Activists won’t be fooled by summit PR
Protesters say people know free trade pact is for corporate gain

By Allan Thompson

Ottawa, Canada, Apr. 13— People won’t be fooled by a government public relations offensive just days before the Quebec City Summit of the Americas, organizers of the alternative People’s Summit said yesterday.

The bottom line is that a proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas would still put corporate interests ahead of human rights, the environment, labor standards and other vital issues, the activists told a news conference.

And more and more Canadians are joining the movement to oppose government efforts to negotiate a hemispheric free trade pact, they said.

“There has been so much interest and so much concern across the country and within the hemisphere about these negotiations . . . I find it hard to see that trying to manage the issue by press release is going to (make it) evaporate tomorrow,” said Rieky Stuart, Oxfam Canada executive director.

Hassan Yusuf, executive vice-president of the Canadian Labor Congress, said governments are “playing to the media to try and assert that they are concerned about other issues than free trade in the Americas.”

Yusuf said there is still no sign that a free trade deal would help to fight poverty, improve working conditions or help people take control of their lives.

International Co-operation Minister Maria Minna yesterday announced Canada would contribute $25 million to support “fragile” democratization efforts in Latin America.

Marc Lortie, senior Canadian organizer for the Quebec city summit, told reporters earlier this week that promoting democracy in the hemisphere will be the summit centerpiece.

Draft communiqué makes democracy essential to summit

Leaders might spend as little as 15 minutes talking about the trade pact itself and a “democratic clause” being drafted for approval by the 34 leaders would say only democracies can join the summit process, Lortie said.

According to a draft copy of the summit’s final declaration obtained by Reuters yesterday, democracy is an “essential condition” of a country’s presence at this month’s and future summits. Cuba has been excluded from the Quebec meeting.

“Any unconstitutional alteration or interruption of the democratic order in a state of the hemisphere constitutes a fundamental obstacle to the participation of the state’s government in the Summit of the Americas process,” the draft states.

The 48-page declaration and plan of action, dated March 26, also calls for a stronger Organization of American States and an anti-poverty initiative to reduce by half the number of people living in poverty in the Americas by 2015. It does not refer to the free trade pact itself, which is expected to run as long as 900 pages.

International Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew has heralded the decision to make public a draft text of the proposed pact as a sign of unprecedented openness, even though it won’t be available before next week’s summit.

Activists call it window dressing.

“Our government is engaged in a major PR offensive against the citizens of Canada,” said Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians.

“I think we’ve become the new Soviet Union. We’re the target of the biggest police security operation in modern Canadian history and it’s an offense,” she said, of the mounting police and security presence in Quebec city.

“We’re jaded about this now . . . only the words of the text matter. Not the preamble, not all the nice meetings we have, not all the nice things that governments say to us.”

Source: MainLine News

Palestinian girl shot as Israeli soldiers fire on school protest

Al-Khader, West Bank, April 12— A seven-year-old Palestinian girl was shot in the face by Israeli soldiers firing rubber bullets when clashes erupted in a West Bank village, authorities said.

Children started throwing stones at Israeli soldiers posted next to a girls’ school in the village after the Israeli army fired tear gas canisters into the school, a school employee told AFP.

Two Palestinian teenage boys were also shot by rubber bullets outside the school during the demonstration, medical personnel said.

Two other girls and three teachers were treated for tear gas inhalation, one of them in hospital, and the school was closed off after the incident, they said.

The incident occurred after an Israeli soldier was wounded when Palestinians opened fire on a road passing between the nearby village of Beit Jala and the Jewish settlement of Gilo in east Jerusalem, where exchanges of fire have been common during the Palestinian uprising.

The road, which links east Jerusalem to Israeli settlements in the south of the West Bank, was closed to traffic.

A heavy exchange of fire erupted between Israeli troops and Palestinian forces after security officials turned away around 30 soldiers trying to enter the Palestinian-controlled area to search houses in Beit Jala, witnesses said.

Tanks fired at least three shells on to the village, they said.

Source: Agence France-Presse

Tens of thousands protest Turkish financial crisis

Turkish riot police hide behind their shields to protect themselves from stone throwing demonstrators in Ankara, Turkey, on April 11, 2001.

Compiled by Brendan Conley

April 11— Tens of thousands of Turks clashed with police Wednesday and more than 200 were injured in a protest in Ankara demanding the resignation of the government amid a crippling financial crisis.

Police fired in the air and used water cannons and tear gas to disperse a crowd of more than 70,000 after demonstrators threw stones, bricks and pieces of wood at police in downtown Ankara, the capital. The protesters were demanding to be allowed to walk to the parliament building.

Scores of demonstrators, policemen and journalists were injured by flying objects, and many officers were forced to hide behind armored vehicles to protect themselves.

At least 202 people, including 137 police officers, were treated in hospitals, the Anatolia news agency reported. Three people, including one policeman, were reported in serious condition.

A group of demonstrators, most of them shop owners, used a truck to ram into a police armored personnel carrier. Paramilitary police wearing bulletproof vests were called in as reinforcements but were later pulled back.

Demonstrators tore large stones from sidewalks and set up barricades before police finally succeeded in forcing the protesters out of a large square in central Ankara.

Groups of protesters smashed shop windows around Ankara’s main square.

Scores were being detained by police, who beat demonstrators with nightsticks.

Interior Minister Sadettin Tantan condemned the violence, saying that illegal groups may have infiltrated the demonstration, private television NTV reported. He did not specify which groups, but officials had earlier accused Islamic groups of trying to take advantage of the protests.

Wednesday was the largest protest since the latest economic crisis that has seen the lira fall by more than 40 percent, interest rates skyrocket and a half-million layoffs.

Critics have pointed to the government’s reluctance to carry out structural reforms, including restructuring the banking sector and swiftly privatizing key state companies, as the main cause of the crisis.

Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit said Wednesday his government had no plans to leave office.

“If they are shouting ‘resign,’’’ Ecevit said, “they also have to provide an alternative. I am not glued to my chair.’’

“I do not believe that the search for a new government would help the country, therefore I am staying at my post,’’ Ecevit said.

Within the current parliament, there are few alternatives to Ecevit’s three-party coalition government.

At least 40,000 people marched in the Aegean port city of Izmir, where shopkeepers refused to open their shops. Another 20,000 people marched through the central Anatolian city of Konya.

There is growing wariness here of the foreign hand now tentatively extended to help bail Turkey out of its crippling economic crisis.

Where once some felt confidence in reforms backed by such bodies as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), suspicion is now nourished by rising prices and unemployment. That suspicion, in turn, feeds an insularism more typical of Turkey 20 years ago.

“The way out of this crisis must come from within Turkey,” says Ali Sahin, who sells dried fruits and nuts at his father’s shop beneath Ankara’s 7th century citadel. “We need to do our selling and buying in Turkish lira, not marks or dollars.

Ali Sahin says the root of the crisis lies with Turkey’s now-defunct $11.5 billion anti-inflation pact with the Washington-based IMF.

The government was due to announce a new economic program on Saturday that it hopes will win IMF support and new loans from Western government.

But many Turks believe more foreign credit will only strain Turkey further and bring about more hardship and unemployment.

“The IMF has for years been Turkey’s enemy,” says Cemal Ergunce, 60, as he waits for a bus. “They are eating us alive.

Sources: Associated Press, Reuters

Witnesses say Colombia paramilitaries killed 25 civilians

By Jason Webb

Bogota, Colombia, Apr. 14— Far-right paramilitary fighters have killed at least 25 civilians in the rural Colombian locality of Naya because they suspected them of collaborating with leftist rebels, an official and witnesses said on Saturday.

The killings began when a squad of 400 paramilitaries entered the area on the River Naya near the Pacific Coast about 240 miles southwest of the capital, Bogota, said people who fled from Naya.

“So far the data we have at the state ombudsman’s office indicates there were more than 25 murders among the peasants. The corpses are strewn along the road,” Eduardo Cifuentes, Colombia’s official ombudsman, who monitors human rights issues, told reporters.

Naya is strategically key for controlling the flow of cocaine to the Pacific, local television said, citing army sources.

Colombia is locked in a 37-year-old, three-way war pitting leftist rebels against the armed forces and the illegal paramilitaries. About 40,000 people have been killed in fighting in the past 10 years alone, and 2 million others have been forced to flee their homes.

In another reported attack this week, the army said on Saturday that people fleeing from the area of Isnos in the southern province of Huila told it that members of Colombia’s largest leftist rebel group, the FARC, had killed 44 locals for refusing to pay extortion money.

But an army officer told Reuters that the troops were still facing armed resistance in the area and had not been able to fight their way to the alleged massacre site to confirm the reports.

Paramilitaries growing fast

The paramilitaries — grouped in the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC — often target and kill civilians they suspect of aiding rebels. Despite public revulsion at their often brutal methods, paramilitary ranks are estimated to have grown ninefold to 8,000 fighters in the past eight years.

They are funded by ranchers and businessmen tired of the inability of the armed forces to defeat the guerrillas. They, like the Marxist rebels of the 17,000-member FARC — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — draw substantial funds from the massive local cocaine trade.

AUC Commander Carlos Castano posted a letter on his Internet site late on Friday addressed to world leaders, including President Bush. Castano, a former army scout, criticized Colombian President Andres Pastrana’s attempts to negotiate peace with the FARC and the smaller ELN, or National Liberation Army, and called for international intervention in Colombia.

Castano, writing from a secret hide-out, warned of the “destabilization of the South American region by an imminent civil war in our country.”

The paramilitaries have been locked in combat in the south of Bolivar province with the FARC and the Cuban-inspired ELN since early March, when the army pulled out of the area. The army has confirmed the deaths of 26 paramilitary and rebel fighters, but refugees from the area say the real figure is higher.

The United States is providing Colombia with about $1 billion in mainly military aid for Pastrana’s “Plan Colombia” anti-drug offensive.

Source: Reuters