Ecuador gov’t receives ultimatum
from Indigenous movement
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Saddam Hussein: Made in the USA
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N. Korea sends plane into South,
restarts reactor
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WORLD BRIEFS
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Palestinian bodies pile up,
new ‘Berlin Wall’ goes up

Compiled by Seán Marquis

Feb. 26 (AGR)— At least 68 Palestinians were killed at the hands of Israeli troops in less than a month (February) and in the past week — as of Feb. 24 — at least 43 Palestinians have been killed in a series of Israeli operations, chiefly in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank city of Nablus.

The dead have been a combination of unarmed civilians, armed militants, members of the legitimate Palestinian security forces and one a medic trying to reach a sick patient.

The Israeli army began this week’s offensive after four Israeli soldiers were killed when Hamas set fire to an Israeli tank guarding a Jewish settlement inside the occupied Gaza Strip.

Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations (UN) commissioner for human rights, said in a statement yesterday he was "extremely concerned" at Palestinian deaths in Gaza. "Such indiscriminate use of force in civilian areas can never be justified," he said, and urged Israel "to cease such actions which can damage any possible peace process in the region."

On Feb. 16 six Hamas militants were killed in a mysterious explosion in the Gaza Strip which Hamas blaims on Israel.

The same day, Tayseer Khalil, a representative of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a PLO faction that does not support attacks on Israeli civilians, was arrested by soldiers in Nablus. Palestinian gunmen fired on the soldiers trying to arrest him and four Palestinians were killed in the gun battle.

Hamas activist, Riyad abu Zeid, was killed when undercover Israeli soldiers hiding in a vegetable van ambushed his car on the Gaza coast road on Feb. 17.

On Feb. 19, the bloodiest day of the week, 11 Palestinians died in an Israeli incursion into Gaza City. The dead included Mundur Safadi, a Palestinian medic shot dead as he accompanied his brother, Dr. Ra’ed Safadi, who was trying to reach a patient.

The Israeli army said the aim of the incursion was to destroy metal workshops it claimed were used by Hamas to build rockets to fire at Israeli towns. That evening Hamas fired three rockets at the nearby town of Sderot, injuring three Israelis.

The dead in the raid also included three members of Palestinian intelligence, a legitimate security force, killed when their car was hit by Israeli machine-gunfire.

As far as a possible "peace" is concerned Ha’aretz newspaper reported that Israel wanted to make more than 100 changes to the draft of the so-called "road map" to a peace put out by the "quartet" — which includes the United States, the European Union, Russia and the UN, including stringent restrictions on any future Palestinian state as well as canceling all specific timetables.

The Israeli prime minister also rejected the right of return for Palestinians who fled or were driven out in 1948. Sharon, who has pledged to find another one million Jewish immigrants by the end of the decade, described Palestinian refugees as "a danger" to Israel’s existence because of their numbers, thought to total about four million.

Sharon also intends to demand that the Palestinians fulfill a series of commitments before Israel has to take a single step toward implementing its side of any agreement.

Israel wants a Palestinian state to have only limited sovereignty, including complete demilitarization. Israel would control its borders and air space, and it would be forbidden to establish diplomatic ties with any "enemy" of Israel.

Land grabs and ‘The Wall’
A dispute between the state of Israel and 70,000 Bedouin living in 46 unrecognized villages in the Negev Desert is being highlighted as the Israeli cabinet prepares to approve a new plan for the Negev Desert that officials, analysts, and Bedouin activists say will boost efforts to move the Bedouin out of their villages and estimated 62,500 acres of land.

The Negev plan includes changes in the law to make demolitions easier and, at the prompting of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the establishment of 30 new family farms for Jews only.

Taleb Sanaa, a Bedouin member of the Knesset, calls it "a declaration of war against the Bedouin citizens." David Cohen, the southern district director for the Interior Ministry sees the plan as a means to stop the "incursions" of Bedouin onto lands claimed by the state.

Bedouin activist Atiyeh Asim says the expansion is a result of "natural growth" and adds that the government facilitates the expansion of Jewish towns. "We have children and we want to live," he says. "The main problem is that the government wants the land we are on. It wants to concentrate the Bedouin, the way the Americans did to the Indians."

Also last week the Israeli Army notified Bethlehem residents of its intention to portion off a section of the city behind a new "security wall."

The inhabitants here, predominantly from Bethlehem’s fast-dwindling Palestinian Christian community, will be cut off from their city by a concrete wall guarded by Israeli army patrols. They will be allowed to cross into Bethlehem only through an Israeli army checkpoint, with permits the army can issue or withhold as it sees fit. They will not be allowed into Jerusalem, on the other side of the pocket of land they will be walled off in.

Amjad Awwad will be cut off from the store he runs. His house is on one side of the street, the store is on the other. After the wall is built he will need the Israeli army’s permission to go to work and to go home again.

"They told us if you want a doctor in the night the hospital will have to phone the Israeli government and arrange permission for him to be allowed in. If it’s a heart attack, we’ll die before they allow the ambulance in."

After the wall is built, the Bethlehem municipality will even need military permission to send trucks to collect the garbage. The wall is part of what has become known as Israel’s "Berlin Wall," electrified fences and concrete walls the Israeli government is building around the West Bank to seal it off and stop Palestinian militants crossing into Israel.

As elsewhere, the wall is not following the 1967 border but dipping deep into the West Bank. The reason it is slicing into Bethlehem, say Israeli authorities, is so Rachel’s Tomb, a Jewish pilgrimage site inside the city, will be on the Israeli side of the wall, guaranteeing easy access for Jewish pilgrims.

For the 500 or so people who will be cut off from the rest of Bethlehem, the wall is a disaster.

Dr. Jad Issac works for the Applied Research Institute, Jerusalem, a Palestinian organization that makes maps of Israeli settlement-building in the occupied territories using satellite images it buys commercially. They show Bethlehem being surrounded by fences to protect new settlement suburbs of Jerusalem built in the occupied West Bank.

"There will be no room for Bethlehem to expand naturally," Dr. Issac said. "The population density will become so high people will start leaving freely. We will be forced to migrate."

"Once they get rid of the Christians," Issac added, "then they will label the rest as terrorists."

The new wall is a segment of the barrier fence that Israel is building in what it calls an effort to separate Israelis from Palestinians. The government claims that the snaking path of the fence is being guided not by politics or religion but by security needs.

The mayor of Bethlehem said that the city would sue the Israeli government to stop the wall, but most residents see those efforts as fruitless.

"It’s a military order," said Awwad. "There is no law."



Sources: BBC, Christian Science Monitor, Daily Telegraph (UK), Guardian (UK), Independent (UK), Qatar News Agency

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N. Korea sends plane into South,
restarts reactor

Compiled by Willy Rosencrans

Feb. 26 (AGR) — North Korea restarted its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon within the last 24 hours, raising the stakes in its diplomatic showdown with the United States, US officials said on Wednesday.

But there were no signs that North Korea had reactivated its nuclear fuel reprocessing facility which would be of even greater concern to the United States, officials told Reuters.

"I think this is another example of the regime of North Korea taking escalatory actions in order to gain concessions," Sean McCormack, White House National Security Council spokesman, said. "We seek a peaceful diplomatic solution, but all options remain on the table," he added.

A Feb. 20 flight by a North Korean fighter plane into South Korean airspace raised tension on the Korean peninsula; Washington meanwhile continued to pursue a hard-line policy towards Pyongyang, preparing battle scenarios and furthering the threat of nuclear war in the region.

South Korea scrambled six F-5E fighters after a North Korean MiG-19 flew almost eight miles into its air space, the first such violation in twenty years. After two minutes the plane returned across the border over the Yellow Sea. A South Korean anti-aircraft missile unit based near Incheon, a seaport west of Seoul, was given the order to be ready to fire.

The US responded to the incursion by placing on alert its long-range bombers based on Guam and ordering the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and its battle group to sail to waters off the Korean Peninsula, which filled a gap left by an earlier aircraft carrier’s departure to Iraq and fueled talk of a possible US pre-emptive strike against North Korea’s nuclear facilities. The Pentagon plans to deploy 24 extra bombers within striking range of the North, and the White House is studying contingency plans for sanctions, a move Pyongyang says would be a declaration of war.

The US halted oil shipments to North Korea in November after announcing that North Korea was developing a nuclear weapons program in violation of a 1994 agreement providing oil and nuclear energy supplies in exchange for nuclear non-proliferation. In December, North Korea removed monitoring devices at its Yongbyon nuclear plant, saying it needed to make up for a shortfall in energy supplies created by the discontinued oil shipments, and expelled UN nuclear inspectors. In January it pulled out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and on Feb. 19 it threatened to pull out of the 1953 armistice agreement that ended the Korean War.

The North has insisted throughout the crisis that all US security concerns, beginning with its nuclear programs, can be addressed if Washington enters into a new agreement that would include a mutual non-aggression treaty, a formal recognition of North Korea’s sovereignty, and a pledge not to obstruct Pyongyang’s economic development by, for example, denying it access to loans from international financial institutions.

But administration hawks have argued that acceding to Pyongyang’s demands would reward bad behaviour. In their view, even the 1994 agreement rewarded actions in which Pyongyang never should have been engaged.

Doves have argued that Washington has little to lose by sitting down with Pyongyang, particularly because all of its allies in the region, especially South Korea, are urging it to do so. Even prominent Republicans are now insisting that Washington’s refusal to engage Pyongyang bilaterally puts US national security at risk.

"The urgency of the crisis brooks no delay over matters of form," Brent Scowcroft, former President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser, wrote in an open letter to the president. "Direct talks represent no substantive concession to Pyongyang; allowing plutonium reprocessing would."

Scowcroft’s advice added to the growing consensus among national-security experts here that Bush will have to come around. By resisting Pyongyang’s demands for bilateral negotiations on its nuclear program and other security-related issues, the administration may be contributing to the crisis.

Meanwhile, on Feb. 21, Swiss-based ABB said that Rumsfeld was on its board in early 2000, when it netted a $200 million contract with Pyongyang. The ABB contract was to deliver equipment and services for two nuclear power stations at Kumho, on North Korea’s east coast as part of the 1994 agreement.

Rumsfeld – who is one of the Bush administration’s most strident "hardliners" on North Korea – left ABB to take up his current post. Wolfram Eberhardt, a spokesman for ABB, said that Rumsfeld "was at nearly all the board meetings" during his decade-long involvement with the company.

Rumsfeld’s position at ABB could prove embarrassing for the Bush administration since while he was a director he was also active on issues of weapons proliferation, chairing the 1998 congressional Ballistic Missile Threat commission, which suggested the Clinton-era deal with Pyongyang gave too much away because "North Korea maintains an active weapons of mass destruction program, including a nuclear weapons program."

A Pentagon spokeswoman, Victoria Clarke, recently told Newsweek that "Secretary Rumsfeld does not recall it being brought before the board at any time."

Sources: Agence-France Presse, BBC, Independent (UK), International Herald Tribune, IPS, Japan Times, Reuters, The Scotsman, Swiss Radio International

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Ecuador gov’t receives ultimatum
from Indigenous movement

By Kintto Lucas

Quito, Ecuador, Feb. 21 (IPS)— Ecuador’s co-governing indigenous movement has distanced itself from President Lucio Gutiérrez, complaining that he has failed to live up to his campaign promises, and that he has continued to follow the neo-liberal policies of his predecessors during his first month in office.

The powerful Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) gave the government one month to modify its economic policies, after holding a national assembly on Tuesday.

"If in 30 days the government fails to rectify its performance, we will withdraw our support," said the president of CONAIE, Leonidas Iza, who did not rule out the possibility of a new national "uprising" by the indigenous movement, which is perhaps the best organized in Latin America.

Nationwide protests by Ecuador’s poor indigenous people, who make up more than 30 percent of the population of this Andean country, overthrew presidents Abdala Bucaram in 1997 and Jamil Mahuad in 2000.

Instead of sending in his troops to crack down on the demonstrators in 2000, Gutiérrez, an army colonel at the time, backed their protests against corruption and the government’s neo-liberal economic policies, and helped oust Mahuad.

Gutiérrez was jailed for six months and kicked out of the army for his involvement in toppling the president. He then decided to enter politics, and went on to win the November 2002 elections, taking office on Jan. 16.

This week, Ecuarunari, the largest of CONAIE’s member groups, decided to "immediately mark our distance from the government of Lucio Gutiérrez, for failing to comply with its mandate and the proposals established by the accord" with the indigenous movement, and for "continuing to follow neo-liberal policies."

Ecuarunari represents the Quechua community, which accounts for more than three million of Ecuador’s 12.4 million people.

Parliamentary Deputy Ricardo Ulcuango of the Pachakutik Movement, the political arm of an alliance between CONAIE and other social organizations, defended the indigenous movement’s independence in its relationship with the government.

"The indigenous and social organizations in general must have the independence and autonomy to work from their grassroots support bases, demand respect for their rights, and mobilize whenever they consider it necessary," he said.

According to Ulcuango, a former president of Ecuarunari and former vice-president of CONAIE, the country’s indigenous groups should not form part of the government’s institutional structure.

Instead, he argued, it is best for the participation of indigenous groups in the government to be channeled through Pachakutik.

"The Ecuarunari resolution does not signify a break with the government," said Ulcuango. "It is the position that any social organization should take with relation to a government," and is "a way of keeping civil society groups on their toes."

But he added that Pachakutik would not give into pressure from groups that want it to break off ties with Gutiérrez.

The movement "will clearly mark its discrepancies with the economic direction taken, pressure for changes in the economic team, and oppose any shift by the government towards the right," said Ulcuango. "But it is not going to break up the alliance, because that is what the right — both within and outside the government — want."

Ecuarunari and Pachakutik are demanding the removal of Finance and Economy Minister Mauricio Pozo.

"Through Pozo, along with his undersecretaries and associates from previous governments, the conditions set by the IMF continue to be imposed on us, and the same neo-liberal policies continue to be implemented," according to a communiqué released this month by Ecuarunari.

In his campaign platform, the populist Gutiérrez pledged social reforms and promised to fight against corruption in a country where 60 percent of the population is living below the poverty line.

"The representatives of Pachakutik within the government should work to change the direction that the administration is taking. Meanwhile, social organizations, including indigenous groups, must maintain their capacity to mobilize and apply pressure from the outside," Ulcuango argued.

Gutiérrez said he was willing to hold a dialogue with the leadership of the indigenous movement and with all social sectors, in order to prevent a break-up of the alliance between Pachakutik and his Patriotic Society Party that carried him to power.

"I don’t believe that breaking up the alliance would be the right thing to do, and the possibility worries me. But if CONAIE wants to pull away, I can’t chain them to my side," he stated.

Pachakutik spokespersons told IPS that the president said he was willing to modify some aspects of the government’s recent agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) if acceptable alternatives were presented.

Groups of secondary and university students and pensioners added their voices to the criticism against the government, marching to the presidential palace Wednesday to demand that Gutiérrez change the tack of his economic policies.

When the president went out on the balcony to address the demonstrators, he was booed and jeered, for the first time since he took office.

"The signing of the agreement with the IMF was sovereign, without impositions. If I did not assume that commitment, how were we going to pay the salaries of teachers and doctors and the pensions of retirees?" he asked.

The agreement entailed a 500 million dollar loan to Ecuador, under conditions that are rejected by social movements like CONAIE and by the left.

Gutiérrez asked the public to demand results "at the six-month or one-year mark," instead of just one month into his term. "Please give me a little breathing room," he requested.

On Thursday, members of the Peasant Social Security and National Peasant Coordinator movements demonstrated outside the presidential palace to protest the letter of intent signed with the IMF earlier this month.

In addition, the National Union of Educators (UNE) announced a two-day strike to demand payment of back wages and protest the accord signed with the IMF.

UNE, the trade union with the greatest capacity to mobilize, has ties to the Marxist Popular Democratic Movement which supported Gutiérrez in the campaign and now forms part of the government, in the Environment Ministry.

Ulcuango criticized several aspects of the new IMF credit, including promises to grant public enterprises in concession to the private sector, and the elimination of subsidies that lowered the price of cooking gas.

Although it is true that Ecuador’s businesses must modernize and become more efficient, "they shouldn’t be handed over in order for foreign companies to rake in profits and raise the rates of public services," he maintained.

The parliamentarian also complained that in the letter of intent, the government agreed to assign all oil export revenues above and beyond what was estimated by the budget to servicing the country’s bulky foreign debt.

The surplus revenues could be significant, since the budget was based on a price of 18 dollars a barrel, while prices have shot up to 32 dollars a barrel.

At a meeting with Pachakutik lawmakers attended by IPS, Finance and Economy Minister Pozo argued that the agreement was justified because the price of oil could go down. But he also stated that some of the surplus oil earnings could go towards social investment.

"It looks like the finance minister is taking us for fools," said Ulcuango.

Pozo said the complete text of the agreement with the IMF would be posted over the Internet by the weekend, to make it available to the public.

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Saddam Hussein: Made in the USA

By Mike Burke

New York, New York, Feb. 15— "The Bush administration [has] sent US technology to the Iraqi military and to many Iraqi military factories, despite over-whelming evidence showing that Iraq intended to use the technology in its clandestine nuclear, chemical, biological, and long-range missile programs."

No, this quotation is not pulled from a conspiracy-minded website, but from the Congressional Record from July 27, 1992. They are the words of the late Congressman Henry Gonzalez of Texas. For months in the early 1990s Gonzalez released hundreds of documents that outlined how the highest levels of the US government — including Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — had secretly and illegally helped arm Saddam Hussein. The scandal was known as Iraqgate.

In 1991, Charles Schumer, then a New York Congressman, now the New York Senator, said Hussein was Bush’s Frankenstein: "He had been created in the White House laboratory with a collection of government programs, banks, and private companies." At the time, future Vice President Al Gore said, "Bush is presiding over a cover up significantly worse than Watergate."

But Iraqgate is now all but forgotten in the wake of the Clinton-era scandals of Whitewater and Monica. The definitive account of Iraqgate, Alan Friedman’s Spider’s Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq, is long out of print. But the US role in arming Iraq has recently resurfaced.

In December, the White House boldly seized Iraq’s 12,000-page weapons document in order to censor parts for the non-permanent Security Council states. Among the information deleted was a list of US corporations, government agencies and laboratories that aided Iraq. The companies included Honeywell, Kodak, Bechtel, Dupont and Hewlett-Packard. Among the government agencies were the Departments of Defense, Energy, Commerce and Agriculture. And then there were government nuclear weapons laboratories Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia, which all offered training to Iraqi scientists. This information emerged only after a German news reporter obtained unedited portions of the Iraq documents.

US-Iraqi relations extend back to June 1982 when President Reagan issued a National Security Decision Directive in the midst of the Iraq-Iran war. According to an affidavit by former National Security Council official Howard Teicher, from 1982 on the White House "supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing US military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that Iraq had the military weaponry required." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld twice, in 1983 and 1984, visited Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein. Teicher, who traveled to Baghdad with Rumsfeld, described the mission: "Here was the US government coming hat-in-hands to Saddam Hussein and saying, ‘We respect you, we respect you. How can we help you? Let us help you.’" Rumsfeld’s trips came at a time when the US knew Iraq had already begun gassing Iranians. In 1985, the US Centers for Disease Control sent samples of an Israeli strain of West Nile virus to a microbiologist at Basra University in Iraq. The US would also send over "various toxins and bacteria," including botulins and E. coli.

In 1986, Taicher would later recall, "President Reagan sent a secret message to Saddam Hussein telling him that Iraq should step up its air war and bombing of Iran. This message was delivered by Vice President Bush who communicated it to Egyptian President Mubarak, who in turn passed the message to Saddam Hussein." And the US continued throughout the 1980s in backing Hussein by providing military assistance and diplomatic cover for war crimes.

In 1984, the State Department arranged for the sale of 45 Bell 214ST helicopters to Iraq. Four years later The Los Angeles Times reported that "American-built helicopters" were used to gas Kurdish civilians. In March 1988 up to 6,800 Kurds were gassed to death in Halabja by Hussein’s troops. In response the US State Department attempted, according to a recent report in The International Herald Tribune, to place blame for the gassing also on the Iranians despite no evidence of Iranian involvement. When the UN Security Council passed a resolution to censure the Halabja attack it called on "both sides to refrain from the future use of chemical weapons."

In July 1990, days before Iraq invaded Kuwait, US Ambassador April Glaspie met with Saddam Hussein and gave him what many believe to be a green light for invading Kuwait.

Speaking for President Bush, Glaspie said, "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." Hussein invaded Kuwait beginning a war that has yet to end. Leading the fight, then Secretary of Defense, was Dick Cheney. While the Gulf War marked the end of US support for Hussein, private US corporations continued to quietly trade with Iraq through foreign subsidiaries. And among those who profited most was Cheney himself.

In 1995, Cheney took over as CEO of Halliburton, a Dallas-based oil-field supply corporation. According to The Washington Post, two Halliburton foreign subsidiaries sold more than $73 million in oil production equipment and supplies to Iraq under Cheney’s command. Cheney had helped Halliburton become the biggest US oil contractor for Iraq.

This article originally appeared in the Indypendent, the monthly newspaper of the New York City Independent Media Center.

PERMANENT MEMBERS OF UN SECURITY COUNCIL SOLD WEAPONS, TECHNOLOGY TO IRAQ

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council — Britain, France, Russia, America and China — were named by Iraq in the 12,000 page dossier submitted to the UN in December 2002 as having supplied the country with weapons technology. Around 8,000 pages were censored from the original document by the United States, including sections that named western corporations that made the sales.

From security council permanent member countries, some of the companies named include:

US (24 companies named)

• Hewlett-Packard: nuclear and rocket technology

• Dupont: nuclear technology

• Eastman Kodak: rocket capabilities

• US Departments of Defense, Energy, Trade and Agriculture: technology for weapons of mass destruction

• Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories: technology for weapons of mass destruction

Britain (17 companies named)
• International Military Services (part of the Ministry of Defense): rocket technology
• Endshire Export Marketing

Russia (6 companies named)
• Livinvest, Mars Rotor, Niikhism: military helicopter parts

China (3 companies named)
• Huawei Technologies: supplies to Iraqi Air Defense

France (8 companies named)

Other countries named include:

Germany (80 companies named)
• Siemens: medical machines with dual-purpose parts used to detonate nuclear bombs

Belgium (7)

Japan (5)

Holland (3)

Source: (Scotland) Sunday Herald

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