Global protests continue against US war, occupation
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WORLD BRIEFS
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Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan
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Scandal-hit US firm wins key Iraq contracts
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Continuing police repression in Argentina
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The Colombian Paramilitaries and Israel
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Second peace activist in less than a week shot by Israeli forces

Apr. 16— An Israeli sniper shot a British peace activist in the head on Apr. 11 as he was trying to help two Palestinian girls out of danger during a bid to set up a protest tent in the Gaza Strip, his colleagues, who witnessed the shooting, said. Doctors at a Rafah hospital pronounced him brain dead.

Tom Hurndall, a 22-year-old student from London, was protecting some children playing with a mound of earth in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah when he was shot, fellow activists from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) said.

They said the British pacifist was in plain view of nearby Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) sniper towers and was wearing a bright orange fluorescent jacket with reflective stripes. Hurndall and eight other ISM activists and many children were in the process of leaving the area when the shooting began.

Snipers opened fire from a tower to the east, said Tom Wallace, a spokesman for the group, citing members who were present.

Wallace said that Hurndall was trying to bring two children to safety after successfully retrieving a girl.

“As he went to get the other children, he was shot in the back of his head,” Wallace said. There was no shooting or resistance coming from the Palestinian side at all, he added.

Hurndall is the second international peace activist to be shot in less than a week.

“Tom was wearing fluorescent overalls. Some children were playing on a mound of earth when some shots rang out from the Israelis,” said Raphael Cohen, a 37-year-old Londoner, who was 15 yards away from Hurndall when he was shot.

“He helped a small boy from the exposed side of the mound and then went back to fetch two little girls. It was then he was shot.” he added.

Doctors said they removed “a high-velocity sniper round” from Hurndall’s head.

Dr. Ali Musa, director of the Rafah hospital, said Hurndall’s brain had been damaged and that he was clinically dead.

He was then evacuated by helicopter to a hospital in Beersheva in Israel.

The Briton is the third activist to be shot by IDF in the past six months.

Another American activist, Brian Avery, was shot in the face by an IDF soldier in Jenin last week. His colleagues also said the shooting was deliberate and unprovoked.

Six months ago in Jenin, an Irish activist Caoimhe Butterly, 23, was shot in the leg.

All three activists belonged to the ISM; a group which helps Palestinians in danger of having their houses demolished by IDF and which use non-violent methods to protest the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

Hurndall’s fellow activists accused the IDF army of deliberately targeting foreigners who go into the occupied territory to help protect Palestinians and bear witness to conditions there.

“The Israelis have really started to target the international presence in Gaza,” Cohen said.

“There are very few of us who are prepared to take the risk to do this human shield work,” he further stressed.

He insisted that there was no Palestinian firing when Hurndall was shot. “We never work when the Palestinian resistance is operating,” he said. “We have no intention of getting caught in the crossfire.

“He is a fantastic person and a very passionate photographer,” Cohen said of Hurndall.

“He was very excited about being in Rafah. He came here to help people and that is what he was doing every day.”

IDF report clears troops over US activist’s death

An Israeli army investigation into the death of Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist, has concluded that its forces were not to blame for her death.

It accused Corrie and other members of the International Solidarity Movement of “illegal, irresponsible and dangerous” behavior.

Corrie, 23, was crushed to death by an army bulldozer in Rafah, Gaza, as she protested house demolitions.

The investigation, led by the chief of the general staff of the Israeli Defense Force, found that Israeli forces were not guilty of any misconduct.

Even though pictures clearly showed Corrie, who was wearing a florescent jacket in broad daylight, in full view of the bulldozer, the army report says Corrie “was struck as she stood behind a mound of earth that was created by an engineering vehicle operating in the area and she was hidden from the view of the vehicle’s operator who continued with his work. Corrie was struck by dirt and a slab of concrete resulting in her death.”

Tom Wallace, a spokesman for the ISM, said that the army’s investigation had been far from credible and transparent as it had promised.

Joe Smith, 21, from Missouri, who witnessed Corrie’s death, said that the army’s description bore little resemblance to what he saw. “Rachel was kneeling 20 meters in front of the bulldozer on flat ground. There was no way she could not have been seen. We only maintain positions that are clearly visible.

“She had been doing this all day but this time the driver did not stop. Once she had fallen under the bulldozer, the driver stopped when she was under its middle section and reversed,” he said.

Source: Palestine Media Center; additional info from the Guardian (UK)

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Global protests continue against US war, occupation

Compiled by Seán Marquis

Apr. 16 (AGR)— Hundreds of thousands of opponents of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq held new anti-war protests across Europe and the Americas, arguing that the Iraqi regime’s collapse was no reason to let up the pressure.

In London, England, protesters held a moment of silence in Parliament Square at the Houses of Parliament.

Organizers said 100,000 rallied against Prime Minister Tony Blair’s support for the war, with the crowd chanting “Blair calls it liberation, it looks to us like occupation.”

“It is clear the war is not over,” said Andrew Murray, chairman of Britain’s Stop the War Coalition: “There are still people being killed and we will also emphasize our opposition to occupation.”

“I think the war is not ending — it’s only just started,” said Sue Wyndham, a 54-year-old protester. “They’re going to go into Syria or Korea next, anywhere they feel they can use their power.”

Protesters tossed bunches of yellow daffodils at the gates of Blair’s home.

In Paris, France about 11,000 protesters marched through the city, and smaller anti-war protests were staged in some 50 other French cities and towns.

In Dhaka, Bangladesh, nearly 50,000 school children and others gathered to accuse the United States and Britain of committing crimes against humanity in attacking Iraq. Many carried toy guns and tanks symbolizing their vow to fight against coalition forces.

“American and British soldiers may have occupied Iraq, but they have failed to win the hearts of the Iraqi people,” Mohammad Selim, 10, said at the protest sponsored by Islamic and leftist parties and anti-war citizens’ groups.

About 4,000 protesters gathered in Seoul, South Korea, where they clashed with riot police trying to keep them away from the US Embassy.

Riot police wielded truncheons and sprayed fire extinguishers at protesters chanting slogans against “the war-mad United States,” who fought back with sticks.

Police buses had their windows shattered in the melee which left at least two protesters injured.

In Rome, Italy crowds swelled to half a million according to unofficial estimates.

“The war is over in its most obvious form as a classic means of destruction,” said Fausto Bertinotti, Secretary-General of Italy’s Refounded Communist Party (PRC): “But it continues as low intensity conflict and a strategic hypothesis of world domination by means of preventive war as conceived by [US President George W.] Bush.”

A small group of protesters vandalized buildings as a procession snaked through the city, hurling red paint at banks and vandalizing targets seen as linked to big business, but police did not intervene.

In the city of Barcelona, Spain more than 200,000 people turned out, chanting: “Aznar resign!” in protest at Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s support for the US line on Iraq despite its rejection by the vast majority of the Spanish public.

Some 200,000 took to the streets of the capital Madrid, organizers said.

In Canada, Federal NDP Leader Jack Layton was among several thousand people who turned out in Montreal to protest against war in Iraq and the systems that lead to war in general.

In Winnipeg, about 700 people marched from the provincial legislature to Market Square. There were many anti-US signs in the crowd, labeling Bush as a moron, imperialist, and dictator.

In Berlin, Germany about 12,000 people gathered for a rally near the Brandenburg Gate, the city’s best-known landmark.

In Australia, between ten and fifteen thousand Sydney protesters participated in the Palm Sunday Peace March which started with an ecumenical church service in Belmore Park before the street march.

Former intelligence officer Andrew Wilkie, who quit his job at the Office of National Assessments in protest at the government’s pro-war policy, told the rally that the invasion of Iraq had fueled hatred in the Middle East against the West.

“There will be a terrorist backlash and we are now that bit closer to the so-called clash of civilizations,” he said. “The government said there is no increased threat of terrorism to Australia - what rot.”

A rally in Brisbane that same day was told that Bush and Australian Prime Minister John Howard should stop kidding themselves over the war in Iraq.

Brisbane Lord Mayor Jim Soorley told a Palm Sunday peace rally in King George Square that no one could claim they had been vindicated over a decision to invade Iraq.

“Peace is much deeper than pulling down a statue of Saddam Hussein and being stupid enough to put an American flag over the face,” Soorley said.

The previous week, the Anti-War Coalition (AWC) organized a march of thousands of people from Klipspruit to Lenasia, south of Johannesburg, South Africa on Saturday, Apr. 5.

Participating organizations included the Anti-Privatisation Forum, the Palestine Solidarity Committee, and the Landless People’s Movement. AWC spokesman Salim Vally said: “The government should expel all military attachés, security agencies, and intelligence personnel from the US and UK embassies and consulates. The government must unambiguously condemn the invasion of Iraq and have no dealings with any puppet administrations established in Iraq by occupying forces, and they (the government) must also insist that the United Nations Security Council be democratically restructured and not be based in the US.”

Sources: Agence France Presse, Associated Press, BBC, Canadian Press, The Sydney Morning Herald

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Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Apr. 7 (IPS)— As senior US officials promise to rebuild and democratize Iraq, citizens of that country might wish to consider the fate of nearby Afghanistan just one year after President George W. Bush compared US intentions there to Washington’s post-World War II Marshall Plan for Europe.

“(Secretary of State George) Marshall knew our military victory against enemies in World War II had to be followed by a moral victory that resulted in better lives for individual human beings,” he told students at Virginia Military Institute, Marshall’s alma mater, last April.

“Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government. Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan train and develop its own national army. And peace will be achieved through an education system for boys and girls that works.”

So it must come as a serious disappointment both to Afghanis and to Bush when Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghanistan’s president and his representative in the Pashtun region of southern Kandahar, recently told one reporter, “There have been no significant changes for people. I don’t know what to say to people anymore.”

While no one is predicting the imminent collapse of the interim government headed by Hamid Karzai, he has been unable to extend meaningful control over most of the countryside beyond the capital Kabul, the only part of Afghanistan patrolled by the multinational International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

Without such control, the central government is unable to gain much traction in the effort to rebuild the war-devastated country as promised by Bush, or win the “hearts and minds” of Afghanis, particularly Pashtuns who make up about 40 percent of the population.

Indeed, in the mainly Pashtun south there is mounting evidence that the ousted Taliban of Osama bin Laden, many of whom are believed to be based along the border with Pakistan, are making a comeback.

That notion was illustrated dramatically last weekend by the assassination, apparently by Taliban militants, of one of Karzai’s closest friends and his nephew, Haji Gilani, in the southern Oruzgan province. Gilani sheltered Karzai in the opening stages of US efforts to turn Pashtun leaders against the Taliban just before the Washington-backed military campaign got underway in October 2001.

The killing was the latest in a spate of anti-government violence that includes the murder 10 days ago of a Red Cross worker from El Salvador. Stopped at a checkpoint with a group of Afghanis, the worker was singled out for execution after the highwaymen received direct orders from Taliban commanders by satellite phone.

It was the first murder of a foreign relief worker since the Taliban’s ouster and prompted a number of agencies, including the Red Cross, to withdraw personnel from much of the south as a precaution, which will further delay the implementation of key rebuilding projects.

In another attack, four gunmen on motorcycles last week ambushed a US military reconnaissance patrol also in the south, killing two US Special Operations Forces (SOF) soldiers and injuring a third, along with three Afghani soldiers. It was the first killings of US servicemen in the country since December.

One week earlier — again in the south — three Afghani guards were killed at their checkpoint, apparently in an attack by guerrillas of either the Taliban or of forces led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Pashtun rebel chief during the Soviet occupation who joined forces with the Taliban after Karzai was named president.

While US military officers on the ground, who have conducted a series of ground and air offensives against suspected Taliban mountain hideouts over the past 10 days, say they are not particularly worried, most independent analysts have warned that these incidents indicate that Washington and Karzai’s government may be losing the war for “hearts and minds,” especially among the Pashtuns, the largest Afghani ethnic group.

Washington has about 8,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan.

“The United States is closely identified with the current situation in Afghanistan,” wrote another of Karzai’s brothers, Afghani-American Chamber of Commerce founder Mahmood Karzai, who, with Chamber vice president Hamed Wardak and Jack Kemp, a former Republican candidate for president, warned in Monday’s ‘Washington Post’ that the regime’s foes are gaining ground.

The major problem, according to most analysts, is that the United States is relying on local warlords backed up by SOF and air power when needed, rather than the ISAF, to provide security in the countryside.

“At best, US cooperation with the warlords serves to alienate the common Afghan citizen,” the Chamber leaders and Kemp wrote. “A worst-case scenario is that Afghanis will associate US involvement with tyranny and become vulnerable to political manipulation by the Taliban and al-Qaida.”

“This is what comes of buying security ‘on the cheap’,” noted one State Department official, who stressed that Washington’s plans for training army and police forces to gradually take over security functions outside Kabul were taking much longer than anticipated, in part due to lack of money to pay recruits.

US commanders have also recently formed provisional regional teams (PRTs) consisting of about 500 US civil-affairs reservists to provide humanitarian and reconstruction help so poor communities can build schools or repair transportation in the central government’s name.

But these too have been dependent on local landlords to provide security and may do little to enhance Kabul’s authority. And in Pashtun areas, some of their work has been attacked and destroyed by Taliban or allied groups, while the use of military personnel to perform humanitarian tasks has only added to the concerns of civilian relief agencies that they too may be targeted.

Karzai recently announced a major program to demilitarize warlords’ militias by providing public-works jobs and training for disarmed militia members as another way of pacifying the countryside. But neither the United States nor other major donors have committed major new funding to the project.

To Karzai’s disappointment, a supplemental appropriations bill worth $75 billion that is nearing passage by Congress does not include any additional money for Afghanistan, let alone for the disarmament program.

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Scandal-hit US firm wins key Iraq contracts

By Pratap Chatterjee

Apr. 9— The scenes of looting in Iraq are heart-rending: the Saddam Hospital in Nasiriyah in southern Iraq was pillaged last week by 20 armed thieves who grabbed a haul of drugs and several ambulances just as a man died in the hospital lobby from gunshot wounds. He sustained his injuries while resisting another gang that was trying to steal his car.

Basra’s Sheraton Hotel saw mobs of young men stealing tables, chairs, carpets, and even a grand piano. British military officials, while proclaiming they had seized control of the city, acknowledged that the telephone system had shut down this week because scavengers had ripped out all the equipment.

Commenting on the unfolding chaos, an unnamed Pentagon official told the New York Times that they were seeking something more than the United Nations peace-keeping troops: “We know we want something a little more corporate and more efficient with cleaner lines of authority and responsibility.”

Dyncorp wants you

That plan appears to be almost ready. Half a world away from the bedlam in Iraq, just outside of Forth Worth, Texas, police recruiters are currently manning the phones for Dyncorp, a multi-billion dollar military Contractor. For Dyncorp the turmoil that is emerging in Iraq could mean a boom in business.

“When the area is safe, we will go in. Watch CNN. In the meantime fax us a resume if you want a job,” Homer Newman, a Dyncorp recruiter told Corpwatch. But Chuck Wilkins, a company spokesman in Virginia, said: “The contract hasn’t yet been awarded.”

Yet a web site has been offering Dyncorp jobs to “individuals with appropriate experience and expertise to participate in an international effort to re-establish police, justice, and prison functions in post-conflict Iraq.” The company is looking for active duty or recently retired cops and prison guards and “experienced judicial experts.” Applicants must be US citizens with ten years of sworn civilian domestic law enforcement. The site even has a toll free number and an email address -- cops.recruiting@dyncorp.com -- for applicants.

The web site explains that recruits will help “establish police stations and monitor activities determining the selection, screening, and training processes for police officers, demonstrating police practices and techniques used by democratic societies advising local police on criminal investigation methods and monitoring their progress working side-by-side with police officers from around the world reporting humanitarian violation.”

Dyncorp has plenty of experience in the rent-a-cop field in other hot spots: Armed DynCorp employees make up the core of the police force in Bosnia. DynCorp troops protect Afghan president Hamid Karzai, while DynCorp planes and pilots fly the defoliation missions over the coca crops in Colombia. Back home in the United States Dyncorp is in charge of the border posts between the US and Mexico, many of the Pentagon’s weapons-testing ranges, and the entire Air Force One fleet of presidential planes and helicopters. The company also reviews security clearance applications of military and civilian personnel for the Navy.

DynCorp began in 1946 as a project of a small group of returning World War II pilots seeking to use their military contacts to make a living in the air cargo business. Named California Eastern Airways, the original company was soon airlifting supplies to Asia used in the Korean War. By last year Dyncorp, headquartered in Reston, Virginia, was the nation’s 13th largest military contractor with $2.3 billion in revenue.

Earlier this week the company merged with Computer Sciences Corporation, an El Segundo, California-based technology services company, in an acquisition worth nearly $1 billion.

Alleged human rights violations and fraud

The company is not short on controversy. Under the Plan Colombia contract, the company has 88 aircraft and 307 employees — 139 of them American — flying missions to eradicate coca fields in Colombia. Soldier of Fortune magazine once ran a cover story on DynCorp, proclaiming it “Colombia’s Coke-Bustin’ Broncos.”

US Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-IL) told Wired magazine that hiring a private company to fly what amounts to combat missions is asking for trouble. DynCorp’s employees have a history of behaving like cowboys,” Schakowsky noted.

“Is the US military privatizing its missions to avoid public controversy or to avoid embarrassment — to hide body bags from the media and shield the military from public opinion?” she asked.

Indeed a group of Ecuadoran peasants filed a class action against the company in Sept. 2001. The suit alleges that herbicides spread by DynCorp in Colombia were drifting across the border, withering legitimate crops, causing human and livestock illness, and, in several cases, killing children. Assistant Secretary of State Rand Beers intervened in the case right away telling the judge the lawsuit posed “a grave risk to US national security and foreign policy objectives.”

What’s more, Kathryn Bolkovac, a UN International Police Force monitor filed a lawsuit in Britain in 2001 against DynCorp for firing her after she reported that Dyncorp police trainers in Bosnia were paying for prostitutes and participating in sex trafficking — including a girl as young as 12. Several DynCorp employees were also accused of videotaping the rape of one of the women. Many of the Dyncorp employees were forced to resign under suspicion of illegal activity. But none were prosecuted, since they enjoy immunity from prosecution in Bosnia.

Earlier that year Ben Johnston, a DynCorp aircraft mechanic for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters in Kosovo, filed a lawsuit against his employer. The suit alleged that in the latter part of 1999 Johnson “learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorp were engaging in perverse, illegal, and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports, and [participating in] other immoral acts.”

The suit charges that “Johnston witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased.”

“DynCorp is just as immoral and elite as possible, and any rule they can break they do,” Johnston told Insight magazine.

He charged that the company also billed the Army for unnecessary repairs and padded the payroll. “What they say in Bosnia is that DynCorp just needs a warm body — that’s the DynCorp slogan. Even if you don’t do an eight-hour day, they’ll sign you in for it because that’s how they bill the government. It’s a total fraud.”

Meanwhile, policing post-Saddam Iraq may be more than Dyncorp bargains for. Iraqis say the exercise of bringing in foreign police is fraught with danger.

“People do not like Saddam, but they do not want a colonizing army,” one young man told the Independent of London. “In the area where I live there was an older man, a retired soldier ... When he heard the Americans were coming he went and got his gun. When people asked why, he said it was because he did not want to be invaded.”

Source: CorpWatch (additional information from Observer (UK))

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Continuing police repression in Argentina

By Maria Trigona

Buenos Aires, Argentina, Apr. 10— At nine months since police killed two young piquetero activists, Darío Santillan and Maximiliano Kosteki on June 26, human rights groups say that activists are experiencing a reactivated government and media campaign to instill fear and begin a repressive offensive. Police force and the discrediting of social movements are at the heart of what activists consider a state terror campaign against protests and the poor.

The massacres of Dec. 19 and 20, 2001, ending with 33 deaths, and the murders of June 26 reveal how far the state will go with crusades to control the streets. Many activists are concerned that heavy police presence during street actions is part of a campaign to provoke violence during non-violent actions and create the illusion that piquetero groups are national security risks.

Since the mid-1990s the piqueteros, as the unemployed workers movement is known, have been organizing throughout the country in response to joblessness. Today in Argentina’s most marginalized neighborhoods, piquetero community projects have blossomed in the forms of bakeries where bread is sold at cost, community gardens, clothing donation and repair, copa de leche (where a cup of milk is given to children each afternoon), and community kitchens. They also blockade roads to demand resources for these projects, welfare plans, and jobs.

Tense standoffs between police and piqueteros in the past months have been followed with government officials publicly announcing that they will not tolerate protests blocking transit and “hard-line” piquetero groups. On Feb. 19, police blocked piqueteros for 10 hours from marching to the Ministry of Welfare to demand social programs be reinstalled. After the standoff, Clarín, Argentina’s largest daily, headlined, “Violent Hard-line Piqueteros,” and published Chief of Cabinet, Alfredo Atanasof’s statement, “We are going to continue pushing dialogue and isolate [sic.] violent groups.”

Hard-line piqueteros’ continued road blockades to signify a rejection of corrupt politics and institutions responsible for Argentina’s poverty. The government is pushing hard to convince the public that because piqueteros are potentially violent they don’t have the right to protest. The Federal Government reopened a judicial case late Feb. accusing piqueteros of threatening national security during the events of June 26, stating, “what happened June 26 indicates an escalation of violent acts that threatens public order, the lives of the public, and the overthrow of constitutional powers.” Claudio Pandolfi, a lawyer with National Coordinator against Police and Institutional Repression (Correpi) who is trying the double homicide case of the 26th, denounced the government’s accusation as an attempt to reactivate a terror campaign against the unemployed in hopes that the public will distance itself from the popular movement. Mariano Bacheco, from piquetero group, Movimiento Trabajadores Desocupados (MTD), suggests, “they always need a phantom to justify repression, it has to have some cause, the supposed cause is us, ‘the violent who don’t want democracy and generate chaos’.”

“While there’s no resources for education and health, while social plans fall and malnourished children die, the Federal Police receive 16 million pesos annually for the business of security,” said María del Carmen Verdú, lawyer with CORREPI, during a march denouncing government repression and commemorating the five month anniversary of the deaths. As the IMF says, “no more social spending,” delegates applaud President Duhalde’s position “to make security a priority.” Minister of Security, Justice and Human Rights, Juan Jose Alvarez argues that the fear of protesteros becoming violent is the reason for devoting more financial resources to increase police presense.

“In this financial situation of the government, the few resources we are able to control we intend to allocate to the security forces to give them minimum equipment to confront protests.”

The Buenos Aires city government in late Feb. signed an agreement with the Federal Police allocating 6.45 million pesos for the purchase of firearms, vehicles, and computers. Delia Garcilazo de Ríos, whose son was killed by prison guards 10 years ago has worked with CORREPI for six years and is part of an association of family members of victims of police violence. She reflects, “Police repression and low salary are forms of having social control. When the people ask for things in a blockade or in a march and there’s a kid who breaks a window, we are violent. But I ask what’s more violent, a youth dying of starvation, a kid being shot from behind, or if we break a window? A window is a material thing, you can fix it, life you can’t ever get back.”

Many like Delia Garcilazo have increasing concerns about the government’s attempts to use a hard hand against activists pressuring the government to respond to the needs of some 57 percent living below the poverty line. In this past month there has been a series of repressive acts by police. Police brutally repressed 89 families residing in Padelai, an abandoned building occupied for 19 years that sits in historic San Telmo during a government ordered eviction. Residents and supporters were tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets and beaten. There were some 86 detained and 40 injured, among them minors and elderly.

In the midst of crisis and repression, Argentina has been the breeding ground of some of the most innovative, inspiring examples of community organizing. Around the nation, workers are taking abandoned factories and creating jo,bs and community activists occupy vacant spaces to feed hundreds of people a day. Rather than supporting community initiatives to cope with poverty, the government ignores these accomplishments and is criminalizing these acts. Neka Jara, organizer from a MTD group acknowledges, “The government is showing strong signs that repression and criminalizing are taking a more offensive appearance.” There are fears among many Argentines that today’s discrediting and criminalizing of the piqueteros and other social movements will allow tomorrow’s repression.

Source: ZNet

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The Colombian Paramilitaries and Israel

Apr. 8-- According to his recently published autobiography, Carlos Castaño was only 18 years old when he arrived in Israel in 1983 to take a year-long course called “562.” Castaño, a Colombian, had come to the Holy Land as a pilgrim of sorts, but not to find peace. Course 562 was about war, and how to wage it, and it was something Carlos Castaño would eventually excel at, becoming the most adept and ruthless paramilitary leader in Latin America’s history.

Castaño was propelled down this path a few years earlier, after the killing of his father, a cattle rancher who was being held for a “tax” ransom by the FARC - Colombia’s strongest left-wing guerrilla army.

Bitter over their father’s death, the result of a botched rescue attempt by the Colombian army, Carlos and his older brother, Fidel, vowed revenge, a vengeance that would dovetail with both the interests of the Colombian landholding classes, and, to a large extent, US foreign policy. It is a vengeance that continues unabated to this day.

The Castaño brothers first offered their services as scouts for the Colombian Army’s Bombona Battalion. One of the battalion’s majors introduced them to a local paramilitary death squad called “Caruso,” with whom they started a killing spree.

Later, according to press reports, Fidel started his own paramilitary death squad called “Los Tangueros,” named after his ranch, “Las Tangas.” Los Tangueros was responsible for more than 150 murders during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In his book, Castaño talks openly about murders he has committed or ordered during this period, making his habit of killing what he calls “guerrillas in towns” routine. In one massacre alone, the Tangueros captured dozens of campesinos from a neighboring town. Back at the ranch, “they tortured them all night with crude instruments before shooting some and burying others alive.” Los Tangueros, along with other death squads dispersed throughout the country, would evolve into the present 9,000-strong paramilitary force in Colombia, which is now killing an average of thirteen civilians per day.

In the 1980s, these paramilitary groups were disparate and poorly trained, sometimes involving themselves in bloody internecine turf battles. In order to take the offensive against the steady advances of the leftist guerrillas, the paramilitaries needed both unification and political/military training.

Exactly how Carlos Castaño got to Israel is still a mystery, as is precisely which entity trained him there. But whoever set it up, the Israeli course “562” definitely had a strong effect on Castaño. “Something clicked in me, and I began to behave differently...My perception of this war changed radically after my trip to Israel,” he said in his best-selling autobiography, which is a series of interviews edited by Spanish journalist Mauricio Aranguren Molina.

In Israel, Carlos Castaño was clearly a good and highly motivated student.

Most importantly, he “received lectures on how the world arms business operates, and how to buy arms.”

And of course, there was also a military component:

“I received instruction in urban strategies, how to protect oneself, how to kill someone or what to do when someone is trying to kill you... We learned how to stop an armored car and use fragmentation grenades to enter a target. We practiced with multiple grenade launchers, and learned how to make accurate shots with RPG-7s, or shoot a cannon shell through a window.”

“We also took complementary courses on terrorism and counter-terrorism, night vision equipment, and parachuting. We also learned how to make homemade bombs. In short, we learned what the Israelis know, but, in all sincerity, very little of all of this has been applied to the war in Colombia. I got a very good basic education, and there I learned how to do the most important thing – I learned how to control fear...”

According to his book, not all was study for Castaño in Israel, and he used his free time to meet with Colombian soldiers undergoing regular military training there – soldiers of the worst human rights violators in the western hemisphere were being trained by some of the worst human rights violators in the Middle East. But these were precisely the connections that would prove so useful in the future.

“In the Sinai desert, I also had the opportunity of meeting military men from our country, the men of the Colombia battalion [of the Colombian Army]. I did not meet the battalion as a whole, but on my R & R days, we went to the same places, and I spent time in the company of sergeants and officers.”

Castaño summarizes his epiphany in Israel in the following terms: “Upon returning to Colombia, I had become another person... I learned an infinite amount of things in Israel and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievements, although I repeat, in Israel I didn’t only learn about things related to military training. There I became convinced that it was possible to destroy the guerrillas in Colombia. I started to understand how a people could defend itself against the whole world. I understood how to bring into the ‘cause’ a person who had something to lose in the war, with the aim of converting him into the enemy of my enemies.”

By 1985, shortly after Castaño returned to Colombia, some of the paramilitary groups that were springing up had become completely dependant on the monies from drug trafficking.

The paramilitaries expanded, protecting operations of the Medellín cartel and others, including that cartel’s competition in Cali.

The DEA was also watching: Its agents had noticed a paramilitary/drug trafficking connection at least as early as1993: “Intelligence indicates that some of Colombia’s private paramilitary groups have been co-opted by cocaine trafficking organizations.

A year later, in another report, the DEA looked at the relationship between the left-wing insurgencies and the drug trade, accurately stating: “Despite Colombian security forces’ frequently claim that FARC units are involved directly in drug trafficking operations, the independent involvement of insurgents in Colombia’s domestic drug production, transportation, and distribution is limited...No credible evidence indicates that the national leadership of either the FARC or the ELN [the second largest left-wing guerrilla group] has directed, as a matter of policy, that their respective organizations directly engage in independent drug production or distribution. Furthermore, neither the FARC nor the ELN are known to have been involved in the transportation, distribution, or marketing of illicit drugs in the United States or Europe.” In other words, the left-wing insurgencies taxed the production of coca or its products’ transportation through insurgent-controlled areas, but were not involved in its processing into cocaine, shipping or marketing – as opposed to the paramilitaries who ran and still run processing factories and were and still are actively involved in shipping it out of the country. There are some, as yet unproven, indications of greater insurgent involvement in the trade since the time of that report.

Paramilitary leaders also set up clandestine training schools in Colombia, or “schools for assassins” as they were called by a secret 1989 Colombian Police (DAS) Intelligence report.

Students were selected by “the express recommendation of a rancher, farmer or narcotraficker from the region” with questions like “What is your ideology? Are you capable of killing your father, mother or brother if it can be confirmed that they are guerrillas?”

But apparently this training by fellow Colombians was not enough, and in 1987 the Israelis were called in to help, probably through Colombian Army intermediaries.

In the mainstream media the 16 Israeli and some British trainers were presented as “mercenaries,” perhaps because of the bias of the Colombian DAS agents who wrote a report on them. These foreign military trainers were far too well connected to be ordinary “mercenaries”—they clearly acted with some government approval, most definitely that of Israel, and probably of some US entity also.Castaño, who attended these courses, said that members of the Colombian Army had actually arranged the courses, which featured the training by a famous Israeli officer, Yair Klein.

Scholarships were awarded so that the best students could undergo further training in Israel, just as Castaño had done: “According to what these instructors said, they were going to send the best 30 students for further schooling in a special course that would be taught in Israel.” Thirty paramilitaries being sent to Israel would have clearly required the permission of the Israeli Defense Forces - the Israeli government. It is hard to imagine anything else for a country continually at war.

And there was also a Nicaraguan Contra connection: “TEDDY, the Israeli interpreter told our source that they should shorten and speed up the course because they had promised to train the Nicaraguan Contras in Honduras and Costa Rica.” Anyone who thinks that these were simple “for hire” mercenaries would do well to analyze this quote. At the time, only with express US government approval – particularly that of the State Department and CIA – could one get into the contra camps located in Honduras or Costa Rica, let alone a group of men bearing arms. These Israelis were clearly trusted at the highest levels of both the Israeli and US governments.

The Castaño brothers consolidated and unified the paramilitaries under the name “Auto-Defensas Unidas de Colombia” (Unified Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), known by its Spanish acronym AUC. As the Washington Post’s Scott Wilson reported:

”From these death squads grew the Peasant Paramilitary Force of Cordoba and Urabá (ACCU), the oldest and largest of the AUC’s confederation of privately funded armies across the country. This was a result of Carlos Castaño’s new leadership: He transformed a regional protection force into a national political movement.”

The effect was dramatic. The paramilitaries grew in size from a few thousand to nine thousand or more, and as Time magazine reported in 2000: “Fear of AUC vengeance is one reason at least 1 million peasants fled their homes during the past decade.” Like the Nicaraguan Contras, the Salvadoran and Guatemalan death squads, the paramilitaries were known for using excessive violence to terrorize the population, and on at least one occasion paramilitary units used chainsaws to torture and kill their victims.

But there were also losses for the paramilitaries. In 1994, Carlos’s elder brother Fidel or “Rambo” as he was known – then the paramilitaries’ leader – was – according to Carlos — killed in a chance combat with FARC guerrillas in northern Colombia. However there exists some doubt as to whether he is really dead.

According to his own autobiography and dozens of press reports, Castaño has often met in secret with government officials. By 2000 the meetings were being openly reported. On November 6, 2000, he met with Colombia’s Interior Minister Humberto de la Calle of then-President Andrés Pastrana’s Government. As a result of the meeting, Castaño released two of seven legislators that his paramilitaries were holding captive. Indeed, at the time of this writing, as we shall see later, Castaño and Mancuso are in negotiations with the new Colombian government.

Source: NarcoNews.com

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