Sunday, January 25, 2004
-Government ‘s call for ending arms export ban will pave the way for Japan’s international arms sale
Defense Agency Director General Ishiba Shigeru said that Japan needs to consider lifting the three government principles banning arms exports.
(Note: The “Three Principles on Arms Export” was set out by then Prime Minister Sato Eisaku in answer to a question in the Diet on April 21, 1967. This policy bans arms sales to communist bloc countries, countries to which the export of arms is prohibited under UN resolution, and countries involved in or likely to become involved in international conflicts.)
Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro and Chief Cabinet Secretary Fukuda Yasuo have practically endorsed Ishiba’s suggestion if it is concerned only with missile defense.
Late last year, the Koizumi Cabinet decided to introduce the U.S.-led missile defense program. It also concluded that a review of Japan’s ban on arms exports to the United States is needed in connection with the missile defense program.
Taking advantage of this, Ishiba is embarking on the road to international arms sales.
Constitutional principle
Japan in 1976 decided to expand the scope of application of the arms sales ban and formulated the Three Principles of Weapons Export prohibiting arms sales to not only countries in conflict but all countries throughout the world. The prime minister at the time explained that the ban accords with the constitutional principle.
The Constitution firmly stands for a peaceful settlement to international conflicts by declaring renunciation of “the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.” This represents Japan’s constitutional idea that Japan seeks to maintain its peace and security through achieving a world without war or any armed conflicts. Japan’s ban on arms sales is a natural reflection of this position.
On May 18, 1983, the Cabinet Legislative Bureau director stated that the Three Principles are in accord with the “Constitution’s pacifism” and that they “contribute to maintaining the peace and security of Japan and the international community.”
The Three Principles have been supported by the Japanese people’s wish for peace and their resolution to prevent Japan from internationally disseminating the means of war or armed conflicts.
The government review of the principles completely runs counter to the deep public concern about the weapons sold by the United States and other major powers helping the spread of armed conflicts and transferred even to those who are causing countless tragedies in many parts of the world.
The Koizumi Cabinet’s review of the arms export-ban and the Defense Agency director general’s slander on the Three Principles as Cold War mentality are in contravention of the Constitution and the government statements, including those in the Diet. All this shows how extraordinary the Koizumi Cabinet is.
In the “Cold War” era, the United States and the Soviet Union were competing with each other for arms sales while engaging in a nuclear arms race. If the government says that the “Cold War is over”, Japan should make efforts to achieve a world without a nuclear arms race or arms sales competition.
However, the LDP government in the 1980s accepted the U.S. request for Japan’s military technologies to be used by the United States for its weapons development, thus starting Japan’s supply of such technologies and military technology exchanges between the two countries. Arguing that the U.S. needs to be distinguished as Japan’s military alliance partner, the government thus made a breakthrough in its arms export policy.
The Koizumi Cabinet has upgraded the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty to serve as a global military alliance and is participating in the missile defense program that will renew the nuclear arms race. What’s more, it has used this move to gut the arms sales ban and had the Defense Agency director general announce a review of the arms export policy to allow weapons to be sold throughout the world. How dangerous it is for the government to endorse the nuclear arms race and involve itself in an arms export competition.
Don’t shut eyes to global current
No one in the world, including the Japanese people, wants Japan to become a major arms exporter.
The U.S. Bush administration is deeply isolated internationally because of its lawless Iraq War. The Koizumi Cabinet is not only dispatching the Self-Defense Forces to Iraq in support of the U.S. preemptive strike strategy, but rushing to lift the government’s arms export ban. This will cause more difficulty in its diplomacy and economic relations with the rest of the world.
Maintaining the principles of the arms export ban and the constitutional principles of peace is prerequisite to securing the future of Japan. (end)
-Violence, Legitimacy and the Future of Japanese and American Multilateralism
by Yoshikazu Sakamoto
Excerpts:
While the U.S. is trying to ?gdemocratize?h the world, that is, to make the world safe for the U.S., it is imperative to remember that governing in a democracy, whether national or international, must derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed. It is natural, therefore, that in the post-Cold War world where the principle of democracy is being universalized, to ensure international legitimacy, not simply hard power, should become crucial as the criterion of diplomacy.....
But the Bush administration has acted in a way that is in diametrical opposition to the principle of legitimacy by adopting the strategy of preventive attack in violation of international law and the United Nations Charter, and prosecuting a war on the basis of a dubious fiction that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and sponsored international terrorism.
And:
.......... Abduction of innocent citizens is a grave human rights violation. But is the denunciation of the abduction an expression of anger toward infringement on human rights of Japanese compatriots or protest against infringement of universal human rights? If it is the former, then it is nothing more than self-centered nationalism. If it is the latter, then the Japanese must pay due attention to the violation of human rights of Koreans in the past by imperial Japan and try to solve the abduction issue while showing readiness to tackle the question of compensation for Koreans who were forcibly taken for forced labor and the former ?gcomfort women?h who were enslaved by the imperial Japanese army.
If Japan discards its unilateralist response and adopts a policy of alleviating the confrontation with North Korea on the basis of universal principles, it can also play a positive role in pushing a multilateral settlement of the Iraq question in the United Nations without binding itself with the U.S.?fs unilateralism, and also in seeking multilateral solutions in the area of regional security cooperation in East Asia, particularly focused on the Korean peninsula.
Whole Article is here:
Violence, Legitimacy and the Future of Japanese and American Multilateralism
Yoshikazu Sakamoto is Professor Emeritus, Tokyo University. This is a slightly revised version of the article appeared in The Japan Times, January 1, 2004.
Read Japan Focus.
Thursday, January 22, 2004
-Japan limits media coverage of Iraq war
By Bennett Richardson | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
TOKYO ? When Japanese soldiers crossed over into Iraq Monday, it marked the first time the nation’s troops entered a combat zone since World War II.
But the send-off for this 40-person advance team was not the splashy news event one might have expected. Television coverage was mostly limited to file footage and bland announcements of equipment details by officials.
The initial low-key coverage partly reflects the Japanese public’s ambivalence over the deployment, which the government has linked to larger goals of moving the nation from pacifism toward an embrace of military commitments. Alluding to stinging international criticism of “checkbook diplomacy” during the first Gulf War, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Monday, “We won’t have fulfilled our responsibility as a member of the international community if we contribute materially and leave the manpower contribution up to other countries.”
But while Mr. Koizumi presses his Iraq case, the Defense Agency is working to mute media coverage of the deployment by asking Japanese journalists to leave Iraq.
The Japan Defense Agency last week asked that all Japanese media “depart immediately from Iraq and give serious consideration whether or not to travel to Kuwait.”
Analysts see the clampdown as a threat to recent reform efforts by a press corps hampered by tight controls on information. The government’s request would force the Japanese media to rely on foreign news sources - a habit that Japanese journalists are striving to break, says Susan Kreifels, a media expert at the East-West Center in Hawaii. Japanese journalists are growing increasingly committed to sourcing their own work and recognizing the right to freedom of speech, she says.
So far, the Japanese press in Iraq appear to be staying. Reuters reported that about 100 Japanese journalists arrived in Samawah in advance of the soldiers.
“As a focus point of international developments, Japanese are extremely interested in events in Iraq, and we plan to continue reporting from there,” said a spokesman for the Asahi Shimbun, a major daily with a half dozen journalists in the war-torn country. Another major daily, the Mainichi Shimbun, said “we plan to keep our two correspondents in Iraq” regardless of the agency’s request.
The Defense Agency had backed up its request by threatening a total blackout if any problems arise. “If the media are deemed an obstacle to the smooth implementation of the mission’s tasks… we will refuse all coverage,” the agency said in a statement.
Last year, the government was forced by pressure from local media organizations to amend a series of bills concerning personal information that, if passed in their original form, could have infringed press freedoms.
“There has always been concern that Japanese journalists rely too much on government sources - but that goes for journalists everywhere,” says Kreifels.
Worried about possible negative publicity about the mission from family of SDF personnel, the Defense Agency has also declared them off-limits to the press on grounds of possible violations of privacy.
“We need to consider the feelings of the families,” said Takeya Takahashi, a Defense Agency spokesman. “We won’t allow family members to speak with the media, be they foreign or local,” he said.
The agency has cited security concerns as the major reason for the strict measures. A threat of terrorist attacks against Japan by the Al Qaeda network came as Tokyo late last year deliberated the timing of the troop dispatch. But the strict controls contrast sharply with the US decision to embed reporters with troops in the field.
Indications suggest the crackdown won’t ease anytime soon. The agency also announced a plan to halt regular press conferences of the top commanders of the air, sea, and land forces. When reporters assigned to the Defense Agency objected to the plan, a top official on Defense Agency chief Shigeru Ishiba’s staff offered to discuss the issue, but added he only aimed to resolve it by the end of the month.
Japan already has a spotty record concerning press freedoms. The system of exclusive press clubs in Japan has been criticized by foreign governments as hampering the free flow of information by allowing local and national officials to suppress news unfavorable to them. In addition, Japanese press clubs don’t admit foreign journalists.
The media rights advocacy group Reporters Without Borders ranked Japan 44th in its world press freedom survey last year.
Mr. Koizumi last year pushed hard for the troop dispatch as part of his campaign to raise Japan’s military profile internationally, despite a limited mandate for the move and questions over whether it involves Japan in an illegal occupation that breaches the country’s war-renouncing constitution.
The advance team will set up camp in the relatively peaceful southern town of Samawah, in anticipation of the arrival of the main force of up to 600 soldiers. The full contingent, expected to arrive by March, will carry out reconstruction tasks.
Before Koizumi announced his decision in December to send the SDF to Iraq, polls showed public opposition to a dispatch as high as 88 percent. But a survey last week by a major satellite TV broadcaster showed for the first time that the number of people who support sending troops had surpassed those who oppose the dispatch - 49 percent agreed with the move while 46 percent disagreed. Other polls over the weekend showed opponents still outnumbering supporters by a slight margin.
Exactly what kind of information beyond government-endorsed releases will emerge remains an open question. As the Iraq issue is clearly of such importance to Japan and the world, “I think most Japanese would want their own news sources,” Ms. Kreifels says
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-Japanese Discrimination Against Korean and other Ethnic Schools
by Eriko Arita
For half a century, Japan has permitted ethnic minorities, notably Koreans, to run their own schools while refusing to recognize these schools’ graduates by denying their students the right to sit for entrance examinations at national universities. The controversy has centered above all on the rights of graduates of pro-North Korean schools. The issues came to a boil recently when the Ministry of Education extended this right to three international schools while continuing to require that graduates of ethnic schools take a preliminary examination to determine eligibility to sit for the regular examination. The issue has long been central to the movement for the rights of ethnic minorities in Japan. Eriko Arita is a staff writer for The Japan Times. This article appeared in The Japan Times on April 12, 2003.
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The recent uproar over whether students at schools for Asian ethnic minorities should be granted equal access to national universities has highlighted the extent to which such institutions have been set apart within the nation’s education system.
Amid protests from the Asian schools, the education ministry decided March 28 to reconsider its plan to allow graduates of international schools accredited by three Western education organizations to take national university entrance exams without having to take a separate qualifying test, called the “daiken.”
Officials at the Education, Culture, Science, Sports and Technology Ministry said they will go back to the drawing board and consider extending the exemption to other ethnic schools.
A teacher and a student at Tokyo Korean Junior and Senior High School, together with mothers of students of the school and staff of the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryun), submitted a petition to the ministry March 28 signed by 4,086 people who denounced the daiken waiver just for Western international schools.
Lee Ok Rim, a third-year high school student, explained that some of her friends want to enter national universities, even though more than half of private and municipal universities allow students of any school for foreigners to take their entrance exams without the daiken prerequisite.
“Because our school is not accredited, my friends who want to go to these universities also have to study for the qualifying test,” she said, explaining that it is a burden to have to study for both the daiken and the actual entrance exam.
Kwon Dal In, a teacher at the school, said about 40 percent of its graduates go on to study at Japanese universities or vocational schools, with some enrolling at national universities after passing the daiken.
Critics have slammed the daiken requirement as one example of the government’s discriminatory policies against ethnic schools, especially pro-Pyongyang Korean schools. Asian schools have meanwhile been campaigning to abolish the regulation for years.
Ministry officials deny the measure is discriminatory, claiming students of international and ethnic schools need to take the daiken because there is no other way to demonstrate they have obtained the minimum standard of education required in Japanese schools.
But Kwon argues that although his students study the language, geography and history of the Korean Peninsula, lesson content and class hours for such subjects as mathematics, science and English are basically the same as those at Japanese schools.
“Our students study Japanese, too, using such material as Japanese literature,” he said. “There should be no problem in our school’s curriculum.”
According to the education ministry, some 21,000 students attend the roughly 120 educational institutions for foreigners in Japan that are classified as “miscellaneous schools,” with about 11,000 of them going to pro-Pyongyang Korean schools.
Skeptics speculate that the ministry’s initial daiken-waver decision came in response to the public outcry over North Korea’s admission in September that it had abducted Japanese nationals, but ministry officials denied any link between the two issues.
Kyoto University professor Naoki Mizuno, one of 1,436 national university educators and employees who submitted an appeal protesting the ministry’s original plan, alleged that the ministry tried to maintain its discriminatory policy against Korean schools by taking advantage of the abductee issue.
Mizuno, an expert in modern Korean history, said the government has suppressed Korean schools since they were established after World War II.
“The government has a negative view of what is taught at ethnic Korean schools, believing the education they provide is anti-Japanese,” Mizuno maintained.
According to Mizuno, the ministry issued notices to prefectural governors in 1965 in which it said the pro-Pyongyang schools should not be classified even as miscellaneous schools—a classification applied to such institutions as cooking and driving schools—after Japan and South Korea signed a normalization treaty that year.
But by the early 1970s, prefectural governments went against the ministry’s policy and recognized all Korean schools as miscellaneous schools in response to calls from the public, according to Mizuno.
Until 1998, however, students of ethnic Korean high schools were not allowed to take the daiken, which are for university applicants who left high schools without completing the course, and had to attend part-time Japanese high schools while studying at Korean schools to take the preadmission test, he said.
A majority of the public seems supportive of the idea of granting ethnic schools equal access to institutions of higher education. The ministry accepted public comment on its initial deregulation plan, but 12,779 people opposed it, saying Asian ethnic schools should also be accredited, while only 390 expressed support.
But observers say some people oppose extending the daiken waiver, especially to the pro-Pyongyang schools, citing such reasons as the institutions’ close ties to Chongryun, which some allege to have been party to the abductions.
Others argue that these schools should follow the ministry’s curriculum if they want to be exempt from the daiken.
However, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Japan has ratified, states that children belonging to a minority group shall not be denied the right to their own culture and language. Since 1998, various United Nations committees have mentioned their concerns on the inequity of access to institutions of higher education affecting Korean children in Japan.
Kwon of Tokyo Korean Junior and Senior High School said he wants the ministry to check the curriculum of his school and evaluate whether it could qualify for a daiken exemption.
“I asked ministry officials to visit our school and examine the curriculum,” he said. Yasuko Ikenobo, parliamentary secretary for education, has promised to do so sometime next month.
Lin Tong Chun, chairman of the Association of Foreign Schools in Hyogo Prefecture and a former chairman of the board of directors of Kobe Chinese School, said that political issues should be discussed between governments, and not be a factor affecting children’s education.
“If the Japanese government does not grant the (daiken waiver) right for ethnic schools, the international community would see Japan as discriminating against (other parts of) Asia,” Lin said. “It would be a great demerit for the Japanese people.”
-Will Japan Follow the U.S. Lead and instigate a new Korean War? Read this and then consider curre
Wrong Again:US policy on North Korea
by Bruce Cumings
In June 1994, Bill Clinton came close to launching a ‘pre-emptive strike’ against North Korea’s nuclear reactors at Yongbyon, about sixty miles north of Pyongyang. Then, at the last minute, Jimmy Carter got North Korea to agree to a complete freeze on activity at the Yongbyon complex, and a Framework Agreement was signed in October 1994. The Republican Right railed against this for the next six years, until George W. Bush brought a host of the Agreement’s critics into his Administration, and they set about dismantling it, thus fulfilling their own prophecy and initiating another dangerous confrontation with Pyongyang. The same folks who brought us the invasion of Iraq and a menu of hyped-up warnings about Saddam Hussein’s weapons have similarly exaggerated the North Korean threat: indeed, the second North Korean nuclear crisis began in October 2002, when ‘sexed-up’ intelligence was used to push Pyongyang against the wall and make bilateral negotiations impossible.
The complacent US public seems unperturbed by Bush’s failure so far to find a single WMD in Iraq, even if the much more disputatious British public was immediately up in arms (so to speak) about the remarkable Intelligence failures that were used to justify the invasion. To grasp the full extent of this phenomenon one needs to be an indefatigable reader of America’s best newspapers and best investigative reporters (all two of them). Take a long and detailed article by Judith Miller, buried on page 12 of the New York Times: only in the 30th paragraph of 34 do we learn that prewar American Intelligence on Iraqi weapons sites was often ‘stunningly wrong’. In the words of a senior US officer:
The teams would be given a packet, with pictures and a tentative grid . . . They would be told: ‘Go to this place. You will find a McDonald’s there. Look in the fridge. You will find French fries, cheeseburgers and Cokes.’ And they would go there, and not only was there no fridge and no McDonald’s, there was never even a thought of ever putting a McDonald’s there. Day after day it was like that.
This officer’s ‘MET Alpha’ group was sent to Basra to investigate equipment considered ‘highly suspicious’ by the Iraq Survey Group in US Intelligence, which thought that it had found possible components for nuclear weapons. What the team in fact discovered was ‘a handful of large, industrial-scale vegetable steamers’, their crates clearly and accurately marked as such in Russian.
There has been even less public scrutiny of Intelligence claims about the capabilities of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. For more than a decade, the CIA has maintained that Korea probably has one or two atomic bombs but no more than that, because the Koreans could not have reprocessed more than 11 or 12 kilograms of plutonium—the maximum amount they could have obtained from their reactor in 1989. This conclusion was first included in a National Intelligence Estimate in November 1993, after all the government experts on North Korea had been gathered together and asked to put their hands up if they thought the North had atomic bombs. Just over half raised their hands. Those in the slim majority assumed that the North Koreans had reprocessed every last gram of the fuel removed in 1989, and had fashioned an implosion device that would detonate this plutonium—no easy task. Still, the CIA referred only to nuclear ‘devices’, not bombs.
Every year since then the CIA Director has told Congress that ‘the chances are better than 50:50’ that North Korea has one or two bombs (not devices), and newspapers have routinely reported this assumption as fact. Yet in 1996, nuclear experts at the Livermore and Hanford laboratories reduced their estimate of how much fuel North Korea possessed to less than the amount needed for a single bomb: the North, they concluded, could only have seven or eight kilograms of fuel, whereas ‘it takes ten kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium to fabricate a first bomb,’ and eight or nine kilograms for subsequent ones. According to David Albright, one of the best and most reliable independent experts, ‘the most credible worst-case estimate’ is that the North may have between 6.3 and 8.5 kg of reprocessed plutonium. In other words, the CIA’s educated guess, endlessly repeated in the media, appears to have been mistaken. A less obvious consequence of this mistake has been its role in strengthening the North’s position in negotiations with the US.
The New York Times White House reporter David Sanger has published so many ‘scoops’ from US Intelligence that some of his colleagues just call him ‘Scoop’. Unfortunately, quite a few have been wrong. Sanger has been particularly good at omitting all the CIA’s qualifications about the one or two nuclear devices the North might or might not possess. In August 1998, the front page of the Times carried his story to the effect that Intelligence had located a huge underground facility where North Korea was secretly making nuclear weapons; this caused a predictable furor in the media. When the North (unprecedentedly) allowed the US military to inspect this site only to find it empty, and with no traces of radioactive material, the news barely made the headlines.
On 20 July this year, the New York Times led with a Sanger article (co-written with Thom Shanker) again claiming that US Intelligence had found ‘a second, secret plant for producing weapons-grade plutonium’. A senior Administration official told the Times that this information was ‘very worrisome, but still not conclusive’. The evidence consisted of ‘elevated levels of krypton-85’, a gas given off in the production of plutonium, in an area far removed from the Yongbyon complex where the North maintains its only declared reprocessing facility. The levels of krypton-85 were said to indicate a second, undeclared nuclear facility. South Korean experts immediately denied the story, and David Albright declared it was not in fact possible to pinpoint a hidden or secret location merely by detecting raised levels of krypton-85. Besides, the North can enrich uranium (as opposed to plutonium) at many sites, in small enough amounts for krypton-85 emissions not to rise above their normal level. In short, there appears to be no second facility.
The real pay-off in the Sanger/Shanker article came, as it had in Miller’s article, in the closing paragraphs, which described the difficulties of a pre-emptive strike on the North’s nuclear installations, given their recent dispersal to ‘any number of other locations’. The Times claimed, for the first time in my daily reading, that the North had as many as 15,000 ‘underground military- industrial sites’, and a history of ‘constructing duplicate facilities’ such that it may well have ‘multiple facilities for every critical aspect of its national security infrastructure’. These facts have been known to experts for some time, and because they make it a bit tricky to launch pre-emptive strikes, the Bush Administration has been planning instead for a series of massive attacks against the North, using nuclear weapons.
The journalist who has most consistently challenged the Intelligence estimates coming out of the Bush Administration has been Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker . In the issue of 27 October he described how senior officials demand access to raw Intelligence before it has been vetted for accuracy and reliability by the CIA and other agencies, a process known as ‘stovepiping’. This means that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz judge the veracity of reports from the field themselves (or with their staffers) without the information having first been ‘subjected to rigorous scrutiny’, and then rush the most damning reports into speeches, such as those intended to make the case for war in Iraq. Cheney has been particularly active, visiting the CIA, browbeating analysts and demanding access to raw information. In August 2002 he claimed publicly that Saddam ‘continues to pursue a nuclear weapon’.
CIA estimates in the 1990s about North Korean weaponry, however questionable and flawed, seem both careful and modest compared to the exaggerations of the Bush Administration and its emissary to Pyongyang, James Kelly. Coming into office when the CIA’s ‘one or two devices’ estimate was nearly a decade old, Bush contrived to hype the threat, while at the same time downplaying the idea that its size made a difference: the North might have two or six or eight atomic bombs, but that didn’t constitute a crisis. Rather, Saddam Hussein—whom we now know to have been disarmed by years of UN inspections—was so much more dangerous as to justify a preventive war. The result was chaos as far as US policy was concerned, and free rein for North Korean hardliners to move ahead with producing nuclear weapons.
Bush resisted holding high-level talks with Pyongyang for more than a year after assuming office, although the Clinton Administration had left on the table a tentative agreement to buy out all of the North’s medium and long-range missiles. When Bush finally dispatched Kelly to Pyongyang in October 2002, Kelly accused the North of having a second nuclear programme, to enrich uranium and build more bombs by that method. According to Kelly, his counterparts at first denied that they had such a programme, then admitted that they were developing not only an enriched-uranium bomb, but more powerful weapons as well. This news would have hit the press like a bombshell, but Bush delayed its release until he got his resolution enabling war in Iraq through Congress. All we have to go on for this strange episode is what Kelly chose to tell the press.
Within days of Kelly’s return, Administration officials told the New York Times that the 1994 Agreement was dead. Then they cut off the supply of heavy heating oil that Washington had been providing as interim compensation under the Agreement. Pyongyang quickly announced that the Agreement had collapsed, withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, kicked out the UN inspectors, removed the seals and closed-circuit cameras from the Yongbyon complex, regained control of 8000 fuel rods that had been encased for eight years, and restarted their reactor. (Basically, this was a lock-step recapitulation of what they had done in 1993-94 in order to get Clinton’s attention.) The North hinted darkly that the hostile policies of the Bush Administration left it no choice but to develop ‘a powerful physical deterrent force’. In spite of all this, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Administration continued to downplay its own evidence that the North now had not one but two bomb programmes and refused to call the situation a ‘crisis’. This clearly confused the North: ‘When we stated we don’t have a nuclear weapon, the USA [said] we do have it,’ one DPRK general told a Russian visitor, ‘and now when we are [saying] we created nuclear weapons, the USA [says] we’re just bluffing.’
What happened in October 2002 is that both Governments, according to Jonathan Pollack, a knowledgable specialist writing in the Naval War College Review , ‘opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes’, and so to unravel ‘close to a decade of painfully crafted diplomatic arrangements designed to prevent full-scale nuclear weapons development on the Korean Peninsula.’ Pollack found that Bush’s Intelligence estimates ‘offered more definitive claims’ about the North’s nuclear capabilities than previous reports had done, and seemed to fudge the date when the CIA discovered evidence that the North had imported enriched-uranium technology—this had happened in 1997 or 1998, and the Clinton Administration had fully briefed Bush and Co on the matter. Yet Kelly and others sat on the evidence for 18 months, then encouraged the press to assume that the programme had just been uncovered. Kelly never presented ‘specific or detailed evidence to substantiate’ his claims, either in Pyongyang or to the press when he returned home, nor did he ask his DPRK interlocutors for explanation or clarification of whatever evidence he may have brought with him.
The American press immediately accepted Kelly’s judgment that the North Koreans had failed to honour their commitments, and the enriched-uranium programme took on a life of its own in the US media. In November 2002, the CIA reported that a gas centrifuge facility for enriching uranium was ‘at least three years from becoming operational’ in the DPRK; once up and running, however, it might provide fissile material for ‘two or more weapons per year’. Yet Kelly told Congress in March 2003 that the facility (assuming there is one: US Intelligence can’t find it) was probably ‘a matter of months’ away from producing weapons-grade uranium. Left unmentioned in any press articles I have come across is the usefulness of an enriched-uranium programme to the Light-Water Reactors (LWRs) that were being built to compensate the North for freezing their graphite reactors in 1994. The virtue of the LWRs from the American standpoint had been that their fuel would have to come from outside the DPRK, thus establishing a dependency that could easily be monitored; but this was precisely what the independent-minded North thought was wrong with the LWRs. As Pollack put it, ‘it seems entirely plausible that Pyongyang envisioned the need for an indigenous enrichment capability’ since ‘the fuel requirements for a pair of thousand-megawatt [light water] reactors are substantial and open-ended.’ Furthermore, to enrich uranium to a level where it is useful as LWR fuel is much easier than to refine it further, to create fissile fuel. But the Bush Administration smothered all discussion of this issue with its widely ballyhooed claims of a second nuclear bomb programme.
Many experts, including former Clinton Administration officials, believe that North Korea clearly cheated by importing this technology. They do not accept the argument that the North had a clear interest in enriching uranium for the LWRs; they differ over whether it merely experimented with the imported technology, or was (and is) hell-bent on a ‘nuclear enrichment programme’—in other words, if the North is trying to build a uranium bomb. If the imports from Pakistan did begin in 1997 or 1998 and were intended to be used in a bomb, the reason may have been that hardliners in Pyongyang disliked the slow pace at which Washington was implementing the commitments it had made in the 1994 Agreement (i.e. to normalise relations with the North and refrain from threatening it with nuclear weapons). Or Kim Jong Il may have chosen to play a double game, continuing to honour the Agreement while developing a clandestine weapons programme. Kim ascended to supreme power in September 1998, on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the regime, and a new weapons programme would have shored up his support among the military.
The Clinton Administration officials, however, believe that whatever the North planned to do, its enrichment technology could have been shut down if the missile deal had been completed and relations between the US and the DPRK normalised. That was essentially what they told the incoming Bush Administration. By dithering for 18 months, only to use the information in order to confront the North Koreans in October 2002, the Bush people turned a soluble problem into a major crisis, in which neither side had any room to back away. Now the North may have embarked on a nuclear weapons programme far beyond the CIA’s ‘one or two devices’, which would be a catastrophic defeat for American diplomacy; and no one—in Washington, Pyongyang, Beijing or Moscow—really knows what Bush wants from his Korea policy.
One interpretation of Kelly’s behaviour in Pyongyang is that he pre-emptively used a bunch of Intelligence reports (ones never fully released to the media) to make sure there could be no diplomatic progress—his visit came in the wake of Bush’s new doctrine of pre-emption, announced in September 2002. The danger now derives from a combination of typical and predictable North Korean cheating and provocation, long-standing US plans to use nuclear weapons in the earliest stages of a new Korean war, and the Bush Doctrine. This last conflates existing plans for nuclear pre-emption in a crisis initiated by the North—a standard operating procedure for the US military for decades—with an apparent determination to attack states like North Korea simply because they have or want to have nuclear weapons like those the US still amasses by the thousand. As if to make this completely clear, someone in the White House leaked Presidential Decision Directive 17 in September 2002, which listed North Korea as a prime target for pre-emption.
Donald Rumsfeld made matters worse in the spring of 2003 by demanding revisions in the basic war plan for Korea (’Operations Plan 5030’). The strategy, according to insiders who have read the plan, is ‘to topple Kim’s regime by destabilising its military forces’, who would then overthrow him and bring about a ‘regime change’. The plan was pushed, according to an article in US News and World Report , ‘by many of the same Administration hard-liners who advocated regime change in Iraq’. Unnamed senior officials considered elements of this new plan to be ‘so aggressive that they could provoke a war’. Short of attacking or trying to bring about a military coup, Rumsfeld and Co wanted the US military to ‘stage a weeks-long surprise military exercise, designed to force North Koreans to head for bunkers and deplete valuable stores of food, water and other resources’. This is oddly reminiscent of 1950, when North Korea announced a long military exercise along the 38th parallel, mobilising some 40,000 troops. In the middle of the exercise, several divisions suddenly veered south and in three days took Seoul; only a handful of the highest officials knew that the summer exercises were the prelude to an invasion. Half a century later comes Rumsfeld, with his provocative plans, a man who according to two eyewitnesses was surprised to learn when he joined the Pentagon that the US still had nearly 40,000 troops in Korea.
In 1958, the US began to deploy hundreds of nuclear warheads, atomic mines, artillery shells and air-dropped nukes in South Korea. They remained there until 1991, when Bush the Elder withdrew battlefield nuclear weapons from around the world—which did not end the nuclear threat to the North, since Trident submarines can glide silently up to its coast any day of the week. Kim Il Sung’s response to the initial nuclear deployments of the late 1950s was to build as widely and as deeply underground as possible, on the assumption, he admitted quite openly, that anything visible above ground would be wiped out in a war. I have seen one nuclear blast shelter, at the bottom of a very steep escalator in a Pyongyang subway station, where three gigantic blast doors, each about two feet thick, are recessed into the wall. Hans Blix was astonished, when he conducted the first UN inspections of the Yongbyon nuclear site in 1992, to find ‘two cavernous underground shelters’, access to which required ‘several minutes to descend by escalator’. They were built, Blix was told, in case the complex was attacked with nuclear weapons. US commanders in the South believe nearly the entire military apparatus of this garrison state is now ensconced underground. Since this, as I said earlier, makes pre-emptive strikes on installations rather tricky, Rumsfeld has been planning instead for a pre-emptive strike on Yongbyon followed by a series of massive nuclear strikes against multiple targets.
The vehicles for these strikes are new missiles that are said to penetrate deep underground before detonating a ‘small’ nuclear explosive. Earlier this year Rumsfeld sought a Congressional repeal of the decade-old ban on the manufacture of small nuclear weapons. According to the New York Times, Congressional proponents, mainly Republicans, argued that ‘low-yield’ nuclear warheads ‘could be used to incinerate chemical or biological weapons installations without scattering deadly agents into the atmosphere’. But the Bush Administration believed ‘low-yield’ nukes would be more effective in deterring ‘emerging nuclear powers like North Korea and Iran’. These new earth-penetrating weapons would have hardened casings (probably made of depleted uranium) enabling them ‘to crash through thick rock and concrete’. Opponents in the Senate argued that repealing the Bill would signal the end of efforts at non-proliferation: ‘We’re driving recklessly down the road that we’re telling other people not to walk down,’ the Michigan Senator Carl Levin said.
JAPAN
The only problem with Rumsfeld’s war plan is that no technology yet developed or imagined can penetrate the earth’s surface for more than about fifty feet, which is why cruise missiles could not eliminate Saddam Hussein on the night the Iraq invasion began (even if, that is, he was in the building targeted): later inspections revealed deep and heavily reinforced chambers designed by a German firm to withstand a direct hit from nuclear weapons. The only answer is larger and larger warheads, so that you target Kim Jong Il and wipe out a large urban neighbourhood, or maybe a city.
Before the occupation of Iraq dimmed their clairvoyant powers, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Co imagined that Kim Jong Il was running around in fear like an ant in a frying pan. Kim disappeared from public view for fifty days from mid-February 2003. When he surfaced again, ‘a senior Defense Department official’ (most likely Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz) told the Times: ‘Truly, if I’m Kim Jong Il, I wake up tomorrow morning and I’m thinking: “Have the Americans arrayed themselves on the peninsula now, post-Iraq, the way they arrayed themselves in Iraq?”’ The US wanted to get its own forces in Korea out of range of the North’s artillery, the official said, and then increase reconnaissance and redeploy to ‘use precision targeting much more aggressively and much more quickly’. In pursuit of this policy, the Pentagon moved 24 long-range B-1 and B-52 bombers from bases in the US to Guam shortly before the invasion of Iraq, and installed several F-117 stealth fighter-bombers in bases in South Korea—they are ‘designed for quick strikes against targets ringed by heavy air defences’. Soon Wolfowitz was in Seoul, to announce a redeployment of US combat forces south of the Han River to get them out of harm’s way, and in passing to tell the world’s press that ‘North Korea is teetering on the brink of collapse.’
These provocative actions might well have instigated another Korean war, given what had just happened in Iraq; short of that, they shame the US in their combination of arrogance and ignorance. Loud in prattling about American sovereignty when it comes to the UN, these officials see no other country whose sovereignty they feel bound to respect. Furthermore, they don’t know what they’re talking about. Kim Jong Il’s birthday is 16 February, a national holiday, and long disappearances (particularly during the harsh winter) have been a trademark of his rule: he husbands his ‘quality time’, puttering around one of his villas in pyjamas and curlers, taking it easy and trying to tame his unruly hair. A better indication of the North’s attitude is its statement on 18 April: ‘The Iraqi war teaches a lesson that in order to prevent a war and defend the security of a country and the sovereignty of a nation it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent force’ (the euphemism North Korea has used since Kelly’s visit to suggest that it might possess nuclear weapons). Clearly, the North Koreans do not want war; in the same news release they signalled for the first time that they were willing to meet the US in multilateral talks: ‘If the US has a willingness to make a bold switchover in its Korea policy, we will not stick to any particular dialogue format.’ But it would be a mistake to assume that if war comes to them, they won’t go down fighting.
After Kelly’s visit, Bush’s strategy was to refuse to talk to the North about anything except how it would go about dismantling its nuclear programme—and to refuse bilateral talks even for this purpose. He offered no incentives in return. The requirement that any talks be multilateral, however, was aimed primarily at East Asian allies whom Bush perceived to be getting off the reservation. Republican Presidents consistently supported the dictators who ruled South Korea for three decades. In 1972, Nixon looked the other way when Park Chung Hee declared martial law and made himself President for life. The first visiting head of state to be invited to the Oval Office by Reagan was Chun Doo Hwan, who had killed hundreds, if not thousands, of the population of Kwangju on the way to his 1980 coup. Many specialists remain convinced that a Republican team jiggered the vote-counting computers during the 1987 Presidential election that brought Chun’s protégé, Roh Tae Woo, to power.
In 2002, the Bush Administration seemed to think the candidate of the old ruling party, Lee Hoi Chang, had a lock on the next Presidential election; when he came to Washington in the autumn, the Administration treated him like a king. Instead, the Korean people elected Roh Moo Hyun, a courageous lawyer who had defended many dissidents against the Chun and Roh regimes. In his campaign, Roh had promised to establish greater independence and equality in the relationship with the US, and to continue his predecessor Kim Dae Jung’s policy of reconciliation with the North.
After Roh’s election, the American press was full of rhetoric about ‘anti-Americanism’ in the South, and scare stories about Korean ingrates wanting to kick US forces out of the country. ‘There are already signs of a deep distrust of Mr Roh in the Bush Administration,’ a reporter wrote just before Roh’s inauguration. ‘Kim Jong Il would probably attack our troops on the DMZ,’ a senior military analyst stated, ‘and then pick up the phone to Roh and say . . . “You must do something to stop the Americans.”’ Robyn Lim, a ‘regional security expert’ at Nanzan University in Japan, declared that ‘the US alliance with South Korea is defunct.’ Around this time, advisers to Roh told US officials that if the US attacked the North without South Korean consent, that would destroy the alliance with the South. Another anti-American comment? Imagine how Americans would feel if a distant power wanted to make war on Canada without consulting Washington, while Canada had 10,000 embedded artillery guns trained on the US.
Roh was the first victor in a democratic election involving two major candidates to get close to a majority since 1971, when Park Chung Hee barely defeated Kim Dae Jung, in spite of all sorts of manipulation (Park then decided there would be no more elections). But his success occasioned remarkable petulance, even (or especially) from Americans who have had long experience in Korea. Richard Allen, a Republican point man on Korean affairs, wrote in the Times that Roh Moo Hyun’s election made for ‘a troubling shift’ in US relations with the ROK. Korean leaders, he said, had now ‘stepped into the neutral zone’; indeed, he added, they had even gone so far as to suggest that, in the current nuclear stand-off, Washington and Pyongyang should both make concessions: ‘The cynicism of this act constitutes a serious breach of faith.’ Maybe American troops should be withdrawn, Allen suggested, ‘now that the harm can come from two directions—North Korea and violent South Korean protesters’. In his opinion, the US ‘is responsible for much of Seoul’s present security and prosperity’, the implication being that Koreans shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds them.
Other Americans wondered how Koreans dared to criticise the US when North Korea was ‘rattling a nuclear sword’. A Pentagon official explained: ‘It’s like teaching a child to ride a bike. We’ve been running alongside South Korea, holding onto its handlebars for 50 years. At some point you have to let go.’ Another military official in Seoul said when Roh was elected: ‘There is a real sense of mourning here’ (on his military base). Meanwhile, American business interests warned that troop withdrawals would cause investors to ‘seriously reconsider . . . their plans here’. It’s amazing that this combination of irritability and condescension should seem so unremarkable both to the people who make such comments, and (often) to the reporters who quote them. A recent Gallup Poll in South Korea showed an increase in the number of those who ‘disliked’ the United States from 15 per cent in 1994 to 53 per cent in 2003. When they were asked if they ‘liked’ the US 37 per cent said yes, as against 64 per cent in 1994.
Meanwhile, the Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, was planning his own breakthrough with North Korea. Negotiations for a summit with Kim Jong Il ‘had been conducted with the utmost secrecy’ over several months. After a secret visit to Pyongyang in August 2002, an adviser to Koizumi told him the North Koreans were receptive to anything Koizumi might want to discuss, including allegations that the North had in the past kidnapped Japanese citizens. Koizumi finally decided to tell the Bush Administration about his plans on 27 August 2002, when the Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, was visiting Tokyo. Jonathan Pollack later wrote that ‘the absence of prior communication between Japan and the United States on the Prime Minister’s impending visit was remarkable enough in its own right. In the context of recent Intelligence findings about North Korea’s [nuclear] enrichment activities, the Prime Minister’s last-minute disclosure . . . was even more stunning to American officials.’
Soon James Kelly was in Tokyo, where he spent three days tabling his evidence about the North’s nuclear-enrichment programme and trying to persuade Koizumi not to meet Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang. He failed. Koi-zumi flew off in mid-September, and Kim Jong Il took the unprecedented step of admitting that his regime had indeed kidnapped a number of Japanese, for espionage purposes. This caused outrage in Japan, and instead of a diplomatic breakthrough, Koizumi had a huge public relations problem on his hands. A few weeks later Kelly showed up in Pyongyang, to confront the North with this same ‘evidence’, which had the effect of derailing a further rapprochement between Pyongyang and Tokyo, and providing a weapon with which to pressure Roh Moo Hyun back into the fold.
I was in Seoul when Koizumi’s summit was announced, a day or two after John Bolton (the so-called ‘Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control’ in an Administration that has wrecked arms control) arrived to denounce Kim Jong Il personally and his regime more generally as evil, a menace to peace, the greatest security threat in the region etc. He did this again in the summer of 2003, as six-party talks on the North Korean problem were about to be held in Beijing. A brutal tyrant had North Korea in the grip of ‘a hellish nightmare’, he said, causing Armitage publicly to distance himself from Bolton’s rhetoric. When a reporter from the Times asked Bolton what the Bush policy was towards the North, ‘he strode over to a bookshelf, pulled off a volume and slapped it on the table. It was called The End of North Korea , and was by an American Enterprise Institute colleague. “That,” he said, “is our policy.“‘
It is the President’s policy, too. From the beginning of his term, Bush has denounced Kim Jong Il as an untrustworthy madman, a ‘pygmy’, an ‘evildoer’. In a recent discussion with Bob Woodward, he blurted out, ‘I loathe Kim Jong Il,’ shouting and ‘waving his finger in the air’. He also declared his preference for ‘toppling’ the North Korean regime. (Maybe Bush’s resentments have something to do with the widespread perception that both leaders owe their position to Daddy.)
Shortly before the 50th anniversary of the end of the Korean War in 1953, the former Defense Secretary William Perry gave a harrowing interview to the Washington Post. He had just finished extensive consultations with senior officials in the Bush Administration, the South Korean President and senior officials in China. ‘I think we are losing control’ of the situation, he said: we are on a ‘path to war’. North Korea might soon have enough nuclear warheads to begin exploding them in tests or exporting them to terrorists. ‘The nuclear programme now underway in North Korea poses an imminent danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in American cities,’ he charged—an absurdity, since in retaliation the US would turn the North into ‘a charcoal briquette’ (Colin Powell’s expression). But then Perry got to the main point: Bush just won’t enter into serious talks with Pyongyang. ‘The reason we don’t have a policy on this, and we aren’t negotiating,’ he suggested, ‘is the President himself. I think he has come to the conclusion that Kim Jong Il is evil and loathsome and it is immoral to negotiate with him.’ Thus do an insecure, reclusive dictator and an insecure, impulsive foreign affairs naif hold the peace of the world in their hands. A less alarmist and, with luck, more accurate view came from Jae-Jung Suh, a scholar who knows as much about Korean security as anyone: ‘The fundamental difference between Clinton’s near success and Bush’s stalemate lies . . . in his refusal to end the enmity between the two nations.’
During the Iraq War Colin Powell gained control—perhaps temporarily—of Korea policy (the Vulcan Group of Pentagon civilian appointees complained that they were too distracted to block what he was doing) and persuaded Bush to allow Kelly to meet the North Koreans again, in Beijing in April, and then to participate in the six-party talks that China arranged at the end of August. David Sanger heralded these talks as a sign that the Administration had fundamentally altered its approach to the North. The mess in Iraq had enhanced Powell’s stature, another reporter wrote, and Bush had decided he needed help from UN allies and friends after all. Time will tell if Bush’s sudden desire for talks with the North and assistance from other countries really signifies a change; optimistic analysts said similar things when Powell took the Iraq problem to the UN in September 2002. If it does, and if Bush gets an agreement, he will only be back where the Clinton Administration was when he took over.
For more than a decade, the North Koreans have been trying to get American officials to understand that genuine give- and-take negotiations on their nuclear programme could be successful, based on the terms of a ‘package deal’ that they first tabled in November 1993. The North has steadfastly said it would give up its nukes and missiles in return for a formal end to the Korean War, a termination of mutual hostility, the lifting of numerous economic and technological embargoes, diplomatic recognition, and direct or indirect compensation for giving up very expensive programmes. Their willingness to do this was tested in 1994, when they froze their nuclear complex and kept it frozen under the eyes of UN inspectors for eight years.
Michael O’Hanlon and Mike Mochizuki recently revived what they describe in Crisis on the Korean Peninsula: How to Deal with a Nuclear North Korea (McGraw-Hill, 172 pp., $19.95, July, 0071431551) as a ‘grand diplomatic bargain’: in return for a verifiable end to the North’s nuclear programmes, a ban on selling and testing its missiles, a steep cut in its conventional forces, outward-looking economic reforms and the beginnings of a dialogue about human rights in the North (or the lack of them), Washington should be ready to respond with a non-aggression pledge, a peace treaty that would finally end the Korean War, full diplomatic relations, and an aid programme of ‘perhaps $2 billion a year for a decade’ (that burden to be shared with America’s allies). They muster a host of nuanced, clever and convincing arguments in support of their strategy, with the ultimate goal ‘a gradual, soft, “velvet” form of regime change—even if Kim Jong Il holds onto power throughout the process’. We could have that, or we could have more dangerous drift in US policy, or a terrible war. Unfortunately, the choice is in the hands of a capricious Administration that listens to nobody, and a jumpy group in Pyongyang.
Many believe that the North Korean regime is among the most despicable on earth (I watched a former US Ambassador to Japan lecture President Roh on this point at a Blue House meeting on the day after Roh’s inauguration), and that for a tyrant like Kim Jong Il to get his hands on nuclear weapons would be a calamity, to be stopped at all costs. I would urge those who think this way to remember that 23 million people live in the North, that the country has had huge piles of chemical weapons for decades, and perhaps biological weapons, too; we have deterred them from using these weapons for half a century with our nuclear weapons, and if the North deters the warmongers among the Vulcan Group with those same weapons, that may be the best we can hope for.
The ‘North Korean problem’ is an outgrowth of a terrible history going all the way back to the collapse of the international system in the Great Depression and the world war that followed it, a history throughout which the Korean people have suffered beyond measure and beyond any American’s imagination. We could have solved the North Korean problem years ago but our leaders have chosen not to try (Clinton is an exception), and in this new century we are all the worse for it.
31 October 2003
Bruce Cumings teaches in the history department at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is North Korea: Another Country. This article appeared in The London Review of Books, December 4, 2003.
-America’s Empire of Bases
by Chalmers Johnson
As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize—or do not want to recognize—that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire—an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can’t begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.
Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers whose names sum up our martial heritage—Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan. We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another.........
-Japan Through the Eyes of a “Quasi-Refugee”
by Suh Kyungsik
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A QUASI-REFUGEE
I first became aware of the relevance of the idea of refugee to my own life when I read Ghassan Kanafani’s writing in the late 1970s. Kanafani (b. 1936), a Palestinian refugee, was a spokesman for the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In 1972 he was assassinated in Beirut by a car bomb. Kanafani’s work, which appeared first in Japanese and then in Korean translation, also played an important role in the South Korean pro-democracy movement during the 1970s. Korean movement leaders such as Paik Nak-Chung were inspired by Arab literatures of resistance, and called for South Koreans to define their own struggles as part of a global Third World liberation movement.
At the time, this claim resonated with me, a resident Korean in Japan, for several reasons. First, my elder brothers had been jailed and horribly brutalized by the despotic regime of South Korean leader Park Chung Hee for political crimes. And there was also the question of national identity.
I can name several of Kanafani’s works that have had a large impact on my thinking: his critical essay on the literature of resistance in Occupied Palestine and his fiction “Returning to Haifa” and Men in the Sun. It was through these writings that I realized that I came to understand the notions of “Third World identity” and “refugee self identity.” Indeed, through Kanafani’s works, I came to the realization that I myself am a refugee of sorts.
In “Returning to Haifa” (1969), Kanafani tells the story of a married Palestinian couple who, during the 1967 Six Day War, return to the home in Haifa that they had been forced to flee during the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948. They find immigrants from Eastern European living there. Not only has their former home been occupied, but the Israeli couple has also adopted their eldest son Khaldun, who they had inadvertently left behind when they fled Haifa twenty years earlier. As they leave, the Palestinian man says to his wife, “The homeland is where none of this can happen.” About their second son Khalid, who was born in a refugee camp, he says “For Kalid, the homeland is the future.” In other words, home is less a matter of territory, land, blood, or even a particular culture or tradition. Home is a conscious decision about the future made under specific political conditions.
These insights have helped me to resolve my long struggle over the idea of homeland. As a resident Korean born and raised in Japan, I came to conceive of a future homeland where certain things “are not supposed to happen.” I confess feeling a keen interest in the son in Kanafani’s story, a man who had been raised as an Israeli and thus was an enemy of his own Palestinian biological parents and brother. We Resident Koreans are constantly torn in our loyalty to two cultures, like the two brothers in Kanafani’s story.
-Dollar vs. Dinar; Smoking Gun = False Alarm; Shiites Demand Democracy
From the New Standard. Support the newly debuted New Standard and help it provide the kind of thoroughly researched hard news that is needed to fill the void left by the mianstream press:
Jan 15 - Dollar Sags vs. Iraqi Dinar, Leaving Economy Unstable
What most Western economists are referring to as the “strengthening” of the Iraqi dinar may be leading the Iraqi economy toward hardship. While it is good news for some currency traders and speculators that the new dinar is gaining value against the dollar, critics have noted that for many Iraqis, including those employed by the Coalition Provisional Authority and paid in US dollars, it amounts to less buying power per paycheck.
Agence France-Presse reported that currency traders in Baghdad were paying as little as 1,000 dinars per US dollar on Wednesday, whereas late last Fall the dollar garnered nearly 2,000 dinars.
The BBC cited unnamed analysts, plus one of its own employees, as crediting a simple increase in the number of transactions, the “gradual pick-up of the Iraqi economy” and “hopes of a surge of US funds into the country” for the dinar’s significant rise over the past two months.
But Iraqi economists are widely suggesting that currency speculators, mostly based in Jordan and Kuwait, are smuggling, buying and hording large amounts of the new dinar. The Deputy Governor of Iraq’s Central Bank, Ahmad Salman al-Juboory, told AFP there was widespread suspicion that 25,000 dinar notes were being carried across the border. There, it is suggested, foreign speculators hold onto the currency while Iraqis respond en masse to the jolt in value—itself caused in part by the speculators—and aggressively exchange dollars for dinars, causing a massive spike in the dinar’s exchange value.
In the short term, for Iraqis who are paid in US dollars, this translates into a drastic, nearly 50 percent reduction in the value of a paycheck. Journalist Dahr Jamail writes in Electronic Iraq that, combined with rising grocery prices resulting from food shortages and 60 percent unemployment, the situation threatens to lead to sharp increases in crime and even stronger opposition to the US-led occupation of Iraq.
For more information:
“Economic Crisis, Threats of Jihad and More Violence in Iraq” (Electronic Intifada)
See reporter Brian Dominick’s comments on this story: The Iraqi people are getting economically shafted, and the whole world seems to be applauding it, albeit while pretending everything is A-OK. I can picture the phony grins on the economists’ faces when they ignore bold-faced reality, re-write well-understood economic truisms, and somehow manage to say things like “the Iraqi economy is doing well.”
The full commentary is here:
“Iraqi Economics 101 (BBC Listen Up!)”
‘Mustard Gas’ Shells Turn Into Another Dead End, Head Inspector Quits
Initial laboratory tests performed by Danish and American scientists on Thursday have shown mortar shells thought to contain banned chemical weapons are in fact just another false alarm. The “discovery,” widely reported earlier this week as the uncovering of banned weapons in Iraq, is quietly being reported today as the latest in a series of false positives obtained by field tests only to be later disproved by laboratory checks.
On January 10, Danish troops claimed to have discovered some 50 mortar rounds, which they said initially tested positive for traces of a blistering agent known as mustard gas. The deeply buried, short range munitions, thought to date back to the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, were most likely rendered useless by heavy corrosion. Nevertheless, numerous Western observers referred to them as a “smoking gun” that “vindicated” proponents of the invasion of Iraq.
Further tests to be performed in the US are expected by US military officials to prove conclusively that the uncovered shells were conventionally armed and not laced with mustard gas or other chemical agents. According to the Associated Press, the Pentagon has conceded that tests used by Coalition forces in the field are set to err on the side of indicating positive results.
In a related story, Reuters cites an unnamed intelligence source as saying that David Kay, the CIA’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq, is refusing to return to Iraq and carry on the hunt for banned weapons following an extended stateside Christmas holiday. According to Reuters, this news is expected to be seized upon by critics as a sign that Kay has given up hope of finding chemical or biological weapons in Iraq.
Iraqi Protesters Demand Elections
Thousands of Shiite Muslims turned out Thursday in Basra to demand the popular election of an interim Iraqi legislature before the July 1 deadline set by the United States for the dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
The protests, which the AP says involved at least 20-30,000 participants, are a response to plans revealed by the CPA which would leave the appointment of Iraq’s first legislators of the post-Saddam Hussein era up to a “provisional caucus,” delaying actual elections for an additional two years. Outraged by this “transfer” plan, the demonstrators chanted slogans opposing continued United States involvement in the governance of Iraq.
Shiites, the majority ethnic group often characterized as supportive of US efforts in Iraq, have shown signs of increasing frustration toward Western nations’ presence in and governance of Iraq.
Smaller demonstrations were also reported in Ramadi, Baghdad and Mosul.
-U.S. Towns Resisting Patriot Act
Foes organizing in communities
by Thanassis Cambanis
Published on Tuesday, January 20, 2004 by the Boston Globe
More than two centuries ago, the patriots of Brewster shut down the Colonial courts on Cape Cod in one of the first acts of resistance against the tyrannical rule of King George III.
Also See:
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
http://www.bordc.org
Now, deliberately evoking its Revolutionary history, Brewster Town Meeting has formally condemned the antiterrorist USA Patriot Act, united against the laws of a different leader named George.
While the act is largely symbolic—federal law enforcement agencies, not local governments, enforce the Patriot Act’s new search, seizure, and detention provisions—the grass-roots opposition has forged an unlikely alliance of people angry at Washington’s domestic handling of the war on terror. In Brewster, anger at the Patriot Act has drawn together libertarians, an antitax group, and a Unitarian congregation, as well as a more traditional coalition of civil libertarians and antiwar activists.
A similar story has already played out in 16 Massachusetts communities, and 16 more, including Salem, Waltham, Watertown, Gloucester, Beverly, and Bedford are preparing measures against the Patriot Act this spring.
Opponents of the antiterrorism measure say the nascent bipartisan groundswell in communities across the nation signals a growing dissatisfaction with the expansion of federal powers—and will reshape the national debate if it continues to accelerate with support from disparate groups, from gun owners to librarians to fiscal conservatives.
The burgeoning nationwide movement has prompted three state governments, and 236 communities in 37 states, to pass resolutions against the Patriot Act. If the backlash continues to grow, opponents of the Patriot Act believe, their momentum will force Congress and the White House to address some of the law’s unpopular elements.
“If anyone takes time to read the Patriot Act, there’s no question that our First Amendment rights are being eroded,” said James Geisler, treasurer of the Brewster Taxpayers Association, a 52-year-old group whose mission is to curtail government spending.
His family has been Republican “for a hundred years,” Geisler said. But it was loyalty to the Constitution, not party politics, that drove the Taxpayers Association’s board of directors to support the ultimately popular Brewster resolution.
Across the Commonwealth, Republicans, gun lobbyists, and libertarians have taken up the call against the Patriot Act. So have a cadre of previously apolitical people such as Jake Beal, 25, a self-described computer nerd who is now leading the drive for a resolution against the Patriot Act in Somerville.
“It’s the first political issue I’ve taken an active stand in,” said Beal, an MIT graduate student who characterizes himself as a conservative Democrat.
He was spurred to action after hearing the sheriff in his hometown of Portland, Maine, describe the federal government’s new powers at a forum one year ago. The sheriff said immigration officials took a detainee suspected of terrorist activity to an undisclosed location and never told the detainee’s family—or local law enforcement officials—where the suspect was taken or what charges he faced.
The Somerville group has collected 1,200 petition signatures and said the City Council is likely to consider the measure next month.
“These local efforts will build up the pressure nationally,” Beal said. “Wouldn’t you like to live in a community where you know that nobody is going to get `disappeared’ by the federal government?”
Local resolutions aren’t the only vehicle of grass-roots fervor.
Dozens of Commonwealth libraries have purged lending records—or stopped keeping them—to protect patrons from federal agents newly empowered to monitor their reading habits.
“What people read is their own business, and as professional librarians we don’t feel it’s appropriate to share that information,” said Ann Montgomery Smith, librarian at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and president of the Massachusetts Conference of Chief Librarians of Public Higher Educational Institutions.
At her university library, Smith changed the computer system so that lending records are erased as soon as a book is returned.
The US Department of Justice says that such alarm over the Patriot Act is unfounded. Attorney General John Ashcroft, in Boston in September on a nationwide speaking tour to rally support for the legislation, said critics misrepresent the law.
Federal law enforcement officials in Massachusetts have said that they rarely, if ever, use the most controversial provisions of the act—such as the measure allowing federal agents to secretly subpoena library records, or “sneak-and-peek” warrants that allow investigators to conduct a secret search.
Those assertions have done little to allay the increasing anxiety over the Patriot Act, which in New England has drawn in equal measures on strains of Yankee independence, social libertarianism, and liberal progressivism.
In New Hampshire last week, the Legislature began debating a bill to nullify the Patriot Act, sponsored by four Republican representatives who see the legislation as part of a larger trend of federal law overwhelming the independence of states.
The Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union is quietly paving the way for a statewide resolution, said Nancy Murray, who follows the issue for the union. Murray said that as more and more municipalities pass resolutions, state lawmakers will be compelled to follow suit. Alice Weiss, 62, began the petition drive that led to Brewster’s resolution. She found that people she considered politically conservative quickly made it a common cause once they read the Patriot Act. It was after a session in the library studying the text of the bill with Weiss that the conservative Taxpayers Union secretary decided to back the anti-Patriot Act campaign.
“This is not a liberal town,” Weiss said. “I was amazed at the support we got.”
- George W Bush and the REAL State of the Union
Today the President gives his annual address. As the election battle begins, how does his first term add up?
232: Number of American combat deaths in Iraq between May 2003 and January 2004
501: Number of American servicemen to die in Iraq from the beginning of the war - so far
0: Number of American combat deaths in Germany after the Nazi surrender to the Allies in May 1945
0: Number of coffins of dead soldiers returning home from Iraq that the Bush administration has allowed to be photographed
0: Number of funerals or memorials that President Bush has attended for soldiers killed in Iraq
100: Number of fund-raisers attended by Bush or Vice-President Dick Cheney in 2003
13: Number of meetings between Bush and Tony Blair since he became President
10 million: Estimated number of people worldwide who took to the streets in opposition to the invasion of Iraq, setting an all-time record for simultaneous protest
2: Number of nations that Bush has attacked and taken over since coming into the White House
9.2: Average number of American soldiers wounded in Iraq each day since the invasion in March last year
1.6: Average number of American soldiers killed in Iraq per day since hostilities began
16,000: Approximate number of Iraqis killed since the start of war
10,000: Approximate number of Iraqi civilians killed since the beginning of the conflict
$100 billion: Estimated cost of the war in Iraq to American citizens by the end of 2003
$13 billion: Amount other countries have committed towards rebuilding Iraq (much of it in loans) as of 24 October
36%: Increase in the number of desertions from the US army since 1999
92%: Percentage of Iraq’s urban areas that had access to drinkable water a year ago
60%: Percentage of Iraq’s urban areas that have access to drinkable water today
32%: Percentage of the bombs dropped on Iraq this year that were not precision-guided
1983: The year in which Donald Rumsfeld gave Saddam Hussein a pair of golden spurs
45%: Percentage of Americans who believed in early March 2003 that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 11 September attacks on the US
$127 billion: Amount of US budget surplus in the year that Bush became President in 2001
$374 billion: Amount of US budget deficit in the fiscal year for 2003
1st: This year’s deficit is on course to be the biggest in United States history
$1.58 billion: Average amount by which the US national debt increases each day
$23,920: Amount of each US citizen’s share of the national debt as of 19 January 2004
1st: The record for the most bankruptcies filed in a single year (1.57 million) was set in 2002
10: Number of solo press conferences that Bush has held since beginning his term. His father had managed 61 at this point in his administration, and Bill Clinton 33
1st: Rank of the US worldwide in terms of greenhouse gas emissions per capita
$113 million: Total sum raised by the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign, setting a record in American electoral history
$130 million: Amount raised for Bush’s re-election campaign so far
$200m: Amount that the Bush-Cheney campaign is expected to raise in 2004
$40m: Amount that Howard Dean, the top fund-raiser among the nine Democratic presidential hopefuls, amassed in 2003
28: Number of days holiday that Bush took last August, the second longest holiday of any president in US history (Record holder: Richard Nixon)
13: Number of vacation days the average American worker receives each year
3: Number of children convicted of capital offences executed in the US in 2002. America is only country openly to acknowledge executing children
1st: As Governor of Texas, George Bush executed more prisoners (152) than any governor in modern US history
2.4 million: Number of Americans who have lost their jobs during the three years of the Bush administration
221,000: Number of jobs per month created since Bush’s tax cuts took effect. He promised the measure would add 306,000
1,000: Number of new jobs created in the entire country in December. Analysts had expected a gain of 130,000
1st: This administration is on its way to becoming the first since 1929 (Herbert Hoover) to preside over an overall loss of jobs during its complete term in office
9 million: Number of US workers unemployed in September 2003
80%: Percentage of the Iraqi workforce now unemployed
55%: Percentage of the Iraqi workforce unemployed before the war
43.6 million: Number of Americans without health insurance in 2002
130: Number of countries (out of total of 191 recognized by the United Nations) with an American military presence
40%: Percentage of the world’s military spending for which the US is responsible
$10.9 million: Average wealth of the members of Bush’s original 16-person cabinet
88%: Percentage of American citizens who will save less than $100 on their 2006 federal taxes as a result of 2003 cut in capital gains and dividends taxes
$42,000: Average savings members of Bush’s cabinet are expected to enjoy this year as a result in the cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes
$42,228: Median household income in the US in 2001
$116,000: Amount Vice-President Cheney is expected to save each year in taxes
44%: Percentage of Americans who believe the President’s economic growth plan will mostly benefit the wealthy
700: Number of people from around the world the US has incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
1st: George W Bush became the first American president to ignore the Geneva Conventions by refusing to allow inspectors access to US-held prisoners of war
+6%: Percentage change since 2001 in the number of US families in poverty
1951: Last year in which a quarterly rise in US military spending was greater than the one the previous spring
54%: Percentage of US citizens who believe Bush was legitimately elected to his post
1st: First president to execute a federal prisoner in the past 40 years. Executions are typically ordered by separate states and not at federal level
9: Number of members of Bush’s defense policy board who also sit on the corporate board of, or advise, at least one defense contractor
35: Number of countries to which US has suspended military assistance after they failed to sign agreements giving Americans immunity from prosecution before the International Criminal Court
$300 million: Amount cut from the federal program that provides subsidies to poor families so they can heat their homes
$1 billion: Amount of new US military aid promised Israel in April 2003 to offset the “burdens” of the US war on Iraq
58 million: Number of acres of public lands Bush has opened to road building, logging and drilling
200: Number of public-health and environmental laws Bush has attempted to downgrade or weaken
29,000: Number of American troops - which is close to the total of a whole army division - to have either been killed, wounded, injured or become so ill as to require evacuation from Iraq, according to the Pentagon
90%: Percentage of American citizens who said they approved of the way George Bush was handling his job as president when asked on 26 September, 2001
53%: Percentage of American citizens who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president when asked on 16 January, 2004
© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
-Britain prosecutes intelligence employee who reveals U.S. Spying
New York Times Column Today Shines Light on British Whistleblower; Case Involves U.S. Spying at U.N. to Push Iraq War Resolution
WASHINGTON - January 19 - Breaking a silence shared with almost all major U.S. media outlets, the New York Times on Monday (Jan. 19) for the first time informed its readers about Katharine Gun—thanks to a column on its op-ed page. As the British press began reporting two months ago, Gun is a former UK intelligence agency employee now facing charges that she violated the Official Secrets Act.
“Katharine Gun has a much better grasp of the true spirit of democracy than Tony Blair,” writes Times columnist Bob Herbert in today’s piece. “So, naturally, it’s Katharine Gun who’s being punished.”
Herbert’s column, titled “A Single Conscience v. the State,” goes on to explain: “Ms. Gun, 29, was working at Britain’s top-secret Government Communications Headquarters last year when she learned of an American plan to spy on at least a half-dozen U.N. delegations as part of the U.S. effort to win Security Council support for an invasion of Iraq.” The plan “included e-mail surveillance and taps on home and office telephones.” It was outlined “in a highly classified National Security Agency memo. The agency, which was seeking British assistance in the project, was interested in ‘the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals.’”
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/opinion/19HERB.html?ex=1075490497&ei=1&en=11973e164e33f4d7
Gun’s latest court appearance in London was today. On Sunday, the Observer newspaper in London published an in-depth news article that shed additional light on the prosecution of Gun, who has said that disclosure of the NSA memo “exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the U.S. government.” She plans to invoke a necessity defense—arguing that she had sought “to prevent wide-scale death and casualties among ordinary Iraqi people and UK forces in the course of an illegal war.”
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,1125812,00.html
On Dec. 17, the Institute for Public Accuracy issued a news release about the prosecution of Katharine Gun ("New Developments in Case of U.S. Spying on U.N. Security Council"). An article about her, written by IPA Executive Director Norman Solomon, appeared in the Baltimore Sun on Dec. 14 and a few other newspapers, including the Boston Globe (Dec. 20).
http://www.accuracy.org/NS121403.htm
http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR121703a.htm
-In the U.S. they arrest the poor when they can’t pay their doctor bills
How Hospitals Are Gouging and Even Arresting the Uninsured
By The Staff of Democracy Now!
What do the Emir of Kuwait and the working poor of the United States have in common? Not much, except when it comes to paying for health care in the United States. They all pay the highest price: up to 500% more than the hospital receives from insured patients.
That’s because hospitals negotiate discounts with big institutions like insurance companies, HMOs or the government that require payment of only a fraction of the listed charges. Those institutions have substantial bargaining power and can guarantee hospitals a certain number of patients. Uninsured people, on the other hand, have no bargaining power and are left to fend for themselves once they get their bills.
Jennifer Kankiewicz was rushed to New York’s Beth Israel Hospital in July 2002 for an emergency appendectomy and was hospitalized for two days. “I waited through a day’s worth of not being able to get out of bed because I didn’t have health insurance,” recalls Kankiewicz. “The next day, a friend drove me to the hospital in an emergency and we went to the closest hospital we knew of.”
Kankiewicz had an emergency appendectomy. “They provided great service,” she says. The hospital “reassured me that I could apply for Medicaid assistance. So I thought, maybe Medicaid would help me with the $24,000 that it cost me.”
Though Kankiewicz is poor, she was not poor enough. She was denied Medicaid assistance because she makes $19,000 a year. In order to qualify for Medicaid, Kankiewicz either needed to be pregnant, disabled or earn less than $350 a month. Though she was able to convince her surgeon to slightly reduce the charges, she still faces over $19,000 in hospital bills, more than her annual salary. She says she is being billed by six separate billing groups and, unlike the big insurance companies; Kankiewicz has no negotiating power with the hospital or its collection agencies.
Read the full story here.
