Wednesday, May 07, 2003
-The Real Casualty Rate from America’s Iraq Wars
by Chalmers Johnson
Most young Americans who enlist in our all-volunteer armed forces—roughly four out of five—specifically choose non-combat jobs, becoming computer technicians, personnel managers, shipping clerks, truck mechanics, weather forecasters, intelligence analysts, cooks, or forklift drivers, among the many other duties that carry a low risk of contact with an enemy. They often enlist because they have failed to find similar work in the civilian economy and thus take refuge in the military’s long-established system of state socialism—steady paychecks, decent housing, medical and dental benefits, job training, and the possibility of a college education. The mother of one such recruit recently commented on her 19-year-old daughter, who will soon become an Army intelligence analyst. She was proud but also cynical: “Wealthy people don’t go into the military or take risks because why should they? They already got everything handed to them.”
These recruits do not expect to be shot at. Thus it was a shock to the rank-and-file last month when Iraqi guns opened up on an Army supply convoy, killing eight and taking another six prisoner, including supply clerk Jessica Lynch of Palestine, West Virginia. The Army’s response has been, “You don’t have to be in combat arms [branches of the military] to close with and kill the enemy.” But what the Pentagon is not saying to the Private Lynches and their families is that they stand a very good chance of dying or being catastrophically disabled precisely because they chose the U.S. military as a route of social mobility.
There are serious unintended consequences to our most recent “no contact” or “painless dentistry” wars that contradict the Pentagon’s claims of low casualties. The most important is the malady that goes by the name “Gulf War Syndrome,” a potentially deadly medical disorder that first appeared among combat veterans of the 1990-1991 Gulf War. Just as the effects of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War were first explained away by the Pentagon as “post-traumatic stress disorder,” “combat fatigue,” or “shell shock,” so the Bush administration is now playing down the potential toxic side effects of the ammunition now being widely used by its armed forces. The implications are devastating, not just for America’s adversaries, or civilians caught in their country-turned-battlefield, but for American forces themselves (and even possibly their future offspring).
The first Iraq War produced four classes of casualties—killed in action, wounded in action, killed in accidents (including “friendly fire"), and injuries and illnesses that appeared only after the end of hostilities. During 1990 and 1991, some 696,778 individuals served in the Persian Gulf as elements of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Of these 148 were killed in battle, 467 were wounded in action, and 145 were killed in accidents, producing a total of 760 casualties, quite a low number given the scale of the operations.
However, as of May 2002, the Veterans Administration (VA) reported that an additional 8,306 soldiers had died and 159,705 were injured or ill as a result of service-connected “exposures” suffered during the war. Even more alarmingly, the VA revealed that 206,861 veterans, almost a third of General Schwarzkopf’s entire army, had filed claims for medical care, compensation, and pension benefits based on injuries and illnesses caused by combat in 1991. After reviewing the cases, the agency has classified 168,011 applicants as “disabled veterans.” In light of these deaths and disabilities, the casualty rate for the first Gulf War is actually a staggering 29.3%.
Dr. Doug Rokke, a former Army colonel and professor of environmental science at Jacksonville University, was in charge of the military’s environmental clean-up following the first Gulf War. The Pentagon has since sacked him for criticizing NATO commanders for not adequately protecting their troops in areas where DU ammunition was used, such as Kosovo in 1999. Dr. Rokke notes that many thousands of American troops have been based in and around Kuwait since 1990, and according to his calculations, between August 1990 and May 2002, a total of 262,586 soldiers became “disabled veterans” and 10,617 have died. His numbers produce a casualty rate for the whole decade of 30.8%.
A significant probable factor in these deaths and disabilities is depleted uranium (DU) ammunition, although this is a hotly contested proposition. Some researchers, often paid for by the Pentagon, argue that depleted uranium could not possibly be the cause of these war-related maladies and that a more likely explanation is dust and debris from the blowing up of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons factories in 1991 in the wake of the first Gulf War, or perhaps a “cocktail” of particles from DU ammunition, the destruction of nerve gas bunkers, and polluted air from burning oil fields. But the evidence—including abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and deformities in Iraq and also evidently in the areas of Kosovo where, in 1999, we used depleted-uranium weapons in our air war against the Serbians—points primarily toward DU. Moreover, simply by insisting on using such weaponry, the Pentagon is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that classifies DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction.
DU, or Uranium-238, is a waste product of power-generating nuclear reactors. It is used in projectiles like tank shells and cruise missiles because it is 1.7 times denser than lead, burns as it flies, and penetrates armor easily, but it breaks up and vaporizes on impact --which makes it potentially very deadly. Each shell fired by an American tank includes ten pounds of DU. Such warheads are essentially “dirty bombs,” not very radioactive individually but nonetheless suspected of being capable in quantity of causing serious illnesses and birth defects.
In 1991, U.S. forces fired a staggering 944,000 DU rounds in Kuwait and Iraq. The Pentagon admits that it left behind at a bare minimum 320 metric tons of DU on the battlefield. One study of Gulf War veterans showed that their children had a higher possibility of being born with severe deformities, including missing eyes, blood infections, respiratory problems, and fused fingers. Dr. Rokke fears that because the military relied more heavily on DU munitions in the second Iraq War than in the first, postwar casualties may be even greater. When he sees TV images of unprotected soldiers and Iraqi civilians driving past burning Iraqi trucks destroyed by tank fire or inspecting buildings hit by missiles, he suspects that they are being poisoned by DU.
Young Americans being seduced into the armed forces these days are quite literally making themselves into “cannon fodder,” even if they have been able to secure non-combat jobs. Before we begin to celebrate how few American casualties there were in the brief Iraq war, we might pause to consider the future. The numbers of Americans killed and maimed from Gulf War II are only beginning to be toted up. The full count will not be known for at least a decade. The fact that the U.S. high command continues to rely on such weaponry for warfare is precisely why the world needs an International Criminal Court and why the United States should be liable under its jurisdiction. Because of its potential dangers and because the alarm has been raised (even if the Pentagon refuses to acknowledge this), the use of DU ammunition should already be considered a war crime one that may also destroy the user in a painfully crippling way.
Sources:
David Wood, “Shaky Economy Alters Equations of Risk in Today’s Military,” San Diego Union-Tribune, April 27, 2003; Doug Rokke, “Gulf War Casualties,” September 30, 2002, on line at
Chalmers Johnson is author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire and, forthcoming, The Sorrows of Empire: How the Americans Lost Their Country.
Copyright Chalmers Johnson
[This article first appeared on http://www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture.]
-South Korea and Human Rights in North Korea
by Kwon Hyok-chol, May 06, 2003
Originally published in the April 24, 2003 issue of Hankyereh 21.
[ZNet Editor’s Note: On April 16, the U.N. Commission of Human Rights adopted a censure against North Korea by a vote of 28 to 10, with 14 abstentions. Among the 14 absentees was South Korea. The government’s official explanation was that the South does not want to further alienate the North from the international community. While they don’t want to line up with the EU and the US, which lambasted the North over human rights at the U.N. session while letting Russia and China slip on the issue, much of South Korean civil society is increasingly frustrated with the lack of a comfortable position regarding the poor human rights situation in the northern half of the peninsula. In a carefully worded article, Kwon Hyok-chol insists that the time has come for Korean civil society to take a stand. By Kap Su Seol ]
In Greek mythology, Pandora’s box is a prolific source of woes that is better to remain sealed. As Pandora’s box is to mythology, human rights in North Korea are to South Korean civil society.
Civil society groups admit that the human rights situation in North Korea is a problem. A human rights activist said on condition of anonymity, “Seen in universally accepted terms, the human rights condition in the North is a big mess.” “We will probably have to take issue with the inadequate level of judiciary independence in the North, and its legal system, which punishes family members of criminals,” he continued, “while we admit such exemplary institutions as free medical care and free education exist side by side.”
However, they shun publicly raising the issue of North Korean human rights. That’s because the cold war dichotomy of “either pro-North or anti-North” is still alive and kicking in this country. Making an issue of the North’s human rights tends to translate into an attempt to cover up the South’s own social contradictions, while pointing to social ills in the South tends to end in an unintended invitation to red-baiting. Political expediency, driven by Cold War rationale, besets the flow of rational debate about North Korea’s human rights.
Most civil society groups are still stalled in the stage of sorting out how to see the issue. Members of what claims to be progressive groups shy away from commenting on North Korean human rights, citing reasons such as “there is little objective information available,” “taking a position about it won’t help North-South reconciliation,” or “it can be exploited by far-right conservatives.”
The dilemma is manifest even within the National Human Rights Commission, a government human rights watchdog. Chang-kuk Kim, its president, said on April 17, “I know well about the human rights situation in North Korea through human rights reports by the U.S. state department and information from North Korean defectors.” “This is a very sensitive issue,” Mr. Kim added and then, “Because there has been little debate about it within the commission, I found it very awkward to respond to the inquiries asked of me at a legislation-judiciary committee session of the National Assembly.” He added, “The commission has yet to consider taking an official position regarding North Korean human rights.”
The issue of human rights in North Korea is a compressed mass of contradictions of world history. Within the debate, universality and particularity, the two philosophical notions, collide: nationalism and cosmopolitanism confront each other; opposing analyses of North Korea emerge; the Cold War ideological struggle continues; and the rivalry between political factions in the South intensifies as they use policy toward the North as a sub-variable in the South’s political equation.
While all this has brought it to a virtual stalemate at home, the debate about human rights in North Korea rages on abroad.
With a resolution adopted at the U.N. Commission of Human Rights on April 16 calling for the improvement of human rights in the North, more intense international pressure will likely be brought upon the country. The human rights situation in the North will be placed under scrutiny by the Office of U.N. Human Rights Commissioner and other international rights agencies. And it will be automatically presented as a priority agenda item at the next session of the commission.
The U.N. commission’s resolution, coupled with recent moves to take the North Korean nuclear issue to the U.N. Security Council, points to a possibility that the international community will give the same weight to the security and human rights issues regarding the North. In line with this, there have been postures that the trilateral talks of the U.S., China and North Korea should deal with human rights concerns.
In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Carl Gershman, president of National Endowment for Democracy, said, “While multilateral talks may follow, it would be a mistake if they were to focus exclusively on settling the nuclear issue. The security crisis can never be resolved in any lasting way without addressing the heart of the problem: the terrible crimes the North Korean regime is committing against its own people.” He continued, “Multilateral talks offer an unprecedented opportunity to place the issue of human rights in North Korea on the international agenda.”
Political posturing to lump human rights in North Korea and its weapons of mass destruction into a single package can also be seen in President Bush’s Jan. 28 State of the Union Address, in which he said, “On the Korean peninsula, an oppressive regime rules a people living in fear and starvation.…We now know that the regime was deceiving the world and developing those weapons all along.”
In the weeks leading up to the Beijing trilateral talks, the U.S., resorting to harsh language, stepped up criticism of the North over human rights. Jeane Kirkpatrick, head of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, said on April 1 in a statement, “It is hard to imagine the possibility of a country whose citizens endure a worse or more pervasive abuse of every human right. This aspect coupled with the dire famine conditions afflicting North Korea, makes it truly a Hell on earth.” She demanded the U.N. commission confront Pyongyang over what she called an abominable rights record.
In a 2002 annual human rights report published on March 31, the state department said: “There [in North Korea] continued to be reports of extrajudicial killings and disappearances. Citizens were detained arbitrarily, and many were held as political prisoners.”
Pyongyang denounces the criticisms as interference in domestic politics, insisting on adherence to its own principals of human rights. And it makes attempts on its own to come clean of the accusations.
In a 1998 revision of the criminal law, the government reduced the number of charges carrying the death penalty to 5 from 33. It increased the minimum age in its death-penalty statute to 18 from 17. In the reformed constitution of 1995, the right to freedom to residence and movement was stipulated. In 2001, the Pyongyang government turned in a report to the U.N. commission, the first such submission by the North in 16 years, under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This represents an effort by North Korea to take part in the international human rights system.
Concerning the debate itself, not only the human rights situation, but also human rights as a universal value remain the point of contention. The belief that all humans are entitled to universal rights is sometimes naïve to the point that despite its moral appeal, it is susceptible to categorical, historical, or political critique.
The French jurist Karel Vasak coined three generations of human rights. The first generation of civil and political rights includes the right to liberty freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; freedom of opinion and expression; freedom of peaceful assembly and association. The second generation of economic, social, and cultural rights consists of the right to work, the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of self and family, and the right to education. The third generation of solidarity rights includes the right to political, economic, social, and cultural self-determination, and the right to economic and social development.
While Europe and the U.S. focus on the first generation that conceives human rights in passive terms, developing and socialist countries consider the second and third generations more essential. There is tension inherent to human rights debate over the definition of their notion, and it offers the point of contention in the issue of not only North Korean but also Chinese human rights.
Since the Tiananmen incident of 1989, the US has attempted to put China on the agenda of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, and China has worked hard to stop it. In a report about successful Chinese diplomatic efforts to stop the U.N. Human Rights Commission to censure the country, the international rights group Human Rights Watch concluded that Western countries’ attitudes toward human rights in China were merely hypocritical as Germany and France succumbed to the economic lures China offered.
In his book International Human Rights, Jack Donnelly, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the University of Denver, said the U.S. subordinated human rights to the Cold War until 1989. He argued that the U.S. confused the pursuit of freedom and human rights with anticommunism. Into the 1990s, the U.S. spread and deepened its interest in international human rights concerns
What is the backdrop against the US frequently tilting at the issue of North Korean human rights? Officially, Washington would say that human rights are universal values that should be protected anytime and anywhere, and that the situation in the North is more than terrible. But this one-size-fits-all answer is not convincing. Rather, it makes more sense that the U.S. is attempting to gain the upper hand in the nuclear showdown with North Korea, and that it is attempting to press the North with human rights issues.
Speculation has risen that the U.S. would go on to further ratchet up pressure on North Korea after its overwhelming victory in Iraq. “It is possible that the Bush administration raises the issue of North Korean human rights situation in a preemptive maneuver to use it as a card in the negotiation with the North,” one government official opined on condition of anonymity.
“One needs to carefully examine a series of remarks the U.S. has made in terms of an extension of the logic that it has liberated Iraq,” Lee Sang Hyun, researcher at the Sejong Institute, said at a conference. “It appears that the U.S. is gradually increasing pressure to create an international mood for a regime change in the North.”
Indeed, some rights advocates in the South are raising concerns that the U.S. could use human rights as an instrument to threaten peace on the Korean peninsula. The uneasiness was epitomized in a statement by Human Rights Sarangbang, a prominent rights organization, regarding the U.N, censure against the North: “It raises grave concerns that the U.N. Human Rights Commission adopted a resolution that the U.S. could use as a pretext to invade North Korea at a time when it has illegitimately occupied Iraq and when the threats of war clouds the Korean peninsula.” It went on to say, “It does not appear impossible that the U.S., which has been pressing the North by branding it as an axis of evil, will use the resolution to start war on the peninsula….As confirmed in the war in Iraq, it is not impossible that the U.S. will acclaim itself as the liberator again and turn the peninsula into a bloody theater of war.”
Oh Chang-ik, director of Citizens’ Solidarity for Human Rights, a right group, said, “While we have to see the situation of human rights in North Korea as it is, this issue has to date been used politically.” “Doesn’t it mean that you should calmly look at human rights in the North as they are if you think of the issue as something of Pandora’s box?” he asked. Mr. Oh concluded: “You must first eat and make a living before you exercise civil and political rights and enjoy cultural rights. It is preposterous for [the U.S.] to press the North over human rights after its economic sanctions wrought damage on the basic condition of livelihood [in the North].”
Some political forces are criticized for using North Korean human rights to advance their political interest. In a statement it released on April 17 about the government’s abstention to the vote on the North Korea censure at the U.N. rights commission, the conservative Grand National Party said, “the government’s abstention was excessively irresponsible and cowardly.” On April 19, regarding press reports that the North is in the process of reprocessing plutonium rods, the party said: “The government must stop whatsoever aid to the North until it takes a clear measure to respect the South as its dialogue counterpart.”
In related development, Good Friends Center for Peace, Human Rights and Refugees, a refugee advocacy group, said in a position statement of April 18 that the right to subsistence and human rights should be addressed simultaneously in the North. It said: “what matters most to those starving and sick is survival itself. Any efforts to improve human rights won’t be felt through the country without addressing food shortages.”
As for political exploitation of the issue of North Korean human rights, Benjamin Yoon, representative of Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights quipped, “The far-right has to date capitalized on the issue excessively.” He added, “It was difficult to get a clear grasp of the human rights situation in the North in the early 1990s. Beginning the mid-1990s, the testimonies by close to 4,000 North Korean defectors almost corroborated the findings by international agencies and civic groups.” Mr. Yoon concluded, “Political ideology aside, you must not look the other way when the truth about North Korean human rights has begun to surface.”
Han Ki-hong, the Network for North Korean Human Rights and Democracy said, “To see human rights and politics as a single entity is far-fetched, to separate human rights from politics is just naïve.” “Some asked me what the point is in raising an issue of North Korean human rights,” he continued. “When it became an international issue, it prompted improvements in the North. Authorities reduced the number of public executions and softened the punishment for those who defect the country for economic reasons.”
As far as the issue of North Korean human rights goes, South Korean progressives have been avoiding it, conservatives have been taking advantage of it, and the North government has dismissed it. All in all, this put the two Koreas, the two first parties, on the sidelines in the current international debate about North Korean human rights.
Just as the idea of a preemptive strike on North Korean nuclear facilities floats in the White House in Washington, skirting the South Korean government’s control, it is increasingly likely that the issue of North Korean human rights will serve a factor in U.S. global strategy, regardless of the will of the two Koreas. And this is really why South Korean civil-society groups and political forces need to put their bias aside and take the bull by the horn to address the issue head-on.
Mr. Kown, Hyok-chol is staff writer at Hankyoreh 21, an independent weekly news magazine in South Korea.
- Licensed to Kill, Inc. May 06, 2003
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman (SUPPORT ZNET: http://zmag.org)
==================================
ZNet Commentary
There is a new tobacco company in town, and it aims to teach a lesson or two.
The company: Licensed to Kill, Inc.
Licensed to Kill, Inc. is incorporated in the state of Virginia, for the explicit purpose of engaging “in any business permitted by the Commonwealth of Virginia and not required to be stated herein including, but not limited to, the manufacture and marketing of tobacco products in a way that each year kills over 400,000 Americans and 4.5 million other persons worldwide.” (You can view the articles of incorporation at:
.)
“We’re not like other tobacco companies that try to obscure what their business is about,” says the company’s short introduction, published on its website ."If you market cigarettes, you market death. It’s that simple. In a country which effectively allows corporations to be formed without regard to their purpose, corporations are allowed to kill people to make money. Addiction to cigarettes may be lethal, but profiting from spreading death is perfectly legal.”
Describing its unique identity, the company states, ‘The name ‘Licensed to Kill’ is truly a tobacco name—a name associated with leadership in corporate killing in that industry in the United States and around the world. We do not own any companies that are not tobacco-based, and we do not feel a need to purchase any food subsidiaries to obscure the fact that our prime source of profit is indeed cigarettes. By taking such a name, Licensed to Kill, Inc clearly identifies what it is: a company that has been given the explicit permission by the state to manufacture and market tobacco products in a way that each year kills over 400,000 Americans and 4.5 million other persons worldwide. In short, a company that profits off of some of the world’s most deadly brands.”
“Some have speculated that the choice of the name ‘Licensed to Kill’ is perhaps a tad bit too truthful. It isn’t. Licensed to Kill, Inc. takes pride in owning what we believe to be the premier tobacco company in the world. Going forward, our identity will give stakeholders clarity about the purpose of our company.”
Taking a jab at Philip Morris, which has renamed its holding company Altria, Licensed to Kill, Inc. says, “We don’t hide what our business is really about behind an altruistic-sounding name.”
Why was such a company created?
Licensed to Kill, Inc. is the inspiration of Robert Hinkley, a former corporate lawyer now turned activist, and is a project of Essential Action.
It was formed to make a point both about corporations generally, and the tobacco industry in particular.
States once exercised a modicum of control—and retain the power to exercise real control—over the incorporation, or corporate chartering process. Corporations are creatures of the state. States have the authority, through their chartering process and through corporations law, to establish rules setting boundaries on corporate conduct and requiring certain kinds of corporate activity.
Over the years, however, states have effectively forfeited these powers, though they remain dormant and could be reasserted.
Underlying the creation of Licensed to Kill, Inc. was this question:
Have states made the incorporation process so pro forma that they would grant a charter to a company that set out as its purpose the killing of millions of people a year?
Now we know the answer: Yes.
The idea of highlighting such an extreme example—that a literal parody could gain a charter—is to suggest how out of control the chartering process has become, and to suggest that it is time to reimpose controls.
Of course, although it is a parody, Licensed to Kill, Inc.’s business plan differs from the actual business plans of existing tobacco companies in only one notable respect: Its willingness to acknowledge the deadly, devastating impacts of the industry’s marketing practices, product manipulation, manipulation and misrepresentation of science, political influence buying, and fundamental way of doing business.
Nearly 5 million people a year worldwide are now dying from tobacco-related disease, thanks in considerable part to the way the industry chooses to do business.
A choice the companies have, because the states fail to impose basic controls on the companies they authorize to do business.
The bottom line message conveyed by License to Kill, Inc.: No one—and certainly no corporation—should have a license to kill. And any system that is willing to grant one is fundamentally flawed, and should be scrapped.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, http://www.multinationalmonitor.org They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators.org)
(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
This article is posted at: http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2003/000149.html
-Fake Photos of Iraqis Welcoming Bush and Blair
Photo manipulation is becoming an art. However, the photo below depicting a large pro-US crowd in Iraq took no art at all. Instead, it is a ham-fisted doctored photograph reminiscent of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s famous cropped photo of the 1950s, Alexander Haig’s claim that a 1981 photo showed the Sandinistas burning bodies of the contras in Nicaragua (in actuality, that lie was later exposed when the full photo showed that it was of the International Red Cross burning diseased corpses in Africa), the infamous “concentration camp” photo in Bosnia (It was not a concentration camp; the men in the photo were posed for the picture, and the photographer had taken it through the one strand of barbed wire that extended along one side of an outhouse), or Madelyn Allbright’s and Colin Powell’s numerous attempts to hoodwink the United Nations with satellite photos that showed nothing of what they claimed.
So, my question is: Do they really expect us to believe their photos, when, with a little more skill they could concoct more believable and much harder to expose photographs? So why don’t they do that? Are they doing some mass psychological experiment on us trying to ascertain just how much we will be willing to accept no matter how improbable?
Check it out for yourself by clicking on the link, below.
- Mitchel Cohen
http://www.thememoryhole.org/media/evening-standard-crowd.htm
-The End of Arms Control and the Normalization of War
“What Colin Powell Showed Us: The End of Arms Control and the Normalization of War”
by Carl Conetta. PDA Briefing Report #14, 05 May 2003 (.pdf file) --
http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/0305br14.pdf
An appreciation of the value and limits of arms control is necessary in order to understand how debasing the standards of proof leads ultimately to the demise of diplomacy and the unnecessary resort to war.
“Reconstructing Iraq: Costs and Possible Income Sources” by Carl Conetta. PDA Briefing Memo #28, 25 April 2003 (.pdf file). --
http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/0305BM28.pdf
A review of accounts reveals a severe shortage of reconstruction funds
Friday, May 02, 2003
What sometimes should be said
What sometimes should be said, before it is too late…
The comparisons below are eerily familiar…
Found these on the Web;
DOES THIS LOOK FAMILIAR? Nazism was a form of government that restricted personal freedom but permitted private ownership of property. It called for aggressive nationalism, militarism and expansion of Germany’s spheres of control through military conquest. The Nazis glorified Germany and its people, claiming that other nationalities were inferior. It promised to build a harmonious, orderly and prosperous society for the Germans.
The Hitler of the 21st Century is in the White House, his name is G.W.Bush and he is the American president. Welcome to the 1932 revival festival, where the Nazis are called Neo-Cons, but they’re still blaming odd-looking middle-eastern people for all the ills of the world. They say, “Shock and Awe” but in English this time. They talk of Lightning War (Blitzkrieg) also in English. They have an office of Homeland Security just like Nazi Germany did. They have corporate deals just like the Nazis too. Like Nazi Germany the USA used to be a democracy, but it’s all “let’s pretend” from now on. It’s early days; only 2,000 people have been DISAPPEARED so far. Be careful what you say on the phone, be careful of your associates, be careful who you talk to, be careful who you donate to, be careful of what you say...anywhere.
LET US PRAY THAT THESE COMPARISONS DON’T BECOME ANY MORE SIMILIAR.
-Vandana Shiva: Trade First is Suicidal for Farmers AND Food Security
ZNet Commentary
The Crisis Of Potato Growers In U. P. April 24, 2003
By Vandana Shiva
THE HARVEST OF TRADE LIBERALISATION POLICIES
By Dr. Vandana Shiva
Following Andhra Pradesh and Punjab, agricultural debts and farmers suicides are now knocking on the doors of U.P. especially potato rowers. While the farmers are spending Rs. 255/Quintal on production, potatoes are being sold for Rs. 40/Quintal, leaving farmers at a loss of Rs. 200 for every quintal produced. Per hectare the costs of production are between Rs. 55,000/ha to Rs. 65,000/ha, of which Rs. 40,000 is the cost of seed alone.
That the independent farmer is struggling to survive against immeasurably difficult odds is borne out by the number of suicides by farmers throughout the country. By 2000, more than 20,000 farmers from all over the country had fallen victim to the high costs of production, spurious seed, crop loss, falling farm prices, and rising debt.
The crisis for potato growers, like the crisis for producers of tomatoes, cotton and oil seeds, and other crops is directly related to World Bank and W.T.O. driven trade liberalisation policies, of which the new Agricultural policies is a direct outcome.
The policies of globalisation and trade liberalisation have created the farm crisis in general and the potato crisis in particular at 3 levels.
1. A shift from “food first” to “trade first” and “farmer first” to “corporation first” policies.
2. A shift from diversity and multifunctionality of agriculture to monocultures and standardisation, chemical and capital intensification of production, and deregulation of the input sector, especially seeds leading to rising costs of production.
3. Deregulation of markets and withdrawal of state from effective price regulation leading to collapse in prices of farm commodities.
1. From farmer first to Corporation first
The new agriculture policies are based on withdrawing support to farmers, and crating new subsidies for agro-processing industry and agribusiness. In a debate on the potato crisis, the U.P. Agriculture Minister referred to subsidies given for cold storage and transport. These subsidies do not go to farmers and producers. They go to traders and corporations. Pepsico entry in Punjab was the first example of this trade first policy.
When the market rate of tomatoes was Rs. 2.00 per kg., Pepsico was paying farmers only Rs. 0.80 to 0.50 per kg, but collecting ten times that amount as a transport subsidy from government. Cold storage owners in U.P. have received Rs. 50 crore in subsidies, but this is not a subsidy to farmers. A farmer pays the cold storage owner Rs. 120/sack for storage. Cold storage owners are hiking charges to exploit the crisis. With 1 crore 3 lakh metric tonnes of potato production in U.P., this is a massive drain of financial resources from indebted farmers to traders, from producers to business and industry.
The annual budgets since liberalization having been adding to the subsidies for the corporate sector -tax holidays for building silos and cold storages, incentives for exporting, subsidized transportation to the ports of the trader’s choice. The recently announced 5-year export policy of the government has allocated Rs. 100 crores towards aided corporations transport grain from FIC to the ports. In addition, public money is used to take land away from farmers to build transportation facilities for agri-business to help them transport the grain even faster.
The experience of the 2001wheat export exposes the government’s lack of commitment to its people. As against an economic cost of Rs 8300 per tonne to the FCI and an open market price of Rs. 7,000 per tonne, India was offered a price of Rs. 4,300 per tonne in international open market in May 2001.
Over and above selling the wheat at the BPL rates, the government agreed to bear the freight charge from Rajpura to Jamnagar port in Guarat and pay a commission to Cargill. Thus, wheat whose cost to the government included the MSP (Rs. 580 of 2000) as well as the commission, market charges, levies and cess paid by FCI, increasing the real cost by another Rs. 70 a quintal, was sold at less than Rs 420 a quintal, giving the corporation a subsidy of Rs. 130 a quintal.
In fact, since 2000, Cargill has emerged as the biggest buyer of subsidised Indian wheat for exports.
2. Monocultures and Standardisation
The impact of the new agriculture policy has been to promote a shift from food grains to vegetables and perishable commodities. While grains can be stored and consumed locally, potatoes and tomatoes must be sold immediately. A vegetable centred policy thus decreases food security and increases farmers vulnerability to the market. While this promotes monocultures of perishable commodities, the word used for these monocultures is “diversification” in typical globalisation doublespeak.
Further, the State Minister for Agriculture, Hukam Singh deo Yadav, and the U.P. Agriculture Minister, Hukum Singh, both cited the variability of size and the standardisation of the agro-processing industry as a reason for not procuring potatoes from farmers in spite of the distress. Size does not matter for the Indian kitchen. Our “Aaloo ki sabzi” and “Aaloo paratha” do not need the Russet Burbank that McDonald needs for its French fries (renamed “Freedom Fries” during the Iraq war because of France’s non-cooperation with the U.S.).
The McDonald corporation needed the Russet Burbank because of its size. For example 40% of all McDonald fries must be two to three inches long, another 40% must be over three inches; and the remaining 20% can be under two inches - and the Russet Burbank fits perfectly. The economic forces of food processing push cultivation to a single crop yielding uniformity, threatening the ecological stability of agriculture more than it has been in the past.
Seed monopolies and genetic uniformity go hand in hand. Potatoes for processing are being introduced in the name of ‘diversificaiton’: - but given the experience o potato cultivation in the US from where Pepsico technology is being transferred, it will lead to genetic uniformity and high vulnerability. Today in the US only 12 varieties of the 2,000 species of potato are cultivated. 40% of all potato cultivation is of a single variety - the Russet Burbank. In 1970, only 28% of America’s total potato acreage was planted with this variety. Acres and acres of the same kid of potato is ecologically very vulnerable as the Irish potato famine reminds us.
The introduction of uniformity is justified as a trade-off for raising yields of horticultural crops miraculously. Pepsi’s promotion literature stated that ‘yields of horticultural produce in India are substantially lower than international standards’. The project proposal for Pepsi Food argued that ‘in Mexico, Pepsi’s subsidiary, Sabritas launched a seed programme that increase potato yields by 58% - from 19 to 30 tonnes per hectare in three years.’
In India, comparable yields have been achieved by farmers and agricultural scientists. Potato yields of more than 40 tonnes per hectare have been realised during field trials in Jalandhar by the Central Potato Research Institute. Yields averaging about 50-60 tonnes per hectare are also achieved by Gujarat farmers, who grow their potatoes on river beds in Banaskantha district. Just as in the first Green Revolution, the existence of indigenous high yielding varieties of rice was denied to justify the introduction of high response varieties, costly potato seeds are being introduced under “crop diversification”, locking farmers into dependency and debt.
This link of monocultures and monopolies over seed explains the high cost of production under trade led agriculture policies.
3. Price Regulation
While the government does keep going through the gimmicks of announcing procurement prices and procurement centres, government intervention in price regulation and procurement has all out disappeared under globalization. The government announced Rs. 195/quintal as the procurement price of potatoes, and opening of 8 centres for procurement.
However, no government procurement is being done to support farmers and ensure a fair price. Prices have therefore fallen to Rs. 40-100/quintal, a bonanza for the agro-processing industry which makes even more profits from chips, but a disaster for the grower who is being pushed to suicides in despair. With potatoes at Rs. 0.40 a kg, the agro-processing industry is paying less than Rs. 0.08 to farmers for chips they sell at Rs. 10.00 for 200 gms. For 1,31,00,000 metric tonnes of potatoes this amounts to a transfer of Rs. 20 billion from impoverished peasants of U.P. to global MNCs such as Pepsi and McDonald.
And the plight of potato farmers in Punjab is no different. As the Tribune reports,
Forced to grow potato in the past few years under crop diversification agriculture programme, the farmers have been finding it difficult to earn enough by selling the produce to meet the cost of inputs.
After incurring heavy losses for growing potato, hundreds of farmers have decided to sell their holding to meet liabilities of loans of banks and commission agents.
Mr. Chotta Singh (Name changed) of Gill Kalan village of this district said, “I grew potato in 20 acres, 10 acres owned by me and 10 acres taken on lease. I spent Rs. 12,000 a acre on potato cultivation and today if I sell my entire produce at the prevailing price of Rs. 100 a quintal, I will incur loss of Rs. 1 lakh.” He added that to meet part of his loan liability of Rs. 11 lakh, he had disposed of one acre.
Mr. Shawinder Singh, another farmer pointed out that he took to potato farming hoping that he would replay his entire loan of Rs. 3 lakh in two to three years as potato was considered a “paying crop”. But now he found that his debt had crossed Rs. 5 lakh because he failed to fetch remunerative price and he had to sell it a throw-away price to get cash to meet routine liabilities. ("Traders syndicate exploits farmers”, Chander Prakash, Tribune, 3 Apr 03)
And the plight of potato farmers in U.P. is the same as the plight of wheat and rice farmers in Punjab and Haryana and soya farmers in M.P., cotton and groundnut farmers in A.P.
In October 2000, almost half the 10 lakh tonnes of paddy that arrived at Haryana mandis was sold to private traders because of declining state procurement. Of this, 47% was sold at almost 14% below MSP rates of Rs. 510 for common paddy. Thee were also reports of rice being sold to millers and private procurers at Rs. 400.
In Punjab, farmers, who had already sold their jewelry and livestock to raise money for paddy inputs, were borrowing from commission agents and other moneylenders in order to meet their basic food and shelter needs while waiting for their paddy to be sold at rates far below the MSP. By October 11, the first suicide story came in; Avtar Singh of Kakra village in Samana District committed suicide when he could not sell his paddy at a low or Rs. 400 for more than a week.
In March 2001, Punjab became the first state to admit that fact that farmers, unable to clear their debts, have started committing suicide.
The dysfunctionality of agriculture under globalisation is leading to farmers paying with their very lives. However, this dysfunctionality is beneficial to agri-business which is harvesting the artificially accumulated stocks and artificially manipulated collapse of domestic markets to make super profits.
This policy of “trade first” is suicidal not just for farmers, but for the food security of the country as a whole.
--From ZNet: Support the Znet Sustainer Program
http://zmag.org
-Henmi Yo-The Iraq war deeply invades our souls
Henmi Yo- a former reporter for the Kyodo News Service, is a widely acclaimed writer. Henmi is one of many Japanese voices that have protested the Koizumi government’s decision to provide supply and other support for U.S. forces in Iraq. His comment on the Iraq War and Japan’s policy options appeared in the Asahi Shimbun on March 28, 2003.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=44&ItemID=3454
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For its sheer brutality, the scene that has emerged before us has hurled the world into what I might call a “new Dark Ages.” Wielding high-tech weapons, a barbarian “empire” is set to dominate the world with absolute violence. This empire’s intentions are “medieval.”
The only thing that is new is the use of state-of-the-art weapons systems. People are being killed with certainty—and in utter absurdity.
This almost epochal act of insane recklessness, led by American and British forces, is not only brutalizing the Iraqi people and laying their land to waste. It is also invading our souls deeply, even though we are far away from the exploding bombs.
I say this because although this war is completely unethical, we are helpless to stop it. All we can do is imagine, in grief and rage, how the bombs must be tearing up human bodies and cremating many people alive.
Our souls, too, are being blitzed by American and British bombs and trampled upon by American and British military boots. This war of invasion against Iraq was launched despite overwhelming global opposition. Should this invasion remain justified, it will not only be a tragedy for the Iraqi people, but will also deal a grievous blow to human morality. It could spell a crushing defeat of human conscience around the world.
The heart of the issue is not that the United States and Britain launched this campaign without the support of the United Nations Security Council. Even had the Security Council given its unanimous blessing, there would have been no moral justification whatsoever for this war.
No evidence turned up to substantiate suspicions that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, nor has there been any definitive proof that would tie Iraq to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and al-Qaida. Debilitated by its defeat in the Persian Gulf War and the ensuing sanctions, Iraq was in no shape to pose any real, military threat to America and Britain.
The Saddam Hussein regime submitted to the humiliating U.N. inspections of the presidential palace, and agreed to scrap its missiles. Despite Saddam’s aggressive words of defiance against Washington, it is said that his unspoken messages verged on a cry for mercy.
More to the point, it was none other than the Iraqi people who were desperately begging for peace and their personal safety. But instead of heeding their plea and offering them a chance of dialogue, the United States and Britain responded by dropping bombs on them.
There is no question that Saddam is a true tyrant.
But America and Britain have proven just as tyrannical. Their action must be remembered forever as a war crime and duly tried.
The world is spending around $800 billion (96 trillion yen) on defense, and America’s defense budget accounts for more than 40 percent of the world total. This mightiest militarist empire in human history owns as many as 8,000 serviceable nuclear warheads, and continues to develop new weapons of mass destruction, such as the MOAB (massive ordnance air burst) bombs that are comparable to strategic nuclear weapons in their destructive power.
At the core of the George W. Bush administration is a group of so-called neo-conservatives, who are effectively in control of this blatantly bellicose superpower that monopolizes violence in the world and is now set to force its own “standards” on the international community in disregard of the United Nations and international agreements. Relying on their infinitely sophisticated, electronically controlled weapons and war mechanism, these neo-conservatives have come to possess a cyber system that shields scenes of actual genocide from the media-a means by which to exercise absolute violence as never before in human history.
The thinking of these White House neo-conservatives is that America alone has the right to invade other nations in the name of “pre-emptive attack” and assassinate the leaders of other nations. Such thinking could not be more remote from anything embraced by a modern nation. On the contrary, it is morbidly old and despotic—the values of barbarians who have no patience for dialogue.
Our world is about to fall under the control of “technologically advanced barbarians,” so to speak.
But what is most abhorrent is that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi did not even hesitate to support this empire’s absolute violence. And in defending his decision, Koizumi hinted at linking Iraq to another “threat” being posed by North Korea. This must mean Koizumi has accepted this potential scenario of terror—that after the Iraqi war, the empire may unleash its absolute violence on North Korea, using Japan as the campaign base.
Does Koizumi intend to pass the so-called national emergency bills into law by then, so that Japan will be able to better support the empire’s new war of invasion?
While protesting the Iraqi war, must we also imagine and brace ourselves for a hell in which we may find ourselves in the near future for the North Korean issue?
We must not let our eyes be fooled by war pictures provided by the U.S. military. We must use our imagination to picture the mutilated bodies of numerous innocent people. No matter how skillfully the military may “sanitize” this war, there is no such thing ever as a clean war without any bloodshed.
Protesting the present war in distant Iraq is the same thing as protesting the next war that will be fought in our backyard.
from ZNet
ZNet | A Community of People Committed to Social Change
Japan Focus Section
http://www.zmag.org/asiawatch/japan_focus.htm
-Walking through life with your eyes closed: Fighting Alienation
by Robert Jensen
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective (http://www.nowarcollective.com), and author of “Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream.” He can be reached at .
I have lived in the United States all my life, and for personal and political reasons I expect to live out my life here. It is my home.
But after the U.S. attack on Iraq, I feel more alienated from my “homeland” than ever before. Judging from my mail and conversations I have had around the country, many antiwar activists feel the same.
This is a serious problem, not just personally for individuals but for the movement. For those of us trying to oppose the U.S. empire, our primary task is organizing people in the United States to resist these imperial policies. That will be difficult if we feel increasingly alienated, and become more isolated, from “ordinary” Americans.
But that is exactly how I feel—alienated and isolated, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise. Since 9/11, the number of people in my daily life with whom I can talk honestly has dwindled to a handful. I have been less interested in attending routine social gatherings outside of my political circle. I have found myself more frequently communicating over email with like-minded people in other cities rather than chatting with colleagues in the hallway. Instead of looking for ways to expand my social circle, I have let it contract.
None of this is because I’m inherently anti-social; it’s a distinct change since 9/11. I have not been doing any of these things consciously, but instead have been drifting away from ways I used to interact with others because it has become more and more difficult to fit into these “normal” situations. I have struggled much of my adult life with the realization that my values were at odds with most of the people around me, but after 9/11 those awkward gaps began to feel like unbridgeable gulfs.
This is not just because of the celebratory reaction to the recent wars by so many Americans. While it can be difficult to be around people who crow about how the United States “kicked butt” in Iraq, in some ways those interactions are simple; I know how to respond. I have a set of questions I ask to try to get people with that view to reconsider some of their assumptions and to consider the effects of this “victory” on people in other places. I can make an argument about the real reasons behind the war. I can point out the lies of the Bush administration. Unless people start screaming, it’s surprisingly easy to have that kind of discussion in many—though certainly not all—cases.
My real difficulty—and the main cause of my increasing sense of isolation—comes in dealing with people who seem detached, who don’t react at all. There are a lot of people around me (I work at a large university) who seem to be doing their best to avoid the questions of war and empire. In a small number of cases, this may stem from some fundamental amorality, truly not caring. But my sense is that many of the people who are trying to avoid the question have some sort of antiwar leanings—they know there’s something wrong with the way the United States has gone forward in the world since 9/11, and, if not against the wars, they are at least skeptical. But they seem to be walking through life with eyes closed, purposefully.
Those are the people I have the most trouble interacting with. When I raise the issue of war they sometimes attempt to divert the conversation toward less contentious subjects. More often people are willing to let me talk but refuse to engage, or sometimes refuse to even acknowledge what I am saying. There have been times I literally wanted to grab people and shout, “You know these wars are wrong. You know these policies are crazy. Why won’t you help do something about it? Why won’t you at least admit to me that you know?”
While I don’t want to generalize too broadly from my life, I have a sense this experience is not idiosyncratic. And it is crucial to come to terms with, especially at this point in the movement.
Like thousands of others around the country, for the past two years I have put more time and energy into political work than ever before in my life. And because I have been spending so much time organizing, writing, and speaking, I have taken it for granted that I was doing all that I could do. Because I have been working more than ever on a variety of political projects, it didn’t occur to me until recently to evaluate how my alienation was affecting the prospects for that political activity.
Sometimes this problem gets reduced to the charge that middle-class activists simply are elitists who don’t know how to interact with “real” people. That may be true in some cases, but it strikes me as a gross oversimplification and a way to avoid difficult questions. The alienation I am talking about is not so much around class or the politics of lifestyle choices (though I think those questions are important) but about whether one is willing to confront the American ideology in public. Some of my most frustrating experiences have been with other middle-class people. The alienation I have felt comes from living in a country in which one segment of the population is drunk on triumphalism and another is hiding from the pressing issues—and there are people from all classes in each of those categories.
In such an environment, antiwar activists need to come together often, not just for political organizing but for support. We need to engage in internal discussions to sharpen our analysis and rethink strategy. But at the same time I think we need to be careful not to withdraw too much from these other spaces in our lives, even if they feel alien or alienating to us. Whether or not we are actively organizing in those spaces at the moment, it’s important to stay rooted in the larger communities in which we live. The struggle against the U.S. empire will be a long one, and we need to be connected to the people we are trying to organize.
I recommend this fully aware that my own instinct is to want to withdraw into spaces that feel safe. In politics it often is most effective to follow our gut, but there also are time when it’s important to overcome some instincts. I think this is one of those times.
-U.N. Pact Sinks on Issue of Violence Against Women
U.N. Pact Sinks on Issue of Violence Against Women
By Emily Freeburg WeNews correspondent
Women’s E News
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/1304
Run Date: 04/24/03
The U.N. commission on women found itself at a diplomatic impasse for the first time in its history over a document describing what steps nations should take to reduce violence against women and girls.
(WOMENSENEWS)--Violence against women--and what steps nations should take to reduce it--became the issue that led to a first-ever diplomatic failure at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.
Meeting two floors below the Security Council in early March that was also hamstrung over the issues of conflict in Iraq, the women’s commission failed to adopt official language detailing measures to reduce rape and trafficking, promote reproductive health and end impunity for war crimes against women, as well as many other ways to eliminate gender-based violence.
The commission had spent two weeks writing what’s called “Agreed Conclusions” on two themes: women’s participation in and access to the media and the elimination of all forms of violence against women. The conclusions are typically used as models for governments to create policy and as advocacy tools by non-governmental organizations. The document on ending violence against women and girls would have been used by advocates to strengthen legislation to end domestic violence and sexual exploitation and trafficking of women. It would also have been used to educate governments on how to promote and protect women’s human rights.
Consensus on the conclusions came to an end when Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Sudan and the U.S. raised objections. The Iranian delegation objected to a specific paragraph that said governments must not use religion or custom as an excuse for violence against women. But the failure to pass this text was about more than cultural differences.
The idea that religion and custom are not excuses for violence against women is not new language in U.N. documents. The subject was already agreed upon in various U.N. meetings, conferences and documents, including the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action from the Fourth World Conference on Women, the Special Session of the General Assembly in June of 2000, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence against Women. Many governments and non-government organizations participating in the commission agree that to re-negotiate already agreed upon text is to take steps backward.
Also, some governments emphasized that consensus could have been reached if all delegates had demonstrated fairness and respect in their negotiations.
“It’s remarkable to see that after decades of work by feminist activists and 12 years of U.N. conferences to see the ways that women’s human rights are still seen as negotiable,” said Charlotte Bunch, executive director of Rutgers’ Center for Women’s Global Leadership.
Breakdown of Security Council Talks Influences Commission Bunch also says the impact of the fact that the commission met during the same time as the breakdown of the Security Council over Iraq cannot be underestimated. The governments that were responsible for ensuring consensus was reached were preoccupied and angry about their loss of power at the Security Council.
“The Commission on the Status of Women is one of the weakest U.N. bodies in terms of power and, when it confronted problems, the heads of governments were upstairs” at Security Council meetings, Bunch said. The new people at commission, she added, did not “have the authority to come out with new solutions and there was no attention to working out compromises.”
Like many conflicts at the United Nations, the controversy over the religion and custom clause played out in disputes over procedure.
As the appointed hour for adjournment neared, Iran raised the objections. Fernando Coimbra, chair of the meeting and first secretary of the Brazilian Mission, moved to accept the conclusions on violence regardless. The delegations of Pakistan, Sudan, Egypt and the U.S. raised their placards in objection. Ignoring them, Coimbra declared the conclusions adopted. This caused another round of placard waving and gavel banging. Eventually, the meeting was adjourned because it was 7:30 p.m. on a Friday night and the translators had left.
Some advocates present speculate that, if the government delegations themselves had had more experience and authority, they could have asked the translators to stay another two hours and continued to reach consensus. Regardless, when the commission resumed 10 days later for its closing meeting, governments had time to renegotiate if they so chose. Yet, the violence statement still did not pass.
“The disappointment is particularly sharp because we were very close. Essentially an agreement could not be reached by the deadline. There was little willingness by delegations to continue negotiating past that time,” said Carl Fox, social affairs advisor to the U.S. mission.
Governments did reach consensus on the theme of women and media, which asked governments to increasingly involve women in the information and communication technology world and allocate resources to ensure that women and girls, especially in developing countries, have access to new information technologies. The conclusions also require that the recommendations from the commission regarding women and media be incorporated in December’s World Summit on Information Society in Geneva.
“The important thing is that advocates at the national level know that the Commission on the Status of Women exists,” said Muthoni Wanyeki, from Kenya’s African Women’s Development and Communication Network. “It’s one thing when the women’s groups are asking their government to do this and the other. It helps immensely when you can say you as a government committed to this internationally. It embarrasses them, and it often speeds up the process of work on policy, but it is a very tedious process.”
Many non-governmental organizations, however, also viewed the proceedings on media with disappointment. They say media discussions did not touch upon hot issues such as intellectual property rights, media ownership, open source technology or network security. The policy on these issues will likely be decided in final negotiations at the upcoming Geneva information summit, a meeting that will be dominated by business interests.
Emily Freeburg is a freelance journalist in New York.
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For more information: U.N. Division for the Advancement of Women-- 47th Session: 3 - 14 March 2003:
http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/47sess.htm
PeaceWomen: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom-- Women and the United Nations:
http://www.peacewomen.org/un/unindex.html
NGO Gender Strategies Working Group:
http://www.genderit.org/
-Corvin Russell: Artists Against Empire
Corvin Russell/ From [url=http://www.rabble.ca]http://www.rabble.ca[/url]
One of the most famous and political of modern paintings, Picasso’s Guernica, powerfully expresses the horror of modern war. On the occasion of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address to the Security Council in February to persuade them of the need for war on Iraq, the tapestry reproduction of the painting that hangs outside the United Nations was covered over with a blue curtain.
Why would the most powerful nation in history be afraid of a painting?
Feminist activist and scientist Ursula Franklin told this story to an audience of 850 at Toronto’s Music Hall on the first night of the first ever full Toronto Social Forum weekend. It was an event unlike any the city has seen.
On this first night it’s a variety show on the theme “artists against empire.” and the hall is filled with laughter, bitter and sweet. Artists, from dub poets to novelists to Afro-Caribbean music ensembles, deploy weapons of ridicule and rhythm, beauty and poignancy. The Turtle Gals, a Native performance ensemble, perform numbers like the “Genocide Waltz,” using the music of musical comedy but with First Nations content, morphing tunes like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” into a First Nations chant.
Another highlight was comedian Shoshana Sperling, appearing as satirical teen pop queen “Shasti the Nasty,” juxtaposing the U.S. rhetoric of freedom with the reality of its imperialism and vapid consumer culture, all rolled up in an expos?Eof the hypocrisy of American sexual puritanism.
After the night of music, recitation and revolution, almost everyone in the audience knows why the United States feared Guernica - because art has power. It can speak truth to our hearts and, in a moment, cut through the most elaborate and careful deceptions. It can move us to new worlds of understanding. Colin Powell’s power was of deception, and the sanitization of war; Picasso’s art exposed the brutal violence of war in a way no PowerPoint presentation could deflect.
The Toronto Social Forum was inspired by the World Social Forums held for the last three years in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Sharmini Peries, a TSF organizer, calls it “the most amazing political event I have ever experienced in Canada.” Iranian author Reza Baraheni calls the “artists against empire” event his first happy night in Canada. The weekend, billed as “one space, many movements”, drew more than 1500 paying participants. Organizers conceived of it as a space where social movements have weight and can be seen together in a way they never have been before. The forum was also a chance to see what other kinds of activism are going on and to re-imagine our home and the world as we would like them to be.
A spirit of fun and creation was always at work throughout the three-day forum, like lungs quietly pumping vital breath into a complex organism. There was a cultural production area where people spend rapt hours making phoenixes and painting signs for the next day’s anti-war demo. A crowd packed the “Culture Cauldron,” an activist cabaret “from the front lines of Deaf Culture and Disability-inspired art.”
At a Saturday soirée, people mixed and mingled while local activists performed. At the Sunday demo, marchers carry the phoenixes and giant puppets, and participate in a demonstration of “chalk and awe,” dropping to the ground as though killed by a bomb, while someone draws a chalk outline around them. For once, as organizer Janet Conway says, a lot of people are actually excited to carry a protest sign.
Without being explicitly critical of old left habits, this emphasis on art has challenged the traditionally dour culture of the left and asserted that joy and celebration are at the heart of the revolution. “We learned a lesson from Brazil,” organizer Judy Rebick says, “politics also has to feed the soul.”
Perhaps that’s why the event seems to glow with a new confidence. The pluralism of participation is striking. Anyone can put on a workshop as long as it fits within the social forum mandate of opposition to neoliberalism and envisioning alternatives. The usual suspects are here, but they’re not alone. The busiest workshop of all is the Culture Cauldron. There are also more workshops organized by First Nations activists and by newcomer communities than I would have expected. Though Peries and other TSF organizers “would have liked to have much broader representation of newcomer communities, both in organizing events and participating in them,” it’s good that participating groups also felt free to parachute in, put on their event and leave.
Mercifully, there was no ersatz consensus or manifesto to be churned out at the end of the affair. On the other hand, at the end of the social forum it feels like there hasn’t been an opportunity to look down from the mountain to see how far we’ve come. What’s missing, Janet Conway says, is “a space to bring everyone together and make visible to everyone the whole of who was there.” Pluralism is only part of the social forum mission: cross-fertilization and the linking of strategies is another part. Here, the Social Forum showed more promise than results.
The next stage of the process in Canada is the potentially epoch-making initiation of the Canada-Quebec-First Nations Social Forum. On the Monday after the TSF, a group of about fifty people, evenly divided between Canada and Quebec, with sparse First Nations representation, met to discuss the launch of a tri-national Social Forum. While there was division in the room on the timetable to adopt, this division never broke along the old linguistic lines. Says Rebick, “It’s hard for anyone under forty to appreciate what a profound change this represents.”
A decision was made to strike a coordinating committee and a secretariat that will organize a series of events beginning in November of this year, culminating in the spring of next. Built into these events must be a more explicit attempt to facilitate a collective (but still pluralist) political vision. The social forums must continue to showcase existing local and international alternatives to neoliberalism, colonialism, patriarchy and war.
Sharing this knowledge and experience is enriching and inspiring, but if the social forum process is to be about building the movements’ strategic capacity, about building a movement bigger than any one issue, then at some point it is not enough to say another world is possible or to imagine what it would look like, you’ve got to make the possible world actual.
Corvin Russell is an activist, translator and writer who lives in Toronto. This article first appeared in [url=http://www.rabble.ca]http://www.rabble.ca[/url]
-Letter to President Bush from the Mayor of Hiroshima
(Thanks to David Mcreynolds for passing this on)
http://www.city.hiroshima.jp/shimin/heiwa/protest/furse_spratt_030421e.html
His Excellency George W. Bush
The President
The White House
The United States of America
Letter of Protest
I have received a report that your administration has submitted to Congress a 2004 Defense Authorization Bill that requests funds for the development of small nuclear weapons with a yield of five kilotons or less, which development has been prohibited since 1993, and that would repeal the Furse-Spratt prohibition on the development of such weapons.
This clear indication that the United States intends to develop small nuclear weapons raises the horrifying spectre that nuclear weapons will actually be used. As mayor of the A-bombed city Hiroshima I am outraged by the barbarism that has led you not only to attack Iraq, killing or injuring thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens, but also to develop new nuclear weapons. You are trampling viciously on the hopes of the vast majority of people around the world who seek peace and, on behalf of the residents of Hiroshima, I vehemently protest.
Coming as it does on the eve of the UN NPT Review Conference Preparatory Committee, this announcement, together with statements regarding the necessity of resuming underground testing and rapidly developing new tactical nuclear weapons, represents an extremely regrettable frontal attack on the process of nuclear disarmament.
I demand that you immediately begin demonstrating a willingness to implement the “unequivocal undertaking” to eliminate your nuclear arsenal promised at the previous NPT Review Conference, take a clear decision to terminate all nuclear testing, and devote the full strength of your great country to achieving a genuinely peaceful 21st century free from nuclear weapons.
April 21, 2003
Tadatoshi Akiba Mayor of Hiroshima
