Amnesty International criticizes Middle East policies

By Laurie Copans

Jerusalem, Israel, Sept. 28— Amnesty International said Friday that Israel has violated the human rights of Palestinians by imposing stifling closures, carrying out targeted killings and firing at civilian areas in a year of Mideast fighting.

The Palestinian Authority has not done enough to prevent shooting attacks on Israeli civilians and “extra-judicial killings” -- assassinations -- of suspected informers for Israel, the London-based human rights group said in a report on the fighting that broke out a year ago.

The Israeli closures have kept tens of thousands of Palestinian workers from jobs in Israel and have severely disrupted life in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Amnesty said the closures — imposed to prevent attacks by Palestinian militants, including suicide bombings — constitute collective punishment.

“By denying a whole population the right to move, the Israeli authorities are not stopping suicide bombers who can pass through on foot,” Amnesty said. “The closures are a grave human rights violation.”

An Israeli army spokesman, Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowicz, said the closures were designed to keep militants out of Israel, and were not meant to punish civilians.

Amnesty said Israel must stop targeted killings of suspected Palestinian militants. About 50 Palestinians have been killed in such attacks, including several bystanders.

Rafowicz said the targets of the killings were “terrorists who are personally involved” in planning attacks on Israelis.

Amnesty also said troops should avoid “reckless and random shooting” at residential areas. During the fighting, Israeli soldiers have shot at Palestinian neighborhoods in retaliation for what the army said were shooting attacks from the areas against Israelis.

The human rights group said Israel has arrested more than 1,500 Palestinians in the past year, and that many of the detainees were tortured. Some of the detainees were held incommunicado for at least 20 days, the group said.

Another group, the World Organization Against Torture, accused Israel and the Palestinians of torturing prisoners in a report it put out Friday.

“Torture has been used by both sides throughout the year, most notably by the Israeli General Security Services during the interrogation of Palestinian detainees,” the Geneva-based group said.

Israeli torture methods included sleep deprivation, shackling prisoners in painful positions, exposure to extreme cold and heat, beatings, and threats, the group said.

Rafowicz denied the allegations of torture and said Palestinians are detained in accordance with “all rules and moral values” of the Israeli military. The detentions are carried out to prevent violence against Israel, he said.

Palestinian Authority security officers have arrested many Palestinians on suspicion of collaborating with Israel and used torture to extract confessions, said the World Organization against Torture.

Amnesty said the Palestinian Authority should stop “extra-judicial killings” of Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel.

Since two Palestinians were executed by a firing squad in January for collaborating with Israel, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has succumbed to international pressure not to allow additional executions.

Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi said the Palestinian Authority supported the rule of law and that there should be “due process and open and fair trials” for suspected collaborators.

Amnesty said the Palestinian Authority must do more to prevent attacks on Israeli civilians, whether in road ambushes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or in suicide bombings in Israel.

Source: Associated Press

Saboteurs cripple Nigerian oil plant

By Ray Kennedy and Daniel Wallis

Johannesburg, Oct. 1— Armed youths who seized control of an oil station in southern Nigeria caused a huge explosion that could halt production for up to 18 months.

The owner, Royal Dutch/Shell, said that the sabotage could cost $25 million. After the attack on the Olomoro flow station, a build-up of pressure in the tanks erupted, spewing crude oil over hundreds of yards of woodland. The raid appeared to have been linked to demands for contracts for local people.

A Shell statement said: “Although the attackers did not make any formal demands, some of them are reported to have asked why the company was doing the work a contractor should be doing.” Local reports said that police arrested about 40 youths in the surrounding area after the attack last Thursday.

Frank Efeduma, a Shell official in the oil-producing town of Warri, 35 miles southwest of Oloromo, said: “It will be shut down for the next 18 months and it will cost $25 million to bring it back on stream. If you calculate what Shell and the nation will lose, it will be enormous. This was a criminal act.”

Olomoro and the Owhe gas-to-liquids facility that depends on it produce 40,000 barrels of crude oil a day. Oil is the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy and the Anglo-Dutch company produces nearly half of the country’s daily crude oil output of two million barrels a day. However, its facilities have suffered many attacks by gangs of militants.

The vast majority of Nigerians have missed any benefits from its vast oil wealth, particularly during the years of rule by military dictatorships. The oil industry has been accused of causing widespread pollution and environmental damage.

The consequences of the raid on the Olomoro flow station will probably be among the most serious so far. Oil workers have been kidnapped frequently by militants to be used as bargaining chips for jobs, contracts or amenities for their communities.

Shell’s role in Nigeria has been the subject of continuing controversy. Over the years, a series of leaks and fires at oil installations owned by Shell and other oil companies have devastated communities, mainly in the southeast of the country. The companies say that they clean up spills and pay compensation, but often the affected areas are so isolated that it can take days before the companies even know about a leak or an explosion.

In May Donald Boham, a Shell spokesman, said that up to 14 of its abandoned Nigerian oil wells could explode without warning. In October 1998 more than 500 people were killed by a fire from a ruptured pipeline in the southern province of Ogoniland. Local newspapers said that many of those killed had been trying to collect the leaking fuel with cups, funnels and petrol cans.

Shell was forced to stop production in Ogoniland in 1993 after a campaign by the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, who accused the company of widespread pollution. Shell has said that its oil facilities in Ogoniland are regularly subjected to sabotage, but Ogoni activists have claimed to be shocked by such suggestions.

Saro-Wiwa and eight other human rights activists were executed by the military Government of Sani Abacha in 1995, leading to Nigeria’s expulsion from the Commonwealth until May 1999.

Source: www.thetimes.co.uk

Activists say military abuses in Indonesia are on the rise

By Bob Burton

Canberra, Indonesia, Sept. 24 (IPS)— John Rumbiak, a human rights advocate from the Indonesian province of West Papua, had a sobering message for his audiences around Australia last week. “Since Megawati became president, the human rights situation has become worse.”

It is a view Amnesty International agrees with. “In Aceh and Papua, (or Irian Jaya) it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the current government and that of (former) President Suharto,” said Amnesty spokesman Damien Spry.

“Agents of the state are resorting to the same tactics of intimidating, imprisoning, torturing and killing those suspected of opposing Jakarta’s rule,” he added.

International pressure on President Megawati Sukornoputri to reform the military is easing as the United States scrambles to enlist support from Muslim nations, of which Indonesia is the most populous, for its planned retaliation against suspected Muslim terrorist groups.

Last Thursday, US President George Bush, who met with the Indonesian leader in Washington, agreed on an economic support package as well as resuming military contact with Jakarta and lifting the embargo on arms sales that was imposed after the military rampage in East Timor in late 1999.

Megawati was among the first leaders to support US moves against Osama bin Laden and allied groups, which have supporters in Indonesia.

It is a policy shift that alarms Amnesty International, which argues that the military is continuing to commit serious human rights violations in the provinces of Aceh and West Papua where pro-independence movements are active.

“Any military assistance to Indonesia must be targeted at the core issues of institutional reform, accountability and transparency,” Spry said. “Under these circumstances, exporting arms or engaging in operational training with Indonesia would send completely the wrong message.”

Rumbiak, who supervises the Jayapura-based Institute for Human Rights Study and Advocacy (ELSHAM) also warns that the crackdown by the military and police in West Papua has gone beyond the armed independence groups.

“Newspaper editors were summoned three weeks ago due to reporting our press conference. The military are not only targeting political activists but now human rights activists and the media also,” he said.

A little over a week ago several ELSHAM staff were called in for interrogation by police after working on an investigation into human rights abuses by the military.

West Papua province, populated by people of Melanesian descent who have mostly converted to Christianity, is growing increasingly resentful and defiant towards the Indonesian military-backed government.

“The repression must stop. We appeal to the police forces and the hard-liners amongst the independence activists to agree to a cease- fire. Bullets, arrows and spears will not reduce the problem, but only create more,” he said.

The crackdown is the latest step in the military reasserting its control over the province since the fall of the Suharto military dictatorship. In 1999 then President Abdurrahmad Wahid gave his blessing and provided funding for the convening of a Papuan Congress in May 2000, which brought together 500 official delegates from all parts of the province.

The Congress ended with the adoption of a resolution in support of independence and high hopes of political progress. However, in the subsequent crackdown on the independence movement, the majority of the political leadership have been arrested and imprisoned.

The lack of international attention on the deteriorating human rights climate in West Papua frustrates Rumbiak. “Why the silence of the international community? Because of concerns about sovereignty and economic interests,” he said.

Study analyzes corporate challenges to democratic governance under NAFTA

Statement of TradeWatch

Sept. 24— In what is becoming a growing threat to democratic governance and state sovereignty, corporations are using new rights and privileges granted under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to challenge a variety of national, state, and local policies and decisions, according to a new report. The report, “NAFTA Chapter 11 Investor-to-State Cases: Bankrupting Democracy,” was produced by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and Friends of the Earth. It reviews the track record of cases brought under NAFTA’s investment chapter, which granted expansive new rights and privileges to foreign investors operating in the three NAFTA signatory nations: Mexico, Canada, and the United States.

Since NAFTA was implemented in 1994, corporate investors in all three countries have used these new investor rights to challenge a variety of national, state, and local policies and decisions. Corporations claim that these governmental regulatory policies are “tantamount to” an expropriation of private property and therefore require compensation from the taxpayers of the country in which they are investing. Of the fifteen cases reviewed in the report, companies have claimed more than $13 billion in compensation for actions that most consider to be normal regulatory activity.

The issue is timely because President Bush has asked Congress to delegate to him six years of constitutional authority over international trade through a process called Fast Track. Bush seeks Fast Track trade authority to expand NAFTA rules to an additional thirty-one Latin American nations by 2005 through the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). In as much as certain members of Congress are trying to bring Fast Track to a floor vote this fall, analysis of the impacts of seven years of NAFTA is urgently needed.

“The study documents a number of extraordinary attacks on normal government activities that are part of operating the civil justice system or legislative work establishing environmental or public health regulation,” said California State Senator Sheila Kuehl.

The report’s findings include:

* Negative effect on public interest policy: In the first NAFTA corporate case, the US Ethyl corporation filed a suit challenging a Canadian environmental and public health measure restricting a gasoline additive it developed as the ban was being debated in parliament. The Canadian government caved in to pressure, revoked its law and compensated the corporation $13 million, demonstrating that the potential to bully even governments of wealthy developed countries under Chapter 11 is enormous.

* NAFTA environmental protections are meaningless: In the NAFTA corporate investor challenges decided to date, NAFTA text language purporting to protect the environment has been given such short shrift by NAFTA tribunals as to render these so-called protections meaningless. In one case involving the construction of a toxic waste treatment facility in Mexico, the environmental and health concerns of the community were given little to no consideration by the NAFTA tribunal that ruled in the company’s favor.

* Governments are subject to second-guessing by NAFTA tribunals: A tribunal in one case found that Canada’s temporary ban of PCB exports based on environmental concerns was reasonable. However, the tribunal also ruled that Canada’s actions were a NAFTA violation and the company deserved compensation because the manner in which Canada sought to implement its environmental goal was not in the least trade restrictive manner possible.

* Potential cost to taxpayers in the billions: In the end, it is the taxpayers of the challenged country who must pay the compensation to a corporation if it succeeds in its NAFTA suit. In the first seven years of NAFTA, with only a small number of cases filed, an astonishing $13 billion has been claimed by corporations in their initial filings: $1.8 billion from US taxpayers, $294 million from Mexican taxpayers, and a whopping $11.3 billion from Canadian taxpayers.

Source: Public Citizen’s Tradewatch: www.tradewatch.org

Police react violently in wake of water cut-offs

Sept. 27— Officials in Cape Town, South Africa began cutting off water supplies to more than nearly 2000 homes behind in their payments yesterday and police opened fire on persons attempting to stop them.

“There seem to be a million cops in the area. People are standing outside everywhere in the street weeping openly. The private workers and protection services have succeeded in carrying out most of the 1800 water cut-offs,” said Ashraf Cassiem, who was kicked in the face by police. Cassiem reported that people were desperately but largely unsuccessfully trying to reconnect their water supplies and had no idea where to go for water if they failed.

Although the police claim to have used only rubber bullets, Cassiem disputes this, “The police shot 15 people, some with rubber bullets and some with live ammunition.” Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign spokesman Faizel Brown said a five-year-old child had been shot in the back while a woman was hit three times. Eleven people had been arrested — four for arson, six for public violence, and one for malicious damage to property, police spokeswoman Nina Kirsten said.

“Things are still burning and the blockades and barricades are still up. It is suspected that the cops might call in the military,” said Cassiem.

Sources: The Sowetan, UnionMail Service