by Indonesians. Anti-communism remained a hallmark of Suharto's regime.

Under his rule, a film supporting the New Order's version of events, Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (Betrayal of Indonesia Communist Party), was broadcast annually on the government television station, the only version of events allowed in open discourse in the country.

U.S. and western complicity

Despite a consensus at the highest levels of the American and British governments that it would be necessary "to liquidate Sukarno," as related in a CIA memorandum from 1962, and the existence of extensive contacts between anti-communist army officers and the U.S. military establishment (including the training of over 1200 officers, "including senior military figures," and also providing weapons and economic assistance), the CIA denies active involvement in the killings. It was later revealed that the American government provided extensive lists of communists to Indonesian death squads. A top-secret CIA report stated that the massacres "rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20^th century."

By the early 1960s, the PKI had approximately 300,000 cadres and a full membership of around two million. It was the third-largest communist party in the world. The party's assertive efforts to speed up land reform frightened those who controlled the land and threatened the social position of Muslim clerics.Sukarno required government employees to study his Nasakom principles as well as Marxist theory. Sukarno had met with Zhou Enlai, leader of the People's Republic of China, and accepted Chinese assistance in establishing a revolutionary militia, called a Fifth Force. At a Non-Aligned summit meeting in Cairo (October 1964) he stated his goal to move Indonesian politics leftward and thereby neutralize the reactionary elements in the army that could be dangerous to his newly independent country.

On the evening of 30 September and 1 October 1965, six generals were killed by a group calling itself the 30 September Movement, and Suharto, a senior general, assumed control of the army. He immediately blamed the coup attempt on the PKI. A mass campaign of fabricated claims against Indonesian "heroes" followed, serving to justify a rampage against the left, reformists, non-believers and dissidents. The ensuing massacre was arbitrary, violent, sadistic, and even cannibalistic to an extent. Rivers ran crimson with blood as corpses floated down to the sea. Sukarno protested the purge, stating that the army was "burning down a house to kill a rat."

From 1958 to 1965 the U.S. trained, funded, advised, and supplied the army precisely so that it could turn itself into a state within a state. The army gradually made itself the government-in-waiting, waiting for an incident like the 30 September movement to occur. They were busy creating the conditions for it and preparing themselves for dealing with it.

According to U.S. Cold War policy, all nationalist leaders of underdeveloped countries who wished to remain neutral were regarded as Communist stooges. The U.S. made a habit of using CIA covert operations to overthrow such leaders: Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and Souvanna Phouma in Laos in 1960. Sukarno was yet another such leader targeted for removal.

In some places Chinese-owned shops were destroyed and their owners killed, which contributed to the subsequent distracting myth that the massacre was basically a spontaneous, genocidal "race riot." But few Chinese Indonesians were PKI members. The best estimate is that around 2000 Chinese Indonesians were killed, out of a total death toll of 500,000.

The British ambassador, Andrew Gilchrist, wrote to London: "I never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.News of the massacre was carefully controlled by Western intelligence agencies. Journalists, prevented from entering Indonesia, relied on the official statements from Western embassies. Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt commented in the New York Times, "With 500,000 to 1 million Communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place." The right-wing oilman H.L. Hunt proclaimed Indonesia the sole bright spot for the U.S. in the Cold War and called the ouster of Sukarno the "greatest victory for Freedom since the last decisive battle of World War II." Time magazine described the suppression of the PKI as "The West's best news for years in Asia,"praising Suharto's regime as "scrupulously constitutional."

Robert F. Kennedy was one of the only prominent Americans to condemn the massacres. In January 1966 he said: "We have spoken out against the inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the Communists. But will we speak out also against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged Communists have not been perpetrators, but victims?"

The USSR's Andrei Sakharov called the killing a "tragic event" - "an extreme case of reaction, racism and militarism." Other socialist countries registered strong protests. Only communist Albania objected when Suharto returned Indonesia to the United Nations.

Since declassified documents confirm U.S. and other western government complicity in this singular episode of mass murder. In late 1968, the National Intelligence Estimate for Indonesia reported: "An essential part of the Suharto government's economic program...has been to welcome foreign capital back to Indonesia. Already about 25 American and European firms have recovered control of mines, estates, and other enterprises nationalized under Sukarno. Liberal legislation has been enacted to attract new private foreign investment.... There is substantial foreign investment in relatively untapped resources of nickel, copper, bauxite, and timber. The most promising industry...is oil."

The 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously is based around events leading up to the killings. Adi Zulkadry, a death squad leader during that time, is quoted in Joshua Oppenheimer's 2012 documentary film The Act of Killing, describing several horrific methods of killing people. "We were allowed to do it. And the proof is, we murdered people and were never punished." Oppenheimer places the number of deaths between 1 and 3 million people. His companion piece The Look of Silence follows one grieving family trying to understand why it happened and exposes how those behind the Indonesian genocide still revel in their crimes 50 years on.

Adapted from Wikipedia.

Photo: Members of the Indonesian Communist Party's youth wing are taken away in 1965, during the violent repression of communists in the country. AP

Today in history: Nazi war crimes indictments read at Nuremberg

Mon, 19 Oct 2015 14:10:00 +0000

Seventy years ago, on October 18, 1945, the chief prosecutors of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) ordered read the indictments against 24 leading Nazi officials. The charges brought against these officials were:

1. Conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity

2. Crimes against peace

3. War crimes

4. Crimes against humanity

After this announcement, the trials formally opened in Nuremberg, Germany, on November 20, half a year after Germany surrendered. Each of the four Allied nations - the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France - supplied a judge and a prosecution team. Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence of Great Britain served as the court's presiding judge. The trial's rules were the result of delicate reconciliations of the Continental and Anglo-American judicial systems.

Simultaneous translations of all proceedings were provided in English, French, German, and Russian.

Beginning in 1942, the Allied powers announced their intent to punish Nazi war criminals. The temptation was great to proceed directly to summary executions instead of trials. But in the words of Cordell Hull, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's long-serving Secretary of State, "a condemnation after such a proceeding will meet the judgment of history, so that the Germans will not be able to claim that an admission of war guilt was extracted from them under duress."

The first group ofdefendants represented a cross-section of Nazi diplomatic, economic, political, and military leadership. The IMT defined crimes against humanity as "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation...or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds."

The charge of conspiracy was added to cover crimes committed under domestic Nazi law before the start of World War II, and so that subsequent tribunals would have jurisdiction to prosecute any individual belonging to a proven criminal organization, such as the Reich Cabinet, the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the Elite Guard (SS), the Security Service (SD), the Secret State Police (Gestapo), the Stormtroopers (SA), and the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces.

Testimony presented at Nuremberg revealed much of what we know about the Holocaust including the details of the Auschwitz death machinery, the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the estimate of six million Jewish victims. The term "genocide" entered the international language.

The judges delivered their verdict on October 1, 1946. Three of four judges were needed for conviction.

Twelve defendants were sentenced to death, among them Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg, and Julius Streicher. They were hanged, cremated in Dachau, and their ashes dropped in the Isar River. Hermann Goering escaped the noose by committing suicide the night before. The IMT sentenced three defendants to life imprisonment and four to prison terms ranging from 10 to 20 years. It acquitted three of the defendants.

The IMT trial at Nuremberg was just one of the earliest and most famous of several war crimes trials. The overwhelming majority involved lower-level officials and officers, such as concentration camp guards and commandants, police officers, members of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units), and doctors who participated in medical experiments. These war criminals were tried by military courts in the British, American, French, and Soviet zones of occupied Germany and Austria, and also in Italy in the immediate postwar years.

On October 17, 1946, the day after the IMT defendants were executed, Pres. Harry Truman appointed Telford Taylor to be the new American chief war crimes prosecutor. He went on to prosecute 183 high-ranking German officials, as well as German industrialists, in 12 separate trials known asSubsequent Nuremberg Proceedings.

Other war criminals were tried by courts in those countries where they had committed their crimes. In 1947, a court in Poland sentenced Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Hoess to death. In the courts of West Germany, many former Nazis did not receive severe sentences: Their claim of following orders from superiors was often ruled a mitigating circumstance. A number of these criminals returned to normal lives in German society, especially in the business world.

Dedicated Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal and Beate Klarsfeld found many hidden criminals who had escaped from Germany after the war. The trial of Adolf Eichmann, held in Jerusalem in 1961, captured worldwide attention.

Many war criminals, however, were never brought to trial or punished.

Principal source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Photo: The Soviet, British, American, and French flags hang behind the International Military Tribunal judges' bench. Credit: National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.

Anti-austerity struggle: Is the tide turning in Europe?

Mon, 19 Oct 2015 10:34:00 +0000

How is the battle going against austerity in Europe?

Portugal, which had a parliamentary election on October 5, does not yet have a new government. Although the conservative, pro-austerity coalition headed by Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho got a plurality of votes, he did not get a majority as in the last election in 2011.

Instead, left and center parties, including the Socialist Party, the CDU (an electoral coalition of the Communist Party and the Ecologist or "Green" Party) and the BE (Left Bloc) got a slight majority of the popular vote and, together, 122 votes in parliament to the right's 84. If the Socialists, Communists, Greens and BE can come to an agreement, they could form a majority coalition government, ousting Passos Coelho.

This would be the first time in years that a communist party has been part of a coalition government in Western Europe. All four of these left and center parties define themselves as being anti-austerity but they differ on other issues, including whether Portugal should stay in the Euro Zone and in NATO.

However, both Jeronimo de Sousa, the general secretary of the Communist Party, and Catarina Martins, the head of BE, say their immediate priority is to oust the present government.

The Socialist Party's secretary general, former Lisbon Mayor Antonio Costa, has expressed willingness to work with such a left-center alliance, and has also voiced great dissatisfaction with the alternative-a right center government wherein the Socialist Party would agree to keep Passos Coelho on as prime minister. So it looks like a left-center coalition may really be possible.

But if a government headed by Mr. Costa and supported by the Communists, Greens and BE comes to power and starts to push against austerity, won't it probably meet the same fate as the SYRIZA government in Greece? Will Angela Merkel stride across the beach to come and kick sand in Portugal's face?

This depends on factors beyond Portugal's borders. Greece's misfortune was its isolation in the face of a united European ruling class and political right, and the fact that its enemies were able to threaten a cutoff of funds for Greek banks if it did not bow to their demands.

With the exception of Cyprus, not a single European government supported Greece in its time of trouble.

But things may be changing. There is a parliamentary election in Spain on Dec. 20, and all indications are that the reactionary, repressive and corrupt administration of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy will lose seats in the Cortes, or parliament. What kind of government will emerge through Spain's complicated multi-party system is yet to be seen, but the right's hand will, at any rate, be weakened. The Spanish left, which consists of the United Left (Izquierda Unida) comprising the Spanish Communist Party and the Communist Party of Catalonia and smaller groups, and PODEMOS, a new left-wing party that has arisen in the last couple of years out of anti-austerity, ant-corruption protests, both take strong positions against austerity. As in Portugal, much will depend on Spain's old social democratic party, the PSOE or Spanish Socialist Workers' Party.

It was ousted by angry voters in the last elections in 2011, precisely because of having accepted austerity policies. But the PSOE now has new leadership under its Secretary-General Pedro Sanchez Perez-Castrejon, who appears to have positioned himself to the left of the old leadership. Both the United Left and PODEMOS also have new, young and charismatic leaders in Alberto Garzon and Pablo Iglesias, respectively.

Ireland has to have an election by April 8, 2016. The Coalition government of Prime Minister Enda Kenny, which consists of his own conservative Fine Gael party and the social democratic Labor Party, has been pressured on the austerity issue by the left-nationalist Sinn Fein party and others. At this early point, polls suggest that a vote for "independents" is surging. What this means in terms of possible results it is too early to tell.

These are positive signs, but don't add up to a massive all-Europe revolt against austerity and the dictates of the Troika.

On the streets, however, there are signs that mass mobilizations against the whole neo-liberal package, and especially the new so-called free trade agreements that are an integral part of it, are building strength. In Berlin on Oct. 7, a quarter of a million people marched to protest against the Atlantic versions of the Transpacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) linking the United States and the European Union, and CETA (the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) which links the European Union with Canada on the same neo-liberal, corporate dominated basis.

The Berlin demonstration was part of a whole series of protests involving a dozen European countries. Mundo Obrero, the newspaper of the Spanish Communist Party, interviewed one of the main leaders of the coalitions organizing the European protests, Felipe van Keirsbilck, the secretary general of Belgium's C.N.E., a labor federation representing hundreds of thousands of private sector employees. Van Keirsbilck explained the goals of the growing mobilizations as: " No to poverty, no to austerity, no to the TTIP and CETA, no to corruption, no to racism," and yes to all European unity against these things.

If mass unity, transcending national borders, can indeed be built around such demands, great things can happen in Europe.

Photo: On Oct. 7 in Berlin, 250,000 demonstrate agaisnt corporate backed trade agreements. | Marcus Schreiber/AP

Bombing in Turkey triggers nationwide anger

Tue, 13 Oct 2015 16:55:00 +0000

On Saturday Oct. 10, two bomb blasts hit a rally in Turkey's capital, Ankara, during a non-violent demonstration calling for a peaceful solution of the conflict between the Turkish government and Kurdish nationalist organizations in the East of the Country. It is not yet known who was behind the bombings, but the incident has set off massive anti-government demonstrations both in Ankara and in Istanbul.

About 14,000 demonstrators, organized by labor and civic groups and opposition parties and including a high proportion from Turkey's Kurdish minority, had gathered in front of Ankara's main train station when the blasts went off in quick succession, right in the middle of the massed demonstrators. First reports indicated that 95 people were killed with hundreds injured, many seriously. However, other sources close to the organizers of the demonstration put the death toll at 128.
Either way, this is the bloodiest terrorist attack in the history of the Turkish Republic.

But it is not an isolated incident. Several other attacks have been carried out this year, most of them directed against the Kurdish people and organizations, including another very bloody one in Suruç, across the border from the besieged Syrian Kurdish town of Kobane, on July 20.

In that attack, a mostly Kurdish group of young socialists had gathered in Suruç to organize humanitarian aid to the people of Kobani, where local Kurdish militia were engaged in an epic battle against armed fighters from the ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, linked to ISIS), a violent Islamist extremist group which is fighting to seize control of Syria and Iraq. ISIL claimed credit for the attack in which 33 people were killed. There have been several other incidents.

The left wing and secularist opposition lost several members in Saturday's Ankara attack. The EMEP (Turkish Labor Party), a Marxist group, stated that nine of its members were killed, including a member of its Central Committee. The Communist Party, some of whose members participated as part of labor unions which were involved, reported several injuries.

The government of President Recep Tayyip Ordogan and Prime Minister Ahmed Davutoglu, of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) deplored the attack, which they claim was done by two as yet unidentified suicide bombers, and blamed it either on ISIS or on the PKK, the Kurdish Labor Party, with which the government is involved in armed struggle in the East of the country. Authorities also suggested culpability by an extreme Maoist group, the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party.

But the opposition is not buying this.

Instead, they point their fingers directly at the Erdogan-Davutoglu government. At the very least, they claim that the authorities were criminally negligent in not providing proper security for the demonstration, and in not allowing ambulances quick access to the scene of mayhem.

But many opponents of the government go much further and hint at a much higher level of criminal responsibility.

Erdogan's government had won some praise for its willingness to negotiate with the Kurdish PKK, but in the elections of June 7 of this year, a secular, left-center political party with roots in the Kurdish population, the People's Democratic Party or HDP, did unexpectedly well, and deprived Erdogan's right wing and Islamist AKP of its majority in parliament. Subsequently the AKP was not able to put together a working parliamentary coalition, and Erdogan called for a new election on November 1. There is every indication that the HDP will do even better this time around.

Meanwhile, the government finds itself in multiple difficulties. After the Suruç terrorist attack, the PKK, which blamed the government for allowing ISIL forces to carry the attack out, resumed armed struggle against Turkish security forces, with the result that many have been killed on both sides.

Turkey also has 2.5 million Syrian refugees on its soil, and is under internal and external pressure to stop its policy of allowing Islamic State fighters to pass back and forth across its southern border in their efforts to topple the government of Syrian president Bashir al Assad. But the United States has also pressured Turkey to allow it to launch air attacks against Islamic State targets in Syria from Turkish soil.

One of the main leaders of the HDP, Selahattin Demirtas, whose party was one of the main sponsors of the Ankara peace demonstration, very bluntly blamed the attack and others like it, as well as right wing riots which attacked the HDP headquarters and the anti-government Hurriyet newspaper in Istanbul on September 8, on the government. A communique from the Foreign Affairs Commission of the HDP, issued before the Ankara bombings, accused the government of not really fighting against ISIS but instead attacking the Kurdish people and their leaders.

This appears to be the general opinion of the left and secularist opposition: That at some level there is collusion between Erdogan's and Davutoglu's government and violent Islamist and anti Kurdish nationalists that is making these attacks possible.

The PKK announced a unilateral truce so that the November 1 elections can take place peacefully. But the drift toward even higher levels of conflict, even civil war, is evident.

Photo: EMEP.

In Berlin 250,000 march against unfair trade

Tue, 13 Oct 2015 14:11:00 +0000

BERLIN - It was a day to remember, a date for the record books! It marked a surprising development in German politics! And who said Germans don't like protest marches or demonstrations?

The organizers counted 250,000, a quarter of a million. Of course the police scaled that down - to 150,000. But who's counting - it was definitely the biggest demonstration here since 2003 when there was a mass turnout against the Iraq War.

It was a protest against the "Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership," TTIP, and its equally-spurned Canadian sister, CETA. Like their U.S.-Pacific clone TPP, both are to be shoved through with little discussion of content.

The march organizers, two opposition parties, the LINKE (Left) and the Greens, Campac (CAMpaign-ACtion, something like MoveOn.org), Attac (against financial speculation), almost 500 ecological, cultural, health and leftist groups of many colors and, of key importance, the union movement - had hoped for 100,000.

The media predicted only half that. But when I squeezed out of the jammed city train in Berlin's main station, pushed through to the exit and looked down at the crowd I could guess at their mistake. It was so full, stretching across the bridges over the Spree River, that I gave up any hope of finding my own group and just mixed in with the happy, friendly crowd on this beautiful sunny day.

From parents with tots in strollers to ancient graybeards, also two blind women, with tens of thousands of banners and flags or occasional masks and puppets, they showed how varied were their backgrounds and home towns but how unified was both their will and determination.

They joined in laughingly when the loudspeaker voice counted down to "4-3-2-1-"Stop T-TIP" or "T-TIP Nein!" They listened to impassioned speeches from a Canadian union man warning how job-creating promises about NAFTA had turned out to be lies, then to a woman from Cameroun, who told how her country had been ruined by "free trade improvements," and then to a Turkish woman reporting on the massacre a few hours earlier and calling for solidarity.

The immense crowd waited patiently, then slowly moved off through one-time East Berlin thoroughfares, past the big Bundestag building and the Soviet War Memorial near Brandenburg Gate into the long wide avenue cutting through one-time West Berlin's Tiergarten park, where one week earlier 25 years of German unification had been celebrated. Called for 12 noon, they were still arriving at 4:30 p.m., while earlier arrivals chatted or danced.

The crowds in the Tiergarten this past Saturday were neither celebrating anniversaries nor cheering soccer goals on big screens, but were concerned with today's pressing problems. TTIP and CETA could force monopoly standards down unwilling throats, nullify European standards against cruel treatment of calves, hogs and chickens, end barriers to hormone-treated meat and genetic manipulation, drop labeling requirements, crush family farms, and change European rules on pharma products which require them to prove their harmlessness before sales are permitted.

Some protested planned cancelation of European rules protecting authors' fees and national cinema culture against more powerful Hollywood pressures. A large number of signs protested the secret arbitration sessions which could meet the wishes of big corporations against any rules limiting their profits, overturning hard-won workers' protection rules, ecological decisions or anything else in their way.

I saw a sign depicting one such happy session with "arbitrators" - all three lobbyists with rat faces. Another told how most promised "advantages" would end up in big accounts in Swiss banks.

Among the speakers, heard by whichever parts of the parade were near sound boxes, was a top Green Party leader, LINKE co-president Bernd Riexinger and Reiner Hoffmann, president of the labor union federation (AGB) with its eight affiliates and about 6 million members.

Five special trains and 600 buses had brought many of them in from all parts of Germany. The hometown signs many carried were not only from cities like Hamburg and Cologne but from small towns with unfamiliar names in all regions.

I saw two fellows chatting, one from far-off Aachen near the Belgian border, the other from Dresden close to the Czech border; I was glad to see at least one progressive from that city whose hate-ridden anti-foreigner parades are in so many news reports. I even saw a group from Alsace, across the border in France.

As for the political parties, there were Greens, especially their youth section, also small but determined groups with flags of the SPD, the Social Democratic Party, in defiance of their top leader, Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, who carefully avoided this parade to give another of his speeches favoring TTIP.

I even saw a handful waving a banner for "The Party," a satirical group with crazily sarcastic slogans like "Privatize All Water." Most of all I saw signs of the LINKE, the Left, though somehow TV reports on the parade carefully omitted showing even one of them. As usual!

Of great interest to me were sentiments often heard from the sound trucks and reflected in more than a few posters. One, more than clear, stated: "Take TTIP and shove it - and Capitalism with it!" Although this giant event included large contingents from the unions, not just leftist ones but even the conservative Building Workers or the Miners and Chemical Workers' Union, the crowds seemed to happily accept or even cheer calls for a change of the system.

It would be foolhardy to overestimate this, I am sure (and which people usually tend to take long trips to demonstrations?), yet it seemed to mark a renewed, rebellious and progressive trend.

New trends are sorely needed - because of other crowds. The tens of thousands of immigrants fleeing into Germany have evoked a dangerous counter-current which, increasingly aided by many media sources now again turning anti-foreigner, is displaying ominous, racist trends on its margins.

Indeed, rightwing elements centered in the Bavarian sister party of the Christian Democrats are now even attacking hitherto untouchable Angela Merkel. A strange situation is developing: Merkel, though still stubbornly in favor of TTIP and against leftist trends like in Greece, and after wavering back and forth on the immigrant question, has now stated defiantly that Germany cannot build a giant new wall, this time around its borders, but must courageously overcome the immense difficulties in integrating hundreds of thousands, while pressuring reluctant European Union partners to join in.

Now, to general amazement, she is being supported by the opposition, the Greens, even the LINKE, while under attack from forces in her own party - with her Social Democrat coalition partner split.

Changes in the German political scene seem more and more in the offing. Fronts are changing, often hardening; no-one can predict which direction will gain the overhand. The giant demonstration on Saturday, with many signs saying "Immigrants Welcome!", was moving evidence that events are not moving only in a rightward direction.

Photo: Tens of thousands of protestors attend the demonstration against the free trade agreements TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) and CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) in Berlin, Germany, Oct. 10. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Burkina Faso coup reversed, general arrested

Thu, 08 Oct 2015 16:08:00 +0000

The coup d'etat in the West African country of Burkina Faso has evidently been reversed by the opposition of sections of the army loyal to the interim government, and by massmobilization.

On Sept. 16, the presidential guard (RSP, or Presidential Security Regiment) headed by General Gilbert Diendéré had burst into a meeting at the presidential palace in the capital, Oagadougou, and arrested interim President Michel Kafando and interim Prime Minister Isaac Zida and several other officials.

General Diendéré was a key aide of the dictator Blaise Compaore who was overthrown by a people's rebellion a year ago when he tried to change the laws so as to be able to serve another presidential term. There had been demands for the guard unit, the RSP, that he commanded to be disbanded. This, and the decision of the interim government not to allow Compaore's henchmen to run in the scheduled Oct. 11 elections, were among the motives mentioned for the general's coup. Another could be that the day after the coup, a report was scheduled to be issued on the murder of former left wing President Thomas Sankara, a hero of the left and the poor, in 1987. There have been suspicions that Compaore and people close to him, who carried out the coup in which Sankara was killed, in fact were directly involved in that assassination. Compaore is now living in exile in the Ivory Coast.

Once Diendéré and his men had taken power, they found themselves resolutely opposed by the same mass forces that had thrown out Compaore in 2014. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) tried to organize a mediation that would please both sides, and the Naba, or King, of the old pre-colonial Mossi Kingdom of which Oagadougou was originally the capital, also tried to mediate.

But the Burkinabe people were not having anything to do with any compromise that might help Compaore and his people return to power, so "the street" rejected a plan that was presented to the nation by ECOWAS, which would have delayed the elections and allowed Compaore's people to run as candidates. Finally, on Tuesday Sept. 22, elements of the army that opposed Compaore and Diendéré stepped in and besieged the presidential palace, defeating the presidential guard diehards holed up there after a sharp firefight and restoring the transitional government. Kafando and Zida, who had been released earlier, announced that they were back in power.

Diendéré had sought refuge in the Vatican embassy in Oagadougou but surrendered on Thursday and is now in custody. The restored interim government has now announced the dissolution of the RSP, and the arrest of a number of other people involved in the coup attempt.

It is not clear whether the elections will go forth as planned on Oct. 11, or will be delayed.

Photo: Burkina Faso coup leader Gen. Gilbert Diendere, center. | AP

Elections throw future of Portugal’s right wing government in doubt

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 15:28:00 +0000

Portugal had legislative elections on Sunday, Oct. 4. At writing, the question of whether Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho will stay on, and on what basis, is the subject of intense negotiations.

The ruling right wing coalition of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coehlo got 38.5 percent of the vote (as compared to 50.4 percent in the last election, in 2011) lost 23 parliamentary seats in the 230 seat parliament or Assembly of the Republic, thus also losing its slender majority, but still got the largest number of seats in total, at 104.

The Socialist Party, which earlier looked to be overtaking the governing parties, faded toward the end but still picked up 11 seats in the 230 for a total of 85, with a popular vote of 32.4 percent compared to 28 percent last time around.

On the left, the United Democratic Coalition, composed of the Communist Party and the Ecologist (Greens) Party, more than held its own with 8.3 percent of the vote (compared to 7.9 percent in the 2011 election) and picked up an additional seat for a total of 17.

The Left Bloc, BE in Portuguese, surged at the very end and swept past the Communist-Green alliance for a total of 10.2 percent of the popular vote, and 19 parliamentary seats. With a few races still to be decided, six seats were won by smaller parties, and none by groups to the right of the government.

Media in the United States misleadingly reported the Portuguese election results as a "victory" for Passos Coelho's government. In fact, it was a major setback.

What happens now is that the coalition government, because it won more seats than any one other party, consults with the mostly ceremonial president, Anibal Cavaco Silva, who will probably ask Passos Coehlo to form a new government.

However, this is not automatic. The parties of the left and left-center outnumber the ruling coalition with 121 seats to 104. As both the Communists and the BE quickly pointed out, this leaves the Socialist Party in the position of kingmaker, depending on whether it moves to support Passos Coelho's continuation in power, or to block it. The combined Socialist, Communist and Left Bloc government could vote "no confidence" in the government and cause its demise.

This election was fought on the subject of austerity and the subordination of Portugal to the dictates of the "Troika" of the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the European Central Bank. This austerity was imposed, as in the case of Greece, in exchange for a financial bailout of $87 billion.

In the 2011 election, the Socialist Party, then in power under the leadership of former Prime Minister Jose Socrates, was severely punished by the voters for having acceded to the Troika's demands and imposed austerity, and this brought in the right wing government of Passos Coelho, a coalition between the Social Democratic Party (in Portugal a right-wing party in spite of its name) and the Democratic and Social Center-People's Party.

However, Passos Coelho continued to implement austerity measures including wage and pension cuts, firing of public sector workers, dismantlement of social welfare programs, measures to weaken the unions, and onerous tax hikes, leading to widespread suffering on the part of the Portuguese working class and ordinary citizens. The government was the target of many mass protest actions led by the labor movement and the left, and as the election season got underway it looked as if it would be swept from power.

But the Socialist Party had to deal not only with the opprobrium of having implemented austerity, of not having opposed it strongly once in opposition, and with scandals involving ex Prime Minister Socrates.

When Socrates resigned as Secretary General of the Socialist Party he was replaced by the Mayor of Lisbon, Antonio Costa, whose initial statements indeed seemed to signal a move toward the left.

What brought about the surge of the Left Bloc at the last minute will be a matter of much speculation. At its founding it brought in organizations connected to the politics of Leon Trotsky's "Fourth International" and other far lefts, however it has moved away from those origins in recent years.

What happens now that Passos Coelho does not have a majority any more? The Socialists, Communists and Left Bloc don't have a recent history of working together. Both the Communists and the Left Bloc express skepticism as to Portugal's continuation in the Euro currency group and other European Union institutions, but the Socialists are committed to remain.

So far it looks as if Passos Coelho will continue as prime minister, and this will be clinched if the Socialist Party ultimately decides to join in a coalition with him. But this is a risk for the Socialists as they will be blamed all the more for continuing austerity. They will have to bear in mind the fate of the similar PASOK party in Greece, which joined the right in a coalition and as a result has been reduced to marginality.

The General Secretary of the Communist Party, Jeronimo de Sousa stated that his party would vote in parliament against the continuation of the present government and called on the Socialist Party to do likewise.

Meanwhile, Catarina Martins, head of the Left Bloc, guaranteed to their supporters that her party would not lend itself to any arrangement that would allow the right wing government to continue in power or implement more austerity policies.

If Passos Coelho cannot put together a viable parliamentary coalition or finds it impossible to govern, another election will have to happen after a constitutionally required minimum period of six months.

Photo: Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho picks up his ballot to vote. | AP