Israel bars Palestinians from peace talks
Go to story

FCC head Powell may eliminate limits on media concentration
go to story

Zapatista leaders
re-emerge in Chiapas

Thousands of Zapatistas marched in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas on Jan. 1, 2003 to commemorate the
ninth anniversary of the rebel affinity’s uprising.
Photo courtesy of Chiapas Indymedia

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Jan. 7 (AGR)— Thousands of Zapatistas thronged the streets of San Cristobal de las Casas, in the southern Mexico state of Chiapas, on Jan. 1 to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the rebel affinity’s uprising against the government and to reaffirm their commitment to freedom, justice and indigenous rights. Hundreds of Mexican farmers blocked border crossings at Juarez-El Paso and elsewhere.

Carrying machetes and wearing their trademark ski masks, over 25,000 Zapatistas rolled into town aboard more than 200 trucks and buses for the first joint celebration of the rebels’ takeover of San Cristobal and several other towns on Jan. 1, 1994.

San Cristobal de las Casas is a "Sister City" of Asheville, North Carolina in an international cultural exchange program of the same name.

Marching to the city’s plaza in a symbolic re-creation of their uprising in 1994, the rebels knocked their machetes together and against the asphalt pavement, yelling chants in favor of indigenous rights and against the government.

Calling on the indigenous people of Mexico to maintain their autonomy without the permission of the government, they expressed publicly that the Zapatista communities will not accept the forced removals of people living in the zone of Montes Azules, and to emphasize the importance of a global resistance to imperialism.

In 1994, the rebels timed their takeover of San Cristobal and other towns to coincide with the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, and the day when all Mexican tariffs against US agricultural products were removed (a provision of NAFTA).

This year, as they celebrated their anniversary, key elements of NAFTA went into effect as tariffs on nearly 80 US agricultural goods dropped from 49 percent to zero.

At the end of the march, seven "comandantes" of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) appeared unexpectedly. It was the first time EZLN leaders have appeared in public since a march in April 2001 that concluded with their addressing Mexico’s lower house of Congress on behalf of an indigenous rights and culture law.

Simultaneously, the de-facto leader of the EZLN, Subcomandante Marcos — "Sub" because the Commander is the people — warned of a new war in southern Mexico. The EZLN spokesperson defied the Mexican government through an open letter published in the local media in which Marcos pledged war if Fox’s administration dares to continue to expel indigenous groups from settlements in the south east of Chiapas.

The EZLN pledged to defend the indigenous settlements with their own lives as their leaders insist the government wants these territories for private exploitation.

In San Cristobal, the insurgent leaders underscored their denial of rumors that the movement is breaking up. Comandante David explained that the silence has been a reflection of the Zapatistas’ disillusionment with the government, and he and other leaders dismissed Mexican president Vicente Fox’s declarations that the region is now at peace.

Comandantes David and Tacho blasted Mexico’s political parties for adopting a version of the indigenous rights and culture law that did not include all the provisions the Indians wanted. They also disparaged the social programs the federal government is conducting in Chiapas.

David accused Peace Commissioner Luis Alvarez of implementing social programs with the sole intent of dividing the people and vowed not to allow him to move around freely in territory where the EZLN is active. Tacho accused the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) of fearing the power the guerrilla group might command should it become a legal political party.

During the EZLN’s march on the capital in 2001, the PRD realized the support the group enjoys and now "fears losing its clientele," he said.

At the rally in San Cristobal, thousands of Tzotzil, Tzeltzal, Chole, Tojolabal, and Zoque Indians from different parts of the state raised their staffs and machetes defiantly.

Comandante Esther attacked the "threats of eviction" of Indians living in the Montes Azules environmental preserve in Chiapas and apostrophized Mexican President Vicente Fox, asking, "Where is peace?" and warning, "The people have wised up to your lies." She was apparently alluding to statements by then-candidate Fox during the 2000 presidential campaign to the effect that if elected, he would resolve the conflict in Chiapas within minutes.

After midnight, the rebels and their sympathizers lit thousands of torches in a symbolic declaration that their fight is still alive.

"Since Jan. 1, 1994, we lit the light of rebellion," said Comandante David. "The powerful people have wanted to extinguish it, but no one will be able to extinguish the light of hope of Mexico’s Indian peoples."

Since their insurrection, the Zapatistas have become icons for the anti-corporate globalization movement worldwide.

At least a dozen campesino organizations, along with environmental groups and others, have formed a coalition called the "Countryside Can’t Take it Anymore" to fight for the survival of Mexico’s rural life, said Peter Rosset. Rosset is an agro-ecologist and the Chiapas-based co-director of FoodFirst/The Institute for Food and Development Policy, a US non-profit group that promotes food as a human right.

The 25 million people who live in rural areas, where 20 percent of Mexican jobs are located, are struggling for their very survival, he maintained.

The groups, like the Zapatistas, say that NAFTA’s destruction of the tariffs have been a "death sentence," and that Mexican farmers can’t compete with their heavily subsidized US counterparts.

Mexican farmers have already been hard hit by US food imports of staples like maize.

"It’s going from bad to worse," said Rosset. "The US produces food cheaply thanks largely to 30 billion dollars in subsidies every year. And those subsidies will increase dramatically this year under the new US Farm Bill."

Mexico can’t compete on that basis and only farmers who supply fresh winter produce to the United States will survive, he said.

NAFTA has also led to depressed prices. Maize prices have fallen 45 percent in the last three years.

Mexico now imports many foods it once produced itself such as soy, rice, wheat and meat largely because of NAFTA, said Nettie Wiebe, a farmer and former president of the National Farmers Union (NFU) in Laura, Saskatchewan.

Wiebe, who recently traveled to meet with Mexican farm leaders, said "the NAFTA has devastated the Mexican countryside with rural impoverishment reaching a crisis point with over 75 percent of rural Mexicans living in poverty."

An estimated 600 peasant farmers are being forced off their land every day, Wiebe said.

A Public Citizen report in 2001 projected that up to 15 million small farmers will be displaced in the next 10 years because of NAFTA’s agriculture provisions.

"As bad as NAFTA’s seven years has been in the United States, the results for poverty-stricken Mexican farmers and consumers is horrific and puts to rest that myth that these trade deals benefit people in developing countries," she said.

The big NAFTA winners are large agribusinesses, many of which have had record profits, reports Public Citizen. Under the NAFTA time frame, Archer Daniels Midland’s profits nearly tripled — from $110 million to $301 million — and ConAgra’s profits grew from $143 million to $413 million.

An NFU study last year clearly shows NAFTA hurt farmers in all three countries. Wiebe wants to end the "forced" trade of food and replace it with "the right of all people to produce their own food in culturally appropriate ways."

"Peasant organizations are getting very militant," Rosset said. "That’s not surprising since this is a life or death situation for them. 2003 is going to be a year of protest and uproar throughout the Mexican countryside."

Sources: Associated Press, EFE, Indymedia.org,
Inter Press Service, Pravda

back to top

Israel bars Palestinians from peace talks

Compiled by Seán Marquis

Jan. 8 (AGR)— Israel has barred Palestinian negotiators from attending talks on peace and administrative reform in London, in anger over twin suicide bombings that killed 23 people in Tel Aviv this week.

Israel confined senior Palestinian officials to their cities and barred all other Palestinians under 35 from leaving the West Bank or Gaza.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said: "To prevent us from going to London means to prevent any attempt to revive the peace process and to break this vicious cycle of violence."

The ban was heavily criticized by London, who is sponsoring the talks between Palestinian officials and international mediators, provoking a heated exchange between Israeli Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his British counterpart Jack Straw.

The Israeli navy also imposed a blockade on the Gaza coast, forbidding fishermen from going out into the Mediterranean Sea, and has decided to close three Palestinian universities for "inciting terrorism."

Government sources said that Israel was to prevent the Palestinian Central Council from meeting for the first time in two years on Jan. 9 when the Council had planned to ratify a Palestinian constitution.

The document was to include a clause on establishing the post of prime minister, a step that could help meet US and Israeli demands to sideline Palestinian Authority Chairman Yassir Arafat.

The militant al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an armed offshoot of Arafat’s Fatah faction, claimed responsibility for the Tel Aviv attacks in statements on Sunday and Monday, saying it was retaliating for demolitions of Palestinian homes.

Militants had vowed to take revenge for Israeli military operations in the West Bank and Gaza, which have been stepped up in the past six weeks.

Even the US on Friday joined a chorus of international criticism against Israel’s policy of home demolitions, which have been denounced by Palestinians and human rights groups as collective punishment.

The Israeli army has bulldozed or dynamited more than 110 houses in the West Bank since August, when it launched its demolition policy.

The explosions — about two minutes apart — devastated the old bus station area and a busy shopping center, killing 23 people and wounding over 100 others in a foreign workers’ neighborhood on Sunday. At least 14 Israelis and six foreigners were among the dead.The explosives were powerful enough to hurl body parts hundreds of yards and shatter windows several blocks away.

One of the survivors said: "There was fire and smoke everywhere. I saw bodies strewn all over the ground. I saw a body without a leg and another with glass embedded in its face. There were bodies without hands, feet, fingers. I tried to help as much as possible."

While ambulances struggled to make their way through the narrow streets and pedestrian precincts of old Tel Aviv, the survivors grabbed billboards and doors ripped off their hinges by the blast to carry the wounded to get treatment.

"They killed the wrong people here," said Anthony Tinubu, a Nigerian illegal immigrant. "You ask yourself who would want to kill us.

"Look at that man, he is from China or somewhere. We are not Jews. I love Israel but I do not want to die because of what the Jews are doing to the Arabs."

According to the Israeli daily Ha’retz, "Herut chairman and MK [Minister of Knesset] Michael Klein said in response to the attack that ... Arafat should be liquidated and that the Palestinians should be hit with a final blow that would make them forget war for hundreds of years. ‘What the Americans are planning for [Iraq President]Saddam [Hussein] is nothing compared to what we should do to the Palestinian Authority,’ Kleiner said."

Politicians barred

Around 1,000 Israeli Jews and Arabs protested outside the supreme court in support of two Israeli Arab Knesset ministers who were barred from running for re-election by the central electoral commission with just three weeks to go before Israel’s general elections.

The court was due to examine the appeals lodged by Knesset ministers Ahmad Tibi and Azmi Bishara barred from running in the elections on the grounds that they supported "Palestinian terror."

The Israeli attorney general, Elyakim Rubenstein, said that Bishara’s support for "resistance" endorsed suicide bombings, and his call for Arab backing was an invitation to destroy the state.

Bishara says resistance to occupation is a recognized right under international law and that it can take many forms.

"I never called for armed struggle. I have always opposed the suicide bombs in writing and in speaking, and the targeting of civilians in general," he said.

"What I did do is show understanding of the option of resistance to occupation, which referred to strikes, demonstrations, mass rallies, even studies.

"And I said that a united Arab stand and international activity will prevent war and prevent a political dictate."

Bishara’s questioning of whether Israel can be both a Jewish and a democratic state is interpreted by Rubenstein as a threat to the existence of the state and therefore in breach of the law.

Kleiner, who is among those pressing for Bishara’s expulsion, said: "In any normal country, they would put him [Bishara] before a firing squad."

‘We’ve become barbarians’

A former Israeli cabinet minister and founder of the liberal-oriented Meretz party has castigated the current state of affairs in the Jewish state, saying Israeli Jews effectively have became barbarians in the year 2002.

Shulamit Aloni, former Minister of Education, was quoted by the Israeli newspaper Yedeot Ahranot on Jan. 1 as saying the year 2002 was "the worst in Israel’s history."

"The year 2002 was the worst in the state’s history... it was the year of moral degeneration during which we became an apartheid state, it was the year in which the government’s legal advisor began burying the democratic system."

Aloni especially lambasted the Israeli government for its repressive policies against Palestinians.

"In the year 2002, Israel sought to negate the rights of the Arab community, they censored a film on Jenin, they closed down an Arab newspaper, and they barred an Arab political party from taking part in the elections."

Aloni also said: "We transformed ourselves into barbarians; we turned 3.5 million human beings into hostages, we turned every town and village into a detention camp; we destroy ancient buildings dating back 800 years in order to build a park."

Echoing Aloni’s words, as many as ten thousand people, Jews and Arabs alike, took to the streets in Nazareth on Jan. 4 to protest against Israel’s increasingly brazen apartheid policies toward its growing Arab minority. Police and organizers estimated the number of protesters at 10,000 people, including many Israeli Jews horrified by what they called "looming apartheid.’’

Putting the idea of apartheid further into reality, Israel is building a barricade in and around the occupied Palestinian West Bank which will be four times the size of communist Germany’s Berlin Wall.

The eight-meter-high, 220 mile long wall is made out of huge gray concrete slabs, and has watchtowers built into it every 300 meters or so. On either side of it are military roads, complete with tanks and armored Jeeps, trenches, some six meters wide and four meters deep, barbed wire, cameras, motion sensors, electrified fencing, and exclusion zones of between 35 and 50 meters. In parts, special material will be laid to detect infiltrators’ footprints. In all it is about 100 meters wide and has been and will continue to be built entirely on Palestinian land.

The wall will effectively make the West Bank a huge open-air prison.

Its first phase, the 70-mile-long northern part of the wall has been under construction since July.

"The real reason for the wall is to take as much Palestinian land and water resources and annex as many of the settlements as possible. Current estimates say it will take as much as ten percent of the West Bank, including its most fertile land, and the whole of the western mountain aquifer, situated under the green line, which supplies the West Bank Palestinians with over 50 percent of their water," says Jamal Juma of the Palestinian Environmental NGO Network and a key campaigner against the wall.

"Once the wall is up it will cripple Palestinian agriculture and economic activity, and turn the West Bank into a series of disconnected, dependent entities or Bantustans. It will make life unlivable and cause the Palestinians to leave, which is what Israel, currently clamoring for transfer or ethnic cleansing, wants."

Sources: Agence France-Presse, BBC News, Guardian (UK), Ha‘aretz, Islamic Republic News Agency, LA Times, Palestine Chronicle, Reuters, Sunday Herald (Scotland)

back to top

FCC head Powell may eliminate limits on media concentration

Compiled by Nicholas Holt

Jan. 7 (AGR)— Over the next few months the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will begin to fundamentally alter the nation’s communications and mass-media landscape, rewriting a broad swath of rules that affect the choices consumers have for getting online and the variety of television and radio programming they watch and hear.

FCC chairman Michael K. Powell is seeking to weaken and possibly eliminate checks and balances on media ownership in the US.

FCC officials say they expect to begin making decisions as early as February.

Powell’s plans follow a joint request by News Corp’s Fox Entertainment Group, Viacom Inc., which owns the CBN and UPN networks, and General Electrics Co.’s NBC division that federal regulators scrap all the government’s media ownership rules.

Media industries have been called the most powerful lobby in Washington, with lobbying expenses of $125 million.

The rules the FCC are reviewing are designed to ensure diversity of voices and viewpoints and prevent individual companies from amassing too much control over what Americans see, hear, and read.

As they presently stand, the rules prevent a broadcaster from owning TV stations that reach more than 35% of the national audience; make it difficult for a company to own both a TV station and a newspaper or radio station in the same market; cap the number of TV or radio stations that can be owned in a single area; and prevent companies from owning more than one of the four major broadcast networks. Additional rules in question govern how much telephone companies need to open their lines to competitors for local phone and high speed internet service.

Those pushing for the changes argue that the old rules fail to account for emerging technologies that can provide a wealth of diverse information and means of communication. Burdensome regulation has stunted their deployment — particularly of high-speed internet access – these people say, and this in turn has hampered recovery of the battered technology sector.

Opponents of the proposed rules fear that, taken together, they ultimately could lead to a few powerful conglomerates controlling the flow of electronic information, from programming of television and radio news and entertainment to owning the pipes that control the internet.

Many of Powell’s strongest allies now control the relevant House and Senate committees and are likely to provide few political obstacles.

In the Senate for instance, Powell will now be reporting to a commerce committee that will be headed by Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who recruited him for the job of FCC commissioner in 1997. McCain has promised hearings on several of the issues the FCC is grappling with.

McCain replaces Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina, who was Powell’s toughest critic and opposed many of his proposals. At one hearing last summer, Hollings all but called Powell a shill for big business in general and the large telephone companies in particular. Although the FCC is an independent agency, Congress controls its purse strings. Proposed rules often are modified through negotiations among the commission’s five members, and FCC officials insist that final decisions have not been made. But analysts are increasingly convinced that, for the most part, the deregulatory agenda of Powell will prevail, making a definitive turn from the policies of the FCC during the Clinton administration.

Powell and Republican commissioners Kevin J. Martin and Kathleen Q. Abernathy have a three to two majority, and while they do not always vote in lock step, they are in general philosophical agreement that less regulation is beneficial.

The commission’s regulatory regime also has been under attack by the courts, which have issued key rulings challenging the commission’s requirements on the sharing of telephone networks and its limits on media concentrations.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Powell said he is determined to keep the internet relatively free from the decades-old, tightly regulated framework of local telephone service. He also disparages claims that changing FCC rules will mean open season for consolidation that will stifle competition. "That assumes that the antitrust division takes a pill and goes to sleep," said Powell, who once worked in the Justice Department. He added that the FCC will continue to evaluate mergers to determine whether they are in the public interest. He cited the agency’s recent rejection of the proposed buyout of Hughes Electronic Corp.’s Direct TV by satellite competitor EchoStar Communications Corp. as one example.

But industry experts, consumer groups, and several major technology companies aren’t convinced.

In a comment filed with the FCC on Jan. 2, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) urged the FCC "to to maintain the remaining broadcast ownership rules in order to protect diversity and localism in the news and information available to the general public, to protect against anti-competitive business practices, and to prevent any further erosion of innovation in media programming…

"As the Commission has long maintained, and the courts have confirmed, the promotion of viewpoint diversity is a proper component of the Commission’s mission to promote the public interest. The media is the lifeblood of American democracy and culture, and local communities should be served by a media marketplace that delivers the ‘widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources.’ Further, as the courts have also confirmed, ownership limits are a rational and constitutional method of ensuring editorial and viewpoint diversity."

Paul Misener, vice president of global public policy for Amazon.com Inc., who also worked at the FCC, said it is "an operating assumption" in his industry that there will be fewer internet access providers in the future.

Misener said the direction the FCC is headed creates the likelihood that while consumers will have a choice between high-speed internet technologies – via cable or souped-up telephone service known as DSL – there will only be one or two internet providers within each technology.

That prospect has Amazon, Microsoft Corp., and a coalition of other technology companies worried that those gatekeepers could prevent users from looking at certain content.

Sources: Center For Digital Democracy, Mediachannel.org, New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, Washington Post

"[The First] Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society. Surely a command that the government itself shall not impede the free flow of ideas does not afford nongovernmental combinations a refuge if they impose restraints upon that constitutionally guaranteed freedom. Freedom to publish means freedom for all, and not for some. Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the Constitution, but freedom to combine to keep others from publishing is not. Freedom of the press from governmental interference under the First Amendment does not sanction repression of that freedom by private interests."

Associated Press v. United States No. 57
Argued December 5, 6, 1944
Decided June 18, 1945

Source: The Center for Digital Democracy
<www.democraticmedia.org>

back to top