Israel taxes humanitarian aid to Palestinians

By Thalif Deen

United Nations, Sept. 25 (IPS)— The United Nations is accusing Israel of imposing arbitrary taxes on humanitarian relief supplies — including food and medicine — being ferried to Palestinians in occupied territories.

The levies charged by Israel were “unreasonable and unique,” Peter Hansen, commissioner-general of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees, told a meeting of donors Wednesday.

Over the last year, UNRWA has been forced to pay more than $2.5 million — of what should be a purely humanitarian budget — in additional port and storage charges.

The taxes are part of a new security regime imposed by Israeli authorities, which have been battling a Palestinian insurgency in the occupied territories since Sept. 2000.

Hansen said the charges, “which amount to a tax on humanitarian aid,” were being levied by Israel for searching consignments of food and medicine destined for the occupied Palestinian territories.

“This is just one of the many issues we have raised with the Israeli authorities in our ongoing dialogue aimed at improving the agency’s humanitarian access,” he added.

A spokesman for the Israeli Mission to the United Nations said Wednesday the allegations would have to be checked with authorities in Israel. “We are going to look into these charges and we will respond,” he added.

Hansen said the charges come on top of heavy losses caused by restrictions that Israel places on. UNRWA staff trying to reach their places of work.

UNRWA is run mostly by 22,000 Palestinians who work as UN teachers, doctors, nurses and relief workers. The international staff, based in Gaza, numbers only about 110.

Currently, UNRWA serves about 3.4 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. A large proportion of them are children.

Its annual budget has been about $300 million since 1994.

Major donors include the United States, the 15-member European Union (EU), the Nordic countries and Japan. The US donation, the largest one of all countries, is about $70 million annually.

Hansen said UNRWA has also been forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair buildings that have been damaged during military operations. The agency recently submitted a claim to Israel for $535,000 to cover the costs.

A UN spokesman said the United Nations has routinely submitted such claims to Israel over the last few years, but its government has never responded to them.

The World Bank says that Israeli damage to Palestinian infrastructure is estimated at between $600 million and $800 million. The loss in gross domestic product (GDP) is estimated at about $5 billion since the fighting intensified in Sept. 2000.

On Wednesday, UNRWA said that it lost over 72,000 teacher workdays during the 2001-2002 academic year because of restrictions imposed on its staff.

In the first eight months of this year, UNRWA lost 11,000 staff workdays at its health clinics.

Although it has tried to re-deploy staff so that they work close to their homes and avoid Israeli military checkpoints, UNRWA still lost more than 340 treatment days in its 34 West Bank health clinics from January to August this year.

The agency has incurred additional costs because closures have forced it to house staff in hotels when they are trapped by curfews.

In April, several UN agencies and international humanitarian and human rights organizations accused Israel of using food, water and medicine as weapons of war.

UNRWA said that although there was “limited access” to refugee camps, Israeli military authorities were selectively blocking UN teams from handing out food and water.

In February, UNRWA complained about the use of heavy weaponry near UN offices.

Retaliating against a Palestinian attack on one of its military bases in Jerusalem, Israel sent its US-supplied F-16 fighter planes to fire deadly air-to-surface missiles at civilian targets.

The bombing, presumably directed at the security headquarters of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, also caused substantial damage to the office of the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Terje Roed-Larsen.

Groups in Guyana condemn new anti-terror law

By Bert Wilkinson

Georgetown, Guyana, Sept. 27 (IPS)— Lawyers, politicians and human rights activists are all protesting a proposed anti-terrorism law that they say is so loosely written it could be used to prosecute strikes and other social actions.

A proposed bill in Guyana could transform some acts of protest into acts of terrorism

It has been more than two months since a small group of opposition supporters in this tiny South American nation broke away from a routine protest march and stormed the compound of President Bharrat Jagdeo, leading to the deaths of two protesters.

Now, the government is using the events of July 3 to justify a new terrorism law, which calls for the death penalty for those who threaten the security or sovereignty of the state using explosives, flammable substances, guns, poisons, chemical or biological substances.

Doodnauth Singh, attorney general and legal affairs minister, argues the bill is necessary because acts of terrorism have never been defined before. What is more, he said on national television this week, this former British colony on the continent’s Caribbean coast faces a serious security problem.

“The bill is necessary in view of the mounting violence in which the country is engulfed,” Singh said. “It is hoped that this measure would serve as a deterrent to those who are inclined to commit acts of violence, including destruction of property.”

While the bill mandates the death penalty for threatening state security, it would also prosecute those who destroy or disrupt supplies or essential services or force the government to act under duress.

That is where the Guyana Bar Association (GBA), the main opposition People’s National Congress (PNC) party, human rights activists and the smaller parties in the national assembly differ with the governing People’s Progressive Party (PPP).

They argue the bill is too draconian and too broad, and would almost certainly be challenged successfully on constitutional grounds in court because it collides with basic freedoms.

For example, says the GBA, some offences previously categorized as manslaughter would be considered as murder under the new law.

“Thus a person who burns an effigy of religious and other cultural importance to a section of people and causes the disruption of services essential to the life of the community, an industrial strike for example, would now be guilty of the offense of terrorism,” says GBA president Nigel Hughes.

The PPP, now in its third consecutive term in office, says that its mostly ethnic Indian supporters are being attacked, beaten and intimidated by mostly Afro supporters of the PNC.

Critics say this is what Singh means when he refers to the current security problem, but many point out that people of all colors are being mugged and burglarized, and that eight of the 12 police officers killed this year were of African origin.

Criminals have become more brazen in recent months, slaying the country’s number two drug official in a drive-by shooting, regularly spraying police stations and vehicles with gunfire and committing countless daylight robberies and car thefts.

Many middle-class Guyanese who can afford to have applied for visas to emigrate.

A yawning racial divide between ethnic Indian citizens and Afro-Guyanese is thought by many to be the root of the current unrest. The Indian community has controlled the government for the past decade and blacks say they have been completely neglected over that period.

In August, Henry Jeffrey, a black senior minister responsible for education, took the extraordinary step of publicly urging the government to deal with accusations about killings by a notorious police “special unit” or face further political chaos.

The attorney general has hinted that the government is prepared to listen to criticisms of the proposed anti-terrorism law from other sections of society.

The bill could have a second reading in Parliament in a matter of days, even though the PNC continues to boycott the House to pressure the government to deal with a number of longstanding issues, including land distribution, discrimination against blacks and extra judicial killings by the allegedly government-supported police hit squad.

Legal observers are also questioning government plans to monitor Guyanese nationals deported here after committing crimes and serving sentences overseas.

A proposed bill would give authorities the right to monitor deportees, particularly those convicted of serious felonies, such as murder, rape, gun-running and drug trafficking.

They would have to report to police stations regularly to respond to questions about their activities.

“That is unacceptable and it serves to challenge freedoms that are guaranteed in the Constitution,” says Hughes.

As strikes on Iraq continue, US strong-arms the UN

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Oct. 2 (AGR)— The past week has been a heavy one for US strikes on Iraq. Allied aircraft hit eight targets, including the Basra airport on Sept. 26. The United States said it targeted a missile site in Qalat Sikur, along with a mobile air defense radar system at the airport, which it claimed had military and civilian uses. Iraq said the airport was civilian.

“Let’s be frank about it: They’re preparing the battlefield for the first stages of the invasion,” said Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council aide now at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “We’re in the first stages of the war.”

On Tuesday, United Nations experts pushed ahead with talks on the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq, seeking an agreement with Baghdad despite a US call to put the inspections on hold.

Late Monday, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that UN weapons inspectors should delay any mission to Iraq until the UN Security Council finishes deliberations on a US resolution.

The Iraqis were “trying their best ... to expedite our requirements for effective inspections,” chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix said after the first of two days of talks in Vienna, the first such meeting since inspectors left the country four years ago.

The Iraqi delegation handed over four CDs which they said contained information on the status of so-called, dual-use nuclear equipment that could be used to build arms as well as for civilian purposes.

Commenting later that day, a senior US State Department official said that if the arms inspectors prepare to move in sooner, rather than considering the US draft resolution, the United States will go into “thwart mode” to stop them.

Assassination A-OK with White House

Also that day, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that the cost of a war in Iraq would be cheaper if President Saddam Hussein simply were assassinated.

Fleischer was asked about a Congressional Budget Office estimate that fighting a full-scale war with Iraq would cost the United States as much as $9 billion a month.

“I can only say that the cost of a one-way ticket is substantially less than that,” Fleischer said. “The cost of one bullet, if the Iraqi people take it on themselves, is substantially less than that.”

Fleischer’s comments were the bluntest so far about options for accomplishing the Bush administration policy of “regime change” in Iraq.

Asked if the administration hopes Hussein will end up dead, Fleischer said: “Regime change is the policy, in whatever form it takes.”

The draft resolution which the United States wants the Security Council to adopt would delay the return of inspectors until Baghdad provides a list of any nuclear, germ or chemical weapons and related material.

Iraq has already rejected the US draft resolution and the United States has made clear it’s threats to go to war — with or without Security Council approval.

In Baghdad, Iraq said it would not be intimidated into accepting a new Security Council resolution by threats of war.

“To the evil ones ... we clearly say that if they imagine that drums of war which they are beating ... may push Iraq to concede its national rights and what has been guaranteed to it by the UN Charter and relevant Security Council resolutions, they are mistaken,” said a statement issued after a cabinet meeting chaired by Hussein.

‘Dangerous implications’ of US threat to UN

UN diplomats, US academics, and Middle East experts are warning that the credibility of the United Nations is being seriously undermined by US pressure to authorize the “regime change” for Iraq, by way of a full-scale, US invasion.

“This is a crucial test for the survival of the world body,’’ lamented a long-time Asian diplomat. “The American determination to go it alone challenges the very foundation on which the world body was built,’’ he added.

The United States has introduced a new resolution in the Security Council that is widely believed to permit an invasion if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein does not meet US demands. If Bush does go to war unilaterally, say diplomats, the Security Council will be reduced to a politically impotent body.

John Quigley, professor of international law at Ohio State University, says the United Nations risks becoming irrelevant no matter what it does.

“If the Security Council caves into American pressure to adopt a resolution that the United States can construe to authorize military action, it will have done what most members think improper, and will have facilitated mass killings of Iraqis by the United States,’’ he told Inter Press Service.

Quigley argues that the better course would be for the United Nations to decline to adopt a US-drafted resolution. “Only in that way can the organization maintain its integrity.’’

So far, the United States is backed by only one other veto-wielding permanent member — Britain. The remaining three permanent members, France, China and Russia, have expressed strong reservations over the US-sponsored draft resolution.

France, a long-time US ally, said Monday that “any action whose stated goal from the outset is regime change would be against international law and open the way to all sorts of abuses.’’ The situation is “fraught with dangerous implications extending far beyond the region,’’ said former Indian ambassador Chinmaya Gharekhan, an adviser to one-time UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. “Will the world witness the first authorized or unilateral use of force to topple a head of state?” he asked.

Phyllis Bennis, Fellow of the Washington-based Institute of Policy Studies, said the US effort to win support in the Security Council is already leading to the kind of over-the-top bribes and threats that characterized the run-up to the passage of resolution 678 authorizing war against Iraq in 1990.

At that time, she said, every impoverished country on the Security Council, including the former Zaire, Ethiopia and Colombia, was offered free or extra-cheap oil, courtesy of Saudi Arabia and the exiled Kuwaiti royals, orchestrated by the United States.

Ethiopia and Colombia were also offered new arms packages, after years of being denied military aid, because of war and human rights violations, she added. The only two countries that voted against the 1990 resolution authorizing a war against Iraq were Cuba and Yemen.

But minutes after Yemen said “no,’’ the US ambassador turned to the Yemeni diplomat in the Security Council chamber, and said: “That will be the most expensive vote you would ever cast.’’

Three days later, said Bennis, the US cut its entire $70 million aid budget to Yemen.

Sources: Agence France Presse, Associated Press, Inter Press Service, Los Angeles Times, Reuters

AIDS, famine crises accelerate in Southern Africa

By Haider Rizvi

United Nations, Sept. 26 (IPS)— The United Nations renewed its appeal Thursday for immediate food and relief supplies to save the lives of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa facing death from starvation and the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Shocked by the horrors caused by the disease and the continuing famine in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, senior UN officials who recently returned from the region say over 14 million people risk starving.

“The crisis is accelerating at a much faster pace than we had anticipated,” James Morris, head of the World Food Program (WFP), told journalists at a news briefing. “There is a crisis within the crisis. The HIV/AIDS crisis is enormous.”

The United Nations is urging industrialized countries and donors to come up with $611 million for food and other life-sustaining support. Currently, officials say, they have only 40 percent of what they need for food.

The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) says that today more than 28 million people in the region — most of them youth — are living with HIV/AIDS.

In July, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated 300,000 people would die in the area by the end of the year.

Officials say the spread of AIDS is a leading factor in the decline in agricultural production, as the disease has infected millions of farmers.

Millions of people are now forced to eat seed grain that should be used for planting, a cause of malnutrition that leaves them vulnerable to disease.

“This is an AIDS induced famine,” Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary general’s special envoy in Africa, told an international gathering of women on Wednesday. “There are no women left to till the land.”

The WFP chief agrees.

“Millions of children are condemned to head their household because their parents and grandparents have died,” said Morris, who recently returned from the region.

The devastation has left behind over four million orphans in the region, dramatically changing life in the six countries, particularly in the area of education.

Lewis, a Canadian national who spent several years in Africa, points out that more than a million children have lost their teachers to AIDS, a phenomenon that accelerates the declining rates of primary education.

When education is available, it is increasingly out of reach for poor families because of tuition charges introduced by many governments as a condition to receive loans under the World Bank’s structural adjust program.

Both Morris and Lewis said AIDS infections have disproportionately hit young women between the age of 15 and 24.

The latest UNAIDS figures show that six million of the nearly nine million young people living with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are women.

Last year, a study by US-based Johns Hopkins University warned that infections would continue to spread to younger age groups as men choose increasingly younger partners.

Millions of young women lack information and knowledge about HIV/AIDS and how to prevent it, while they remain vulnerable to rape and forcible marriages to older men infected with the disease.

“AIDS has a woman’s face in sub-Saharan Africa,” says Lewis who says gender inequality is a fundamental reason for the AIDS epidemic. “There is a need for an unbridled campaign for gender equality,” he adds. “The UN itself has to monitor this campaign in Africa and elsewhere in the world.”

Last year, Secretary General Kofi Annan established a global fund for AIDS and other deadly diseases and asked governments and international donors to pledge $10 billion to fund it. Till now, the UN has received a little more than two billion dollars.

“It’s a moral lapse,” says Lewis. “When three thousand people died on Sept. 11, the world raised $100 billion. Last year two million people died in Africa,” he continued. “There is something wrong here.”

South cedes water rights as requirement for loans

By Gustavo Capdevila

Geneva, Switzerland, Sept. 27 (IPS)— The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank pressure developing countries to sell off their water services to a handful of transnational corporations as a condition for financial assistance, says the independent organization One World Action.

The privatization of potable water is practically obligatory in the developing South today because the IMF and World Bank make it a precondition for providing aid to water and sanitation programs, says Gunnar Aegisson, author of the study published by the Britain-based One World Action.

The entities responsible for water services — extraction, purification and distribution — were part of the public domain nearly worldwide until the mid-1980s, when the two multilateral credit organizations began to spearhead the privatizing effort.

In recent years, the international community has become increasingly aware that water is a limited resource. “Global freshwater consumption rose six-fold between 1900 and 1995 — more than twice the rate of population growth,” says the report, titled “The Great Water Robbery.”

Currently, more than a billion people lack access to safe drinking water, says the report, warning that if immediate and massive investments are not made, by 2025 the population without water will reach 2.5 billion.

In that context, One World Action stresses that access to water is a human right, as was largely recognized in the debate at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, which ended Sept. 4 in Johannesburg.

But in practice the notion that water is a basic human right, one that states should guarantee for its citizens, clashes with the view that water is an economic good, a commodity that should be subject to market forces, stated Aegisson.

In addition to this contrast, which is reflected in the options of public and private distribution services, there are other divergences of opinion about decision-making and management related to water services.

Aegisson, policy chief at One World Action, says the two should be placed “in the hands of the user communities themselves,” instead of concentrated in the public or private water service providers.

Water distribution in cities and town in developing countries are mostly limited to central areas, which are usually where the wealthier population lives.

Authorities have mostly failed to extend services to the poorer outlying areas, where the lack of potable water pipelines and sanitation and drainage services are considered a main cause of the high disease and infant mortality rates.

One of the reasons behind government ineffectiveness is that poor populations lack political influence in developing countries. As long as this situation remains, “their needs will continue to be ignored by the elite in power,” commented the activist.

Another obstacle for the South is the lack of capacity. “The debt crisis and the structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF in the past two decades have left many public services critically under-funded and institutionally weak,” states the report.

The IMF and World Bank, in this context, pushed for privatization with the argument that open competition on a free market would lead to increased efficiency.

However, the report’s author objects to the competition justification saying that water distribution “is by its very nature a monopoly.”

The consumer cannot choose between suppliers so therefore does not enjoy the benefits of a competitive market, says Aegisson.

The fact is that privatized water services are the exception. Worldwide, only five percent are privately owned or managed.

France is an exception in the industrialized world, as an imperial decree in the mid-19th century established private administration of water services. In Great Britain, not only the management, but also the ownership of water sources were privatized more than a decade ago.

However, the author points out that in the two countries there are strong public administration systems that are capable of effectively regulating the private water companies.

In other industrialized countries, there are few signs of change away from public sector water management. As such, the pressure for privatization has been focused on developing countries, where governments tend to be susceptible to those influences.

The One World Action report on water identifies ideological and profit-driven motives behind the privatizing effort.

“The neo-liberal wave that swept the world in the 1980s deemed government intervention and management unhelpful: markets were supposed to be better at making decisions,” explains the report.

However, in spite of the fact that neo-liberalism has partially retracted, change at the IMF and World Bank are very slow, it adds.

The profit motive arises from the sheer magnitude of the water business, estimated by Fortune magazine in 2000 at $400 billion a year. That sum equaled 40 percent of the oil industry and more than a third of the global pharmaceutical sector.

The World Bank has calculated that the global trade in water will soon reach a trillion dollars, with most of the predictions for expansion concentrated in the developing world.

The international water industry is dominated by a handful of transnational firms, with two French companies, Vivendi and Suez, the biggest by far, controlling 70 percent of the private water market.

The Aegisson study maintains that a large part of the financial success of the giant water companies is due to the backing they receive from international credit institutions, like the World Bank and regional development banks.

Ultimately, says the One World Action report, the responsibility for water services rests with the government, and requires a democratic and accountable system in order to ensure an equitable approach.

One World Action is active in Europe and in association with organizations from developing countries in efforts to fight poverty and promote democracy and respect for human rights.

WORLD BRIEFS

Loyalists blamed for pipe bombing

Loyalist paramilitaries have been blamed for a pipe bomb attack on a home in north Belfast, Northern Ireland. A mother and her young child escaped injury Sept. 28 when the device exploded inside their car. The woman was walking towards the car with her three-year-old son in her arms when the pipe bomb was thrown. She was later treated at a hospital for shock.

Sinn Fein councilor Margaret McClenaghan said she believed the loyalist Ulster Defense Association (UDA) was responsible. She said the homes of Catholics on the street were attacked by loyalist stone throwers throughout the day before the device was thrown, and accused the UDA of carrying out a campaign against all Catholics who lived on the street. (BBC)

EU caves in to US over International Criminal Court

The European Union (EU) is ready to agree to a deal with the US giving American citizens a degree of immunity from prosecution by the new International Criminal Court (ICC), having been persuaded by Britain to step back from its hardline opposition to prevent a transatlantic conflict.

Its foreign ministers, meeting in Brussels today, are expected to set out the conditions in which separate immunity arrangements can be concluded for Americans. Human rights groups and the Council of Europe urged the EU not to take this step.

The court, which is due to begin work in the Hague next year, was created as a permanent institution to try individuals for genocide, war crimes, and other human rights abuses. Washington has refused to back the court, saying it fears Americans could become targets for politically motivated attacks.

The conflict over the court has added to the strain caused by Iraq and trade disputes, and underlined the gap between American unilateralism and the EU’s multilateral approach to international issues.

The US will have to guarantee that there would be no impunity for crimes by promising that Americans accused of abuses will be tried in their own country. It will also have to drop its demand for blanket immunity.

Human Rights Watch has accused Britain of slavishly torpedoing a united EU position. (The Guardian)

Ecuadoran activists oppose ‘impunity agreement’ for US personnel

Human rights groups in Ecuador urged the government to reject a US request for an agreement that would guarantee US personnel stationed in this South American country immunity before the International Criminal Court (ICC).

US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Otto Reich, is leading a US effort to get “as many countries as possible” in Latin America to sign bilateral agreements that would leave US soldiers and civilian staff abroad outside of the jurisdiction of the ICC.

In a letter signed by seventeen human rights groups, activists stated their concern over the fact that such an agreement would ensure that US citizens accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity would not be turned over to the ICC and would consequently not be punished.

The Bush administration has asked several Latin American countries to sign “impunity agreements.” Secretary of State Colin Powell met on Sept. 16 with around a dozen forign ministers from the region to that end. (IPS)

US brands exiled Filipino leftist as a ‘terrorist’

On Aug. 9, the US State Department designated the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the New Peoples Army (NPA) as “foreign terrorist organizations” and implored other governments to do the same.

On Aug. 12, the US Treasury Department listed the CPP, the NPA, and alleged CPP leader Professor Jose Maria Sison – a political refugee living in the Netherlands – as “terrorists” whose assets must be frozen.On Aug. 13, Dutch authorities issued a ruling directed at the NPA/CPP and at Sison, stating that it would comply with US demands. Days later, Sison’s personal bank account was frozen and his social benefits, including housing and health insurance, stopped.

The persecution of Sison follows a recent pattern of criminalization of left-wing political refugees in Europe, particularly members of Turkish and Kurdish groups. However, it has another dimension, as the US “war on terrorism” engages not only in Afghanistan and Iraq but also in the Philippines, ostensibly against the Abu Sayyaf bandit group. (Green Left Weekly)

Firebombs thrown at US military base in South Korea

The South Korean government expressed regret Sept. 26 after activists hurled several firebombs into a US military base north of Seoul.

Several unidentified men threw at least nine firebombs over the wall to Camp Red Cloud at Eujongbu, said South Korean police. Police suspected that the attackers were students protesting the deaths of two South Korean teenage girls struck and killed by a US military vehicle in June.

Later Friday, police detained a dozen students after they rallied at the US Embassy in central Seoul. The students shouted slogans that called on US president Bush to apologize for the deaths of the 14-year-old girls killed on June 13 when they were run over by a US armored vehicle on a training mission.

The two US soldiers responsible for the accident were arraigned on Tuesday at a US military court on charges of negligent homicide.

About 37,000 US troops are stationed in South Korea. A small number of activists have protested over similar incidents to voice wider demands for the withdrawal of US troops from the country. (AP)