Government denies killing 1,000 villagers in South Sudan

Rebels in Southern Sudan say that militias killed 1,000 people and displaced thousands more in the Western Upper Nile region. Photo courtesy of CIA World Factbook

By Katy Salmon

Nairobi, Kenya, July 31 (IPS)— The Sudanese government has refuted claims that it has launched a massive offensive in southern Sudan. It blames the fighting on ethnic militias over which it claims it has no control.

Rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) say that “1,000 people have been killed and tens of thousands displaced” from Western Upper Nile by a government offensive, which began on Friday. Rebels claim the government attacked rebel positions near the village of Tam, some 20km south of Bentiu, the main government town in Western Upper Nile on July 26.

“There are a lot of massacres going on. The government is using three helicopter gun-ships to give cover for ground troops. It is a three-pronged attack,” said SPLA spokesperson Samson Kwaje.

The government denies any hand in the conflict.

“There is no offensive from the government. This is completely the figment of someone’s imagination,” said Mohamed Dirdeiry, a senior official at the Sudanese embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

“What is happening is that there are some skirmishes here and there, mainly between tribal militias who want to position themselves better before peace,” he said.

According to Dirdeiry, the government of Sudan does not control the militias, who he says “have their own agendas.”

Others disagree with the government’s version of events.

“That’s what we expect, that the government might say, ‘Oh, these are just tribal militia. We are not involved.’ In other words, fighting the war through proxy and displacing a huge population in Western Upper Nile,” said a sceptical Dan Eiffe of the Norwegian People’s Aid, which operates in southern Sudan.

“We are working in that area and we’ve people up there. And we have people coming out of the field who can verify what I am saying. We have a health center, which received many wounded people on Saturday and Sunday from that area.

“These militias are fully supported and fully organized by the government of Sudan. They’ve launched a major offensive. They would not have the capacity to do that. They are supported by gun-ship helicopters, and they’ve taken over a large area of Western Upper Nile in Mayam county,” Eiffe charged.

Dirdeiry vehemently denies this.

“The government army is not at all involved in any fighting right now. No helicopter gun-ships are right now fighting in any part of southern Sudan,” he reaffirmed.

Such counter-accusations and denials have been a regular feature of the conflict between the government of Sudan and the SPLA, which erupted in 1983. The southern rebels want greater autonomy from the Islamic military regime in the north, which they claim marginalizes and exploits them.

At least two million people have been killed and another four million displaced in the conflict since 1983.

Sudanese are not the only casualties in Sudan’s long-running civil war. Charles Kibbe, a Kenyan community health worker with the aid agency, World Vision, was killed earlier in the week when an armed group attacked the charity’s camp in Waat, in south-eastern Upper Nile. Two Germans and another Kenyan member of staff were also abducted in the raid.

Despite the mounting death toll, hopes for peace in Sudan are higher than they have been for years. On July 20, there was a major breakthrough in peace talks when the government agreed to let the south hold a referendum on self-determination after a six-year interim period.

The agreement, called the Machakos Protocol, also agreed that the Sudanese constitution would be rewritten to ensure that Sharia (Islamic law) would only be applied in the north, not to non-Muslims in the south.

Days later, there was a historic meeting between Sudanese President Omar el Bashir and SPLA leader John Garang in Uganda which seems to indicate that there is a genuine momentum for peace from both sides.

The two presidents pledged to “ensure that all efforts are deployed to resolve the outstanding issues.”

Despite the peace overtures, fighting is likely to increase in the short-term. Observers believe two warring parties are keen to shore up their positions ahead of the next round of talks, due to begin in Kenya in mid-August, at which a cease-fire will hopefully be agreed upon.

The area of Western Upper Nile is particularly sensitive because lucrative oil fields are located there, along a line that divides the north from the south.

The sharing of oil resources has taken center stage in the Sudanese conflict over the last three years. It is another difficult issue that should be hammered out during the August talks.

Sudan has one billion barrels of proven oil reserves. Experts say that the total could be 10 times that amount because there has been limited exploration.

US ‘Hague Invasion Act’
becomes law

New York, New York, August 3— A new law supposedly protecting US servicemembers from the International Criminal Court shows that the Bush administration will stop at nothing in its campaign against the court, Human Rights Watch warned today.

US President George Bush today signed into law the American Servicemembers Protection Act of 2002, which is intended to intimidate countries that ratify the treaty for the International Criminal Court (ICC). The new law authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a US-allied country being held by the court, which is located in The Hague. This provision, dubbed the “Hague invasion clause,” has caused a strong reaction from US allies around the world, particularly in the Netherlands.

In addition, the law provides for the withdrawal of US military assistance from countries ratifying the ICC treaty and restricts US participation in United Nations peacekeeping unless the United States obtains immunity from prosecution. At the same time, these provisions can be waived by the president on “national interest” grounds.

“The states that have ratified this treaty are trying to strengthen the rule of law,” said Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch. “The Bush administration is trying to punish them for that.”

Dicker pointed out that many of the ICC’s biggest supporters are fragile democracies and countries emerging from human rights crises, such as Sierra Leone, Argentina and Fiji.

The law is part of a multi-pronged US effort against the International Criminal Court. On May 6, in an unprecedented move, the Bush administration announced it was “renouncing” US signature on the treaty. In June, the administration vetoed continuation of the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia in an effort to obtain permanent immunity for UN peacekeepers. In July, US officials launched a campaign around the world to obtain bilateral agreements that would grant immunity for Americans from the court’s authority. Yesterday, Washington announced that it obtained such an agreement from Romania.

However, another provision of the bill allows the United States to assist international efforts to bring to justice those accused of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity, including efforts by the ICC.

“The administration never misses an opportunity to gratuitously antagonize its allies on the ICC,” said Dicker. “But it’s also true that the new law has more loopholes than a block of Swiss cheese.”

Dicker said the law gives the administration discretion to override ASPA’s noxious effects on a case-by-case basis. Washington may try to use this to strong-arm additional concessions from the states that support the court, but Dicker urged states supporting the ICC “not to fall into the US trap: the law does not require any punitive measures.”

Human Rights Watch believes the International Criminal Court has the potential to be the most important human rights institution created in 50 years and urged regional groups of states, such as the European Union, to condemn the new law and resist Washington’s attempts to obtain bilateral exemption arrangements.

The law formed part of the 2002 Supplemental Appropriations Act for Further Recovery from and Response to Terrorist Attacks on the United States.

Source: Human Rights Watch

The Hussein in Rumsfeld’s closet

By Jeremy Scahill

Aug. 2-- Five years before Saddam Hussein’s now infamous 1988 gassing of the Kurds, a key meeting took place in Baghdad that would play a significant role in forging close ties between Saddam Hussein and Washington. It happened at a time when Hussein was first alleged to have used chemical weapons. The meeting in late December 1983 paved the way for an official restoration of relations between Iraq and the US, which had been severed since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

With the Iran-Iraq war escalating, President Ronald Reagan dispatched his Middle East envoy, a former secretary of defense, to Baghdad with a hand-written letter to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and a message that Washington was willing at any moment to resume diplomatic relations.

That envoy was Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld’s Dec. 19-20, 1983 visit to Baghdad made him the highest-ranking US official to visit Iraq in six years. He met Hussein and the two discussed “topics of mutual interest,” according to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry.

“[Hussein] made it clear that Iraq was not interested in making mischief in the world,” Rumsfeld later told The New York Times. “It struck us as useful to have a relationship, given that we were interested in solving the Mideast problems.”

Just 12 days after the meeting, on Jan. 1, 1984, The Washington Post reported that the United States “in a shift in policy, has informed friendly Persian Gulf nations that the defeat of Iraq in the 3-year-old war with Iran would be ‘contrary to US interests’ and has made several moves to prevent that result.”

In March of 1984, with the Iran-Iraq war growing more brutal by the day, Rumsfeld was back in Baghdad for meetings with then-Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. On the day of his visit, Mar. 24, United Press International (UPI) reported from the United Nations: “Mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers in the 43-month Persian Gulf War between Iran and Iraq, a team of UN experts has concluded... Meanwhile, in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, US presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld held talks with Foreign Minister Tarek Aziz (sic) on the Gulf war before leaving for an unspecified destination.”

The day before, the Iranian news agency alleged that Iraq launched another chemical weapons assault on the southern battlefront, injuring 600 Iranian soldiers. “Chemical weapons in the form of aerial bombs have been used in the areas inspected in Iran by the specialists,” the UN report said. “The types of chemical agents used were bis-(2-chlorethyl)-sulfide, also known as mustard gas, and ethyl N, N-dimethylphosphoroamidocyanidate, a nerve agent known as Tabun.”

Prior to the release of the UN report, the US State Department on Mar. 5 had issued a statement saying: “available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons.”

Commenting on the UN report, US Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick was quoted by The New York Times as saying: “We think that the use of chemical weapons is a very serious matter. We’ve made that clear in general and particular.”

Compared with the rhetoric emanating from the current administration, based on speculations about what Hussein might have, Kirkpatrick’s reaction was hardly a call to action.

Most glaring is that Donald Rumsfeld was in Iraq as the 1984 UN report was issued and said nothing about the allegations of chemical weapons use, despite State Department “evidence.” On the contrary, The New York Times reported from Baghdad on Mar. 29, 1984, “American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the United States and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name.”

A month and a half later, in May 1984, Donald Rumsfeld resigned. In November of that year, full diplomatic relations between Iraq and the US were fully restored. Two years later, in an article about Rumsfeld’s aspirations to run for the 1988 Republican Presidential nomination, the Chicago Tribune Magazine listed among Rumsfeld’s achievements that he helped to “reopen US relations with Iraq.” The Tribune failed to mention that this help came at a time when, according to the US State Department, Iraq was actively using chemical weapons.

Throughout the period that Rumsfeld was Reagan’s Middle East envoy, Iraq was frantically purchasing hardware from American firms, empowered by the White House to sell. The buying frenzy began immediately after Iraq was removed from the list of alleged sponsors of terrorism in 1982. According to a Feb. 13, 1991 Los Angeles Times article: “First on Hussein’s shopping list was helicopters — he bought 60 Hughes helicopters and trainers with little notice. However, a second order of 10 twin-engine Bell “Huey” helicopters, like those used to carry combat troops in Vietnam, prompted congressional opposition in August, 1983... Nonetheless, the sale was approved.”

In 1984, according to The LA Times, the State Department — in the name of “increased American penetration of the extremely competitive civilian aircraft market” — pushed through the sale of 45 Bell 214ST helicopters to Iraq. The helicopters, worth some $200 million, were originally designed for military purposes. The New York Times later reported that Hussein “transferred many, if not all [of these helicopters] to his military.”

In 1988, Saddam’s forces attacked Kurdish civilians with poisonous gas from Iraqi helicopters and planes. US intelligence sources told The LA Times in 1991, they “believe that the American-built helicopters were among those dropping the deadly bombs.”

In response to the gassing, sweeping sanctions were unanimously passed by the US Senate that would have denied Iraq access to most US technology. The measure was killed by the White House.

Senior officials later told reporters they did not press for punishment of Iraq at the time because they wanted to shore up Iraq’s ability to pursue the war with Iran. Extensive research uncovered no public statements by Donald Rumsfeld publicly expressing even remote concern about Iraq’s use or possession of chemical weapons until the week Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, when he appeared on an ABC news special.

Eight years later, Donald Rumsfeld signed on to an “open letter” to President Clinton, calling on him to eliminate “the threat posed by Saddam (sic).” It urged Clinton to “provide the leadership necessary to save ourselves and the world from the scourge of Saddam (sic) and the weapons of mass destruction that he refuses to relinquish.”

In 1984, Donald Rumsfeld was in a position to draw the world’s attention to Hussein’s chemical threat. He was in Baghdad as the UN concluded that chemical weapons had been used against Iran. He was armed with a fresh communication from the State Department that it had “available evidence” Iraq was using chemical weapons. Rumsfeld said nothing.

Washington now speaks of Hussein’s threat and the consequences of a failure to act. Despite the fact that the administration has failed to provide even a shred of concrete proof that Iraq has links to al-Qaida or has resumed production of chemical or biological agents, Rumsfeld insists that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

But there is evidence of the absence of Donald Rumsfeld’s voice at the very moment when Iraq’s alleged threat to international security first emerged. In this case, the evidence of absence is indeed evidence.

Source: Commondreams.org

The US forced me out, says Robinson

By Oliver Burkeman

New York, New York, July 31— The UN’s outgoing human rights commissioner, Mary Robinson, says she was prevented from continuing in the job because of pressure from the US, which she has accused of neglecting human rights during the “war against terrorism.”

“I am not somebody just to walk away,” Robinson said. “If I had been hard-pressed, I would have stayed, [but] there seems to have been strong resistance from just one country.”

Her remarks came a week after the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, announced her replacement, a veteran Brazilian diplomat described yesterday as “somebody who doesn’t run afoul of the big powers.”

Robinson, 57, a former Irish president and only the second person to hold the post of high commissioner for human rights, has been a vocal critic of the US since Sept. 11 — not least over Washington’s decision against granting prisoner of war status to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

“I believe that the emphasis has been on the war on terrorism, and that there has been a blurring of the edges and a lack of precision,” Robinson said. “A lack of precision means a lack of protection.”

The climate had become “much more difficult for human rights,” she said.

Tension between the commissioner and the Bush administration pre-date military action in Afghanistan, and turned particularly rancorous over the world conference against racism in Durban, South Africa, which almost collapsed under the weight of a Syrian-led campaign for delegates to declare Israel a racist state.

But this is the first time Robinson has blamed Annan’s decision not to extend her tenure on lobbying by Washington.

Her replacement, Sergio Vieira de Mello, a career UN diplomat with a background in humanitarian relief and peacekeeping, seems certain to adopt a less outspoken style. “He’s a very diplomatic operator, somebody who doesn’t run afoul of the big powers,” said a UN official. “And somebody who is very effective in that way up to now.”

Asked if Vieira de Mello was expected to avoid confrontation with the US, the official said: “The short answer is yes, and the long answer is yes.” But a spokesman for the secretary general said Annan had taken the decision not to reappoint Robinson “independently.”

“It’s not one state or one body of states saying this is what we want — otherwise, frankly, you’d have a very different-looking UN,” he said.

Source: Guardian (UK)

Abuses in Bolivia linked to US anti-coca efforts

A WOLA report says that Bolivian security forces, called ‘America’s mercinaries’ by Chapare residents, have committed serious human rights abuses.
Map courtesy of CIA World Factbook

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Aug. 3 (IPS)— Bolivian security forces, trained, funded, and equipped by the United States, have committed serious human rights abuses with impunity in the coca-growing Chapare region, says a report released here by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

Since September last year, 10 coca growers have been killed and at least 350 have been injured or detained. Many of the detained were beaten or even tortured by US-backed troops, many of them specially recruited former soldiers, says the report, issued on the eve of next week’s meeting of the Bolivian Congress, which is to elect a new president.

The report, Coca and Conflict in the Chapare, calls for Washington to review its role in Bolivia and especially its pressure on the new government to carry out an aggressive eradication campaign despite protests by coca-growing peasants, called “cocaleros.”

“It is inexcusable that the US government continues to fund units of security forces in Bolivia where there is clear evidence that those units are abusing their own citizens,” said Bill Spencer, WOLA’s executive director.

He noted that under Congress’ so-called Leahy Law, units of foreign security forces believed to be responsible for gross human rights abuses are ineligible to receive aid.

The report comes at a critical moment in Bolivia. Cocalero leader and Aymara Indian, Evo Morales, stunned the country’s political establishment when he finished second in the contest for president with 21 percent of the vote, just behind former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who won 22.5 percent.

Political analysts said Morales’ spectacular rise was due in part to outspoken opposition to his candidacy by the US ambassador in La Paz, Manuel Rocha, who warned the electorate just four days before the vote that Washington would cut aid “if you elect those who want Bolivia to become a major cocaine exporter again.”

“The strong showing for Morales indicates widespread discontent with US drug policy and its reverberations throughout Bolivian society and the economy,” says the report, written by Kathy Ledebur of the Andean Information Network.

Because none of the candidates won a majority, the National Congress is supposed to elect the winner when it convenes on Tuesday. Latest reports from La Paz indicate that de Lozada has struck an alliance with the fourth place finisher, former president Jaime Paz Zamora, which should permit de Lozada to assume the presidency.

Nonetheless, Morales’ party, Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), will form the second-largest bloc in Congress. The cocalero has become a major national figure around whom the growing opposition to almost 20 years of neo-liberal economic policies and repressive anti-drug measures — both blamed on Washington — may well be mobilized.

“The citizenry no longer believes in the political system,” Fernando Garcia Algaranaz, the leader of another populist party, New Republican Force, told the Los Angeles Times on Friday. “Politics here is moving from the parliament to the streets.”

The Force’s presidential candidate, former Army Capt. Manfred Reyes Villa, took third place in the June elections.

Bolivia used to be the world’s biggest producer of coca, the base material for cocaine, and has long been a major focus of US eradication strategies. But during the presidencies of Paz Zamora in the 1980s and Lozada in the first half of the 1990s, progress in eradicating coca production was fitful, despite tens of millions of dollars in US aid for the effort.

In 1998, President Hugo Banzer initiated Plan Dignidad, described in the report as an “all-out, no-holds-barred approach to eradication” that was so successful US officials cited the country as a model for the rest of the Andean region. But that success came at a substantial cost, according to the report.

The Plan included dispatching hundreds of security forces into Chapare to manually destroy the coca plants in continuous operations and a permanent military presence in Chapare, all paid for by the US embassy. And while the Plan was supposed to be supplemented by an alternative development program for peasants whose coca crops were uprooted, the latter simply failed to keep up.

The speed with which eradication efforts swept through Chapare “created gaps between eradication and alternative development assistance that can leave peasant farmers without livelihoods,” said a recent report by the US General Accounting Office (GAO).

Chapare was already one of the poorest parts of Bolivia, but the loss of the coca crop without any alternatives for farmers plunged most of the region into deprivation.

“This notable lag [in providing alternative development] has greatly exacerbated the extreme poverty in the region and led to soaring malnutrition, heightening tensions in the region and provoking conflict,” the WOLA report says.

Cocalero protests and crackdowns by US-financed forces — routinely referred to as “America’s mercenaries” by Chapare’s residents — escalated sharply last fall, culminating in the collapse of a major mediation effort as a result of US pressure. At the same time, the government issued a decree that prohibited the drying, transport, and sale of coca leaf grown in the Chapare region in previously legal markets.

When the government moved to enforce the decree in January, cocaleros reacted with violent protests suppressed by the security forces. After more clashes in mid-January, four security officers were found murdered.

Over the following week, almost 100 cocalero leaders were detained by the security forces, some beaten during their internment, and the cocalero radio station, ‘Radio Soberania,’ was closed down and Morales expelled from Congress.

But as tensions reached the boiling point, the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office, the Catholic Church, and the Permanent Assembly began a mediation that resulted in an agreement Feb. 9 that suspended the controversial decree for three months, released prisoners, and lifted cocalero roadblocks.

The resulting relaxation in tensions has meant a slowing of eradication efforts, something the State Department objected to in its annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report earlier this year. The report complained that the government’s “sensitivity” to social unrest had impeded compliance with drug war targets.

The report spurred strong protests from virtually all political forces, the government and Sanchez de Lozada and served instead to bolster Morales’ political fortunes.

With the election now finished and a new government about to be elected, WOLA and other analysts fear that Washington will renew its pressure for an aggressive eradication campaign in Chapare.

For the United States, “success is measured in terms of coca eradicated and not by the well-being of the Bolivian people,” says the report.

It called on Washington to review its policy in light of both the human rights and social tolls on the region’s people and the election results, which demonstrate increasing popular resistance to US-backed policies.

Shell named in apartheid lawsuit

By Nicol Degli Innocenti

Johannesburg, South Africa, Aug. 3— Royal Dutch/Shell, the oil company, is to be cited in a multibillion-dollar class action lawsuit brought by a team of lawyers on behalf of the victims of South Africa’s apartheid regime, a lawyer said yesterday.

“We have filed against seven companies and corporations so far and in the next few weeks, probably before Aug. 9, we will file against another two or three including Royal Dutch/Shell,” said John Ngcebetsha of the Apartheid Claims Taskforce.

Shell, which is accused of supplying the white minority regime with oil in violation of an anti-apartheid embargo, will be added to the list, which already includes IBM, the computer company, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, CommerzBank, UBS, Credit Suisse and Citicorp.

A total of 35 companies and banks, including Honeywell, Exxon Mobil, Barclays and Natwest, have so far been identified by the task force. Letters were sent to them in July to propose voluntary settlement talks, and those that have not responded will be taken to court in an effort to force them to pay reparations to the victims of the apartheid regime.

The first hearing is scheduled for Aug. 9 in New York. The team of lawyers bringing the class action lawsuit is headed by Edward Fagan, the US lawyer who in 1998 forced Swiss banks into a $1.25 billion settlement for victims of the Holocaust.

Fagan claims reparations of up to $100 billion could be won for the victims of apartheid and says the case will finish in two to three years.

In South Africa there is unease at what one activist called Fagan’s “cowboy tactics” and relentless publicity-seeking.

“We should ensure that no one personality takes the spotlight away from the cause itself and the victims of apartheid,” Ngcebetsha said.

A statement released after a meeting of lawyers, trade unions, victim support groups and church representatives in Johannesburg said there was great “concern about the impression that has been created that the matter of apartheid reparations is primarily about large amounts of money.”

While supporting the legal actions, the meeting recommended “a united and coordinated approach to the legal claims process.”

Fagan says his crusade is built on principle rather than greed. Companies that supported the white minority regime should face public judgment: “Were it not for the conspiracy of these financial institutions and companies, apartheid would not have been possible.”

Source: Pan-African Newswire

Israel imposes travel ban on Palestinians after bloody week

Compiled by Sean Marquis

Aug. 7— On Monday, Aug. 5, Israel announced a “total ban” on Palestinian travel in much of the West Bank.

Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer said the army was “imposing a total blockade of the West Bank. Nobody enters and nobody leaves.”

Just hours after the announcement, a car bomb exploded near the northern town of Umm el Fahm, killing one person and wounding several others, police said.

Movement will be completely restricted in the towns of Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilya and Ramallah, according to an Israeli army statement.

Israeli aircraft fired several missiles at targets in Gaza City on Monday wounding four people, according to Palestinian sources.

Confirming the strike, Israeli military sources said that one of the targets was a factory used to manufacture missiles and ammunition.

Earlier in the day, two Palestinian Fatah activists were killed in a gunfight with an Israeli army unit in the village of Bourka, north of the West Bank city of Nablus.

Also the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) arrested more than 10 Palestinians throughout the territories -- including a raid at the Hebron university where the IDF arrested students and staff who were suspected of carrying out attacks against Israel. Computers and diskettes from the university’s offices were confiscated.

Bloody week

The travel restrictions came on the heels of a week that saw heightened levels of violence on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In exchanges of gunfire with the IDF, a total of three Palestinian gunmen were killed and two wounded in Nablus and the Gaza Strip.

Outside Nablus, in the village of Salem, Israeli soldiers surrounded the house of a Hamas activist, 28-year-old Amjad Jubur, and shot him dead, both sides said.

According to the Associated Press, Israeli soldiers fatally shot an elderly Palestinian woman who entered an Israeli-controlled area outside her home near the Kissufim crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

An Israeli couple was shot dead early on Monday in the West Bank, while driving on a road north of Ramallah. Two of their children were also wounded in the attack.

On Sunday at least 10 Israelis died in a wave of attacks by various Palestinian militant groups. In the worst single incident on Sunday, a suicide bomber killed nine people and injured more than 40 others in a bus attack outside the town of Safad in northern Israel. Following Sunday’s attacks, the Israeli Government cancelled all planned meetings with Palestinian officials and promised a “fight without mercy” against militants.

The spate of attacks pointed to a concerted effort by several militant groups in response to the killings of a Hamas leader and 14 other people in an Israeli bombing in Gaza last month. The Israeli army admitted it knew civilians were in the area and would be in danger of injury in the attack but carried out the bombing anyway.

Hamas said it carried out Sunday’s bus attack, and also claimed responsibility for the bombing of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University last Wednesday which killed seven people, five of them US citizens.

Demolitions as retribution

At 1am on Thursday, Aug. 1 Israeli soldiers gave Atta Sarasara and his family 20 minutes to leave before soldiers blew up the family home -- punishment because their son was a suicide bomber.

Standing over the wreckage of his home Thursday, Sarasara, a high school mathematics teacher, was still coming to terms with the loss of his son, Hazem Atta Sarasara, who blew himself up Tuesday at a Jerusalem fast-food stand, injuring seven Israelis.

“It is not fair and it’s a very hard act against my family. I never knew that my son was going to commit such an attack and the Israelis know that as well,” a red-eyed Sarasara said.

But Israeli soldiers moved in overnight, destroying the home in what military sources said was a deterrent measure to show that such actions have a price.

On Thursday, Palestinian flags and posters of Hazem fluttered over the slabs of concrete where the Sarasara house once stood. Spray-painted slogans announced: “We will not be terrorized by [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon’s attacks.”

For years, Israel used to destroy the homes of the families of suicide bombers, particularly during the first Palestinian uprising of 1987-1993, as punishment. But the practice largely stopped after interim peace accords were signed in 1993, although Israel continued to destroy Palestinian homes for other reasons.

In recent weeks, however, the army has resumed the practice as punishment.

In July 19 raids in the West Bank, the Israeli army also arrested 21 relatives of Palestinian militants and threatened to deport them to the Gaza Strip as a way to deter future attackers and undercut the financial support families of suicide bombers receive from groups such as Hamas.

Sources: Associated Press, BBC News, Ha’aretz

Mexican gov’t calls off controversial plan for new airport

By Diego Cevallos

Mexico City, Mexico, Aug. 2 (IPS)— The Mexican government backed down on its plans to build a new international airport in a rural area near the capital, due to the staunch resistance mounted by local peasant farmers, who refuse to give up their land at any price.

The decision to build the airport in Texcoco, 15 kms east of Mexico City, is unviable because there is no time for the protracted negotiations that would be necessary to overcome the opposition of local residents, said authorities.

They pointed out that an urgent solution is needed to address the problem of the current airport, which is operating at saturation point.

Some sectors might see the decision as a sign of weakness on the part of the government, but it is really an indication of the administration’s reluctance to impose its plans by force, Secretary of Communications and Transport Pedro Cerisola said Friday.

Peasant farmers in the rural municipality of San Salvador Atenco, in Texcoco, who have held regular protests against the plan for the new airport since it was announced by the government in October, celebrated the decision, and demanded an apology from President Vicente Fox for having caused so much conflict.

“We want the president to publicly apologize to us, and to admit that we were the ones who have been right over these past nine months,” said a local leader in San Salvador Atenco, América del Valle.

The leaders of the protest demonstrations, which turned violent last month when the police tried to break up a peaceful march, declared the start of three days of celebrations Friday.

Some local farmers even ascribed the success of their protests to 16th century indigenous peasant Juan Diego, the world’s first Indian saint, who was canonized Wednesday by Pope John Paul II on his fifth visit to Mexico.

In mid-July, hundreds of people in San Salvador Atenco, which would have lost 85 percent of its territory if construction of the airport had gone ahead, seized police and local officials as hostages, destroyed cars, blocked highways and warned that they were prepared to die before giving up their land.

The demonstrators, who were backed by leftist social activists from around the country, even declared that the central government had no authority in San Salvador Atenco, and set up their own government in the town - which carries the same name as the municipality - despite the fact that many locals were willing to sell their land in exchange for the compensation offered by the state.

The uprising in San Salvador Atenco is “a light in the struggle against the neo-liberal economic model,” said activists.

The decision to cancel the project, which was to cost around three billion dollars, demonstrates the government’s inability to enforce a state of law, and hurts investor confidence in the country, said business spokespersons.

The chairman of the National Chamber of the Construction Industry, Leandro López, lamented that the government had called off the plan due to political pressure, and said Texcoco was the best site for the airport.

The foreign investors who had expressed interest in building in Texcoco have been let down, and have found out that the Fox administration will allow its arm to be twisted by violent protesters, said real estate businessman Carlos Gosselin.

Texcoco is an area of poor farmland and swamps that provide an important breeding-ground for migratory birds. According to the government, most of the area’s impoverished peasant farmers had agreed to the compensation offered for their land.

But when the plan to build the new airport was announced, a group of local farmers said it would only be built over their dead bodies.

Authorities are now seeking an alternative site, because the current airport, which is surrounded by urban areas, has nowhere to expand, and will become obsolete in seven or eight years, said Cerisola.

He added that the necessary steps to build a new airport would be taken before Fox’s term ends in December 2006, but said no site had yet been chosen, and no new timeframe had been set.

When he unveiled the plans for the Texcoco airport last October, Fox promised that it would be up and running before the end of his term.

Mexico City’s international airport was built 50 years ago for an annual flow of nine million passengers, and is stretched to its limits to deal with today’s 21 million passengers.

Group slams UN report on Israeli attack in Jenin

A view from the top of the Hawashin district of the Jenin refugee camp. Armored Israeli bulldozers flattened the entire Hawashin district, demolishing more than 100 multi-story homes. The destruction left some 4,000 persons homeless, more than a quarter of the population of the camp.
Photo by Peter Bouckaert/Human Rights Watch

By Thalif Deen

United Nations, Aug. 1 (IPS)— A prominent human rights group says a UN report that probed Israeli attacks on a Palestinian refugee camp is a failure because it did not examine the lawfulness of the soldiers’ actions. New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) described the report on the April incursions into the Jenin camp by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), released Thursday, as “disappointing.”

The group released its own 50-page report on the attack in May.

“It is not a report the United Nations can be proud of,” Peter Bouckaert of HRW told reporters.

“We are very disappointed with the report because it doesn’t make any factual determination of what happened in Jenin.” The Palestinian Authority claims that more than 500 people were killed in the Israeli military attack. But the UN report says that only 52 Palestinians were killed, of whom up to half may have been civilians, while the number of Israeli soldiers killed was about 23.

The report was prepared on a request made by the 189-member General Assembly following Israel’s refusal to permit a UN fact-finding team to investigate the “massacre” in the camp.

The study criticizes the IDF’s killing of civilians, the arbitrary arrests and detention of Palestinians, the use of civilians as human shields and the “disproportionate and indiscriminate destruction” of property by Israeli troops.

But Bouckaert says it does not go far enough. In its May report, HRW found that “Israeli forces committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes.”

“Establishing whether this extensive destruction so exceeded military necessity as to constitute wanton destruction — or a war crime — should be one of the highest priorities for the United Nations fact-finding mission,” it said.

Speaking to reporters Thursday, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan admitted the limitations of the report. “It is not an on-the-spot investigation. But we built on reports available in the public domain.”

The Secretary-General said, “while some of the facts may be in dispute, I think it is clear that the Palestinian population have suffered and are suffering, the humanitarian consequences of which are severe.”

While the Palestinians cooperated with the UN team, the Israelis refused. The Israelis also blocked the team from visiting the Jenin refugee camp and also the occupied territories.

In his report, Annan admitted that a full and comprehensive assessment of the events in Jenin could not be made without the full cooperation of both parties (the Israelis and Palestinians) and visits to the area.

“I would, therefore, not wish to go beyond the very limited findings of fact which are set out in the body of the text,” he said.

“I am nevertheless confident that the picture painted in this report is a fair representation of a complex reality,” he added.

The study also blames armed Palestinian groups who are alleged to have booby-trapped civilian homes — “acts which targeted Israeli military personnel, but also placed civilians in danger.”

Bouckaert says the document “effectively lets the Israelis off the hook,” pointing out that the United Nations does not use the word “unlawful” in the report, nor does it refer to the Fourth Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.

The document also lacks legal analysis of the serious abuses that took place in Jenin. Even if the Israelis refused to cooperate, that should not have prevented the UN from reaching conclusions, he adds.

Clearly, said Bouckaert, the Israelis had committed “war crimes” in Jenin. “And there were deliberate killings of civilians.” “If Israel claims to be a democracy, it has a duty to prosecute soldiers who were responsible for the crimes committed,” he added.

The UN report attributes some of the deaths to Israeli attacks on ambulances and denial of humanitarian access. It cites at least three instances where Israeli military forces attacked ambulances taking the injured to hospitals.

Many of the reports of human rights groups contain accounts of wounded civilians waiting days to reach medical assistance, and being refused medical treatment by Israeli soldiers, the report said.

Speaking of the “overall impact,” the report said that the civilian population in the occupied territories continues to “suffer severe hardships, many of which have sharply intensified since the events covered in the report.”

There has been a near-complete cessation of manufacturing, construction, commerce, and private and public services in the main West Bank centers, exacerbating the severe decline in living standards over the last 18 months. Since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000, the violence in the occupied territories has taken a heavy death toll: more than 1,539 Palestinians killed along with 441 Israelis.

“The events described in this report, the continuing deterioration of the situation and the ongoing cycle of violence in my view demonstrate the urgent need for the parties to resume a process that would lead back to the negotiating table,” said Annan.

WORLD BRIEFS

Bove leaves jail in fighting mood
Radical French farmer Jose Bove emerged Aug.1 from six weeks in prison for trashing a McDonald’s restaurant and promptly denounced the government for jailing a trade union leader.

Looking thinner after a four-week hunger strike, the beaming anti-globalization activist promised to fight on against “malbouffe” (lousy food) despite the threat of returning to what he called the abominable conditions of French jails.

Over 600 people turned up at the prison near the southern French city of Montpellier to greet Bove, who had received a three-month sentence for the 1999 anti-US protest.

Bove was released early thanks to sentence reductions for good conduct, a recent presidential pardon for minor offenders and time he had already served in custody before sentencing.

Bove, the head of the radical Confederation Paysanne farmers’ union thanked the crowd for its support, which he said “turned this intolerable sentence into a resistance movement.”

Bove called his time in jail an unbearable experience unfit for any human being and attacked plans by the new center-right government to lower the minimum age for imprisonment to as young as 13 in some cases. (Reuters)

Mexican farmers seek autonomy
The leader of a Mexican peasant group that thwarted government plans to build an airport on their land pledged to create an autonomous government in the area’s main town.

Ignacio Del Valle wants to turn Atenco into a self-governed town, apparently similar to ones created by the Zapatista rebels in the southern state of Chiapas following a 1994 uprising.

The crowd cheered and waved machetes when Del Valle made the announcement, but it was unclear if the proposal had been formally accepted under the rules with which protest leaders have governed Atenco since October, when they ran the mayor out for agreeing to negotiate on the airport project.

The pledge came after the federal government agreed to cancel a planned $2.3-billion airport that would have taken many peasants farmland at extremely depressed prices. The protests against the airport were supported by leftist and anarchist groups, Zapatista supporters and anti-globalization activists.

Autonomous areas in Chiapas refuse to recognize state or federal authority and are ruled by voice-vote assemblies instead of elections.

Atenco would be the first such rebel government outside Chiapas, where the townships refuse any kind of federal aid or public works projects.

However, Del Valle has said the protesters want federal or state farm aid for the town. (AP)

UN sidesteps report on US bombing
of Afghan civilians
The United Nations says it is not embarrassed by a draft UN report that implicitly accused the US of wiping out evidence after a recent air strike in Afghanistan that killed more than 50 people at a wedding ceremony.

The UN team that visited the bombed site issued a preliminary report last week that found no evidence of the US claim that the bombing of civilians in early July was prompted by firing at US aircraft.

The implication in the UN report, described as “an internal document,” was that the US was covering up its deadly mistake and had “cleaned the area” of all traces of shrapnel, bullets, and blood.

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. David Lapan denied allegations and said that shell casings, blood samples and blast fragments were removed from the scene of the bombing to aid the inquiry currently being conducted by the US in collaboration with Afghan authorities.

The UN has also brushed aside speculation that it may have come under US pressure not to release the draft report.

The casualties in the air strikes included 54 deaths and more than 120 injuries — all of them civilians. US troops said they believed that they were bombing villages harboring Taliban leaders. (IPS)

Senate committee clears
women’s rights treaty
In a direct challenge to the administration of President Bush, the Democrat-led Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted on July 29 to send a 23-year-old international treaty on the rights of women to the full Senate for approval.

The final vote was 12-7 in approving the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which has been ratified by 170 countries around the world.

CEDAW, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979 and signed by US President Jimmy Carter in 1980, calls on all countries to ensure equality between men and women in education, marriage, employment, health care, legal rights, access to credit, and public office.

The United States is the only Western country, apart from San Marino and Monaco, that has not ratified the treaty.

Some 166 US organizations and nine state legislatures have endorsed the treaty, including the American Bar Association and the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Groups who actively oppose the treaty include organizations long associated with right-wing Republicans, such as the Eagle Forum, Concerned Women for American (CWA), and the Women for Faith and Family (WFF).

The latter groups have argued that ratification would empower the CEDAW committee to press for changes in US anti-abortion and prostitution laws and promote homosexuality and androgyny. (IPS)

Thousands protest Karzai government
Thousands of Afghans, many banging drums and dancing, gathered for a fourth day on Aug. 2 in one of the nation’s most restive regions to protest against the interim government of President Hamid Karzai.

The demonstrations in the Khost region of Paktia province and in neighboring Nangarhar province — where US troops are still pursuing remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaida — underlined the social unrest and ethnic tension Afghanistan’s government still faces.

The protesters had several grievances against Karzai’s government, including a demand that governors in southern Afghanistan be appointed in consultation with Bacha Khan Zadran, a regional warlord.

If the demands were not met within 24 hours, protesters would block the road between Khost and the capital Kabul, the warlord’s brother, Kamal Khan Zadran said.

The demonstrators also were demanding that arrests be made in the July 1 assassination of Vice President Abdul Qadir, who was also the governor of Nangarhar.(AP)