UN commission leaves gays, lesbians
waiting another year
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US detains children at Guantanamo Bay
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Bush admin. appoints corporate CEOs
to direct Iraqi economy
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United States tests Islamic jihad in Iraq
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WORLD BRIEFS
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US oil firm Occidental sued for
1998 Colombia bombing

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Apr. 25 (IPS)— International human rights attorneys Friday filed a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against Occidental Petroleum and its security contractor, AirScan Inc., for their role in the bombing that killed 18 civilians, including six children, in a Colombian village in December 1998.

The lawsuit, which coincided with the company’s annual stockholders’ meeting in southern California, is being brought under the Alien Tort Claims Act, an 18th-century law against piracy that has been used successfully by people claiming to have suffered serious rights abuses abroad to sue those responsible in US courts.

In recent years, a number of suits have been brought against US oil and gas companies operating abroad by individuals whose rights were violated by local army or security forces hired and used by the companies to protect their installations.

One of the plaintiffs in the new case against Occidental, Luis Alberto Galvis Mujica, whose mother, sister and cousin perished in the attack, was expected to directly question Occidental’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Ray Irani and its board of directors about the incident during Friday’s meeting.

The suit revolves around Occidental’s operations in Colombia, particularly its 750-kilometer Cano Limon oil pipeline, which runs from the Amazonian region of Colombia near the Venezuelan border to the Caribbean.

The pipeline has for years been a target for sabotage by left-wing guerrillas, so much so that the administration of President George W. Bush persuaded Congress last year to provide $131 million in military aid to train and equip a special Colombian Army battalion to protect it. Bush has asked Congress for another $110 million for next year.

The incident took place Dec. 13, 1998 over the village of Santo Domingo, about 50 kms from the pipeline, during a battle between leftist rebels hiding in a nearby jungle and Colombian Army troops. During the firing, a Colombian Air Combat helicopter dropped a US-made cluster bomb on the town, according to the Colombian inspector general’s office, which concluded that the pilots should have known that they would hit civilians rather than rebels.

The Los Angeles Times reported last year that a US Customs plane that was tracking a suspected drug flight was involved in initial operations that led to the bombing the next day.

Members of the helicopter crew later testified in Colombia that the operation was planned at Occidental’s regional headquarters, where the helicopter was also fuelled. They said they received targeting information from US citizens who were flying a surveillance plane belonging to Florida-based AirScan, which was patrolling the area under contract with the Colombian Air Force, reported the Times.

Two of the four helicopter crewmembers were sanctioned in an administrative proceeding late last year in one of the few Colombian government efforts to punish serious rights abuses by soldiers, but the decision is on appeal.

Last January, the US State Department suspended all funding to Colombia’s air force unit for impeding the investigation of the case. Under US law, the administration is obliged to suspend military aid to any unit found to have committed serious rights violations or to have failed to co-operate with investigations into abuses.

AirScan has denied any involvement in the incident.

In a statement released Friday, Occidental also denied responsibility. “While we have not had an opportunity to study the complaint,” it said, “we believe that any suggestion that Occidental Petroleum was responsible in any way for the Santo Domingo tragedy resulting from military action involving Colombian armed forces and elements of the terrorist group known by its Spanish acronym, FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), is completely false. Occidental has not and does not provide lethal aid to Colombia’s armed forces,” it said.

A company spokesman, Lawrence Meriage, said it will “vigorously contest” any allegation that it was involved. “In fact,” he noted, “Occidental and its employees have been routinely victimized by armed terrorist groups that were operating, and continue to operate, in the vicinity of Santo Domingo and throughout the state of Arauca.”

In December, he said, rebels killed four employees of an Occidental contractor and wounded 15 others when they detonated a bomb that destroyed a commuter bus from the Cano Limon oil field.

The suit against Occidental is being brought by the Washington-based International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) and the Center for Human Rights at Northwestern University School of Law.

The fact that it is being brought in a federal court in California gives the plaintiffs an important advantage.

Last September, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals -- whose jurisdiction covers California and the rest of the US West Coast -- ruled in a similar case that Unocal, another California-based oil giant, could be sued for forced labor, rape, and murder allegedly committed by Burmese soldiers guarding a major gas pipeline project.

The ruling overturned a 2000 decision by a federal judge that plaintiffs would have to provide evidence that Unocal either participated directly in the abuses or exerted direct control over the army when the abuses occurred in order for the case, which was also brought under Alien Tort Claims Act, to proceed to trial.

The appeals court said that was too high a standard to establish responsibility, and that it was sufficient to show that the corporation knew about and benefited directly from the military’s conduct. The trial court in the Unocal case will be bound by the appeals court’s ruling unless and until that judgment is overturned by the US Supreme Court.

It is quite possible that the State Department may intervene on behalf of Occidental to persuade the judge to dismiss or suspend the case on the grounds that permitting it to proceed could endanger key US national-security interests.

The State Department did precisely that last August when it intervened in another case against ExxonMobil, which was being sued by plaintiffs from Aceh province in Indonesia, where Indonesian Army troops have been accused by international rights groups of terrorizing local communities for years.

While cases based on the Alien Tort Claims Act have won big judgments against specific individuals, including about a dozen foreign heads of state and senior military officers, no case against a US corporation has yet been fully tried.

One still pending case also involves Colombia. In 2001, Colombian plaintiffs sued Coca-Cola for the killings and intimidation by paramilitary units of union leaders at several of Coke’s bottling plants around the country.

Occidental also has a controversial history in Colombia apart from its Cano Limon pipeline. For many years, it tried to drill for oil on the sacred lands of the U’wa Indians, but finally abandoned a direct role in that effort last year in the face of criticism by environmental and human rights organizations and local resistance.

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UN commission leaves gays, lesbians
waiting another year

By Gustavo Capdevila

Geneva, Switzerland, Apr. 25 (IPS)— Homosexual men and women will have to wait at least one more year for the first-ever formal recognition of their human rights in official United Nations documents.

A coalition of Islamic nations, with the support of other countries apparently under pressure from the Vatican, blocked approval in the UN Commission on Human Rights this week of a resolution sponsored by Brazil calling for guarantees to protect gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals.

Friday, as it wrapped up its annual sessions, the Geneva-based Commission, the maximum human rights authority at the UN, put off debate on the text until next year.

The amendments presented by five Muslim states — Egypt, Libya, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia — aimed at watering down the resolution met the same fate, though they did achieve their goal of blocking discussion of the Brazilian text.

Pakistan sought to annul the resolution Thursday, stating that the text “did not reflect Islamic values.”

Independent human rights organizations say the failure of the Brazilian initiative to be decided this week is largely due to the “bias” of the Commission’s chairwoman, Libyan diplomat Najat El Mehdi Al-Hajjaji.

The proposed amendments seek to remove all mention of discrimination based on sexual orientation, rendering the resolution meaningless, complained rights activists.

Brazil’s draft resolution expresses “deep concern at the occurrence of violations of human rights in the world against persons on the grounds of their sexual orientation.”

The text “calls upon all states to promote and protect the human rights of all persons regardless of their sexual orientation” and states that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights must “pay due attention to the phenomenon of violations of human rights on the grounds of sexual orientation.”

The rights of homosexual, bisexual, or transsexual people have never been officially recognized by the United Nations, despite the fact that international laws on the issue began to emerge at the close of World War II, noted Canadian jurist Douglas Sanders.

And no homosexual organization to date has obtained “consultative status”, which the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) grants certain non-governmental organizations, said Sanders, professor at the University of British Columbia.

“Millions of people across the globe face imprisonment, torture, violence, and discrimination because of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” Melinda Ching, spokeswoman for the London-based human rights watchdog Amnesty International, reiterated during Commission sessions this week.

In Egypt, for example, 21 men were sentenced to three years in prison after being caught in a wave of arrests and trials of individuals singled out as gay, said Ching.

“Adoption of the resolution is the only way to end the intolerable exclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people from the full protection of the UN system,” states an Amnesty International communiqué.

The draft resolution tabled by Brazil, and co-sponsored by 19 European nations, warns the 53-member UN Commission that an underlying factor of many human rights violations committed around the world is intolerance of the sexual orientation of the victims.

Brazil’s diplomatic team has maintained a consistent stance on this issue for several years, says Brasilia’s representative in Geneva, Luis Felipe de Seixas Correa. He noted that his country had presented a homosexual rights initiative at the World Conference against Racism, held in 2001 in the South African city of Durban.

Seixas Correa criticized the Commission Friday, saying the UN body was created to erase taboos, not to maintain them. He said Brazil’s Foreign Ministry would keep up pressure to ensure that the resolution passes next year.

Debate on the draft resolution was rocky, a result of the procedural obstacles set up by the Muslim states, “in a maneuver to block discussion” or postpone it, commented Morris Tidball, director of the International Service for Human Rights.

Al-Hajjaji, in the final days of the six-week sessions, did not act with the impartiality that was expected, apparently to ingratiate herself with the countries or blocs of nations that had supported her, commented Tidball.

Loubna Freih, of the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), agreed that Al-Hajjaji acted with bias, alleging that she used the power of the Commission chair to support the plans of Libya and allied countries.

In the last two days of the UN Commission’s sessions, which ended Friday, the chairwoman proved reticent to facilitate debate on human rights and sexual orientation, said the HRW activist.

During Friday’s sessions, the five Muslim countries tried to block debate through procedural tactics, and Al-Hajjaji finally proposed that the resolution be put off until the Commission’s next period of sessions, in 2004.

The chairwoman’s proposal was approved by a vote of 24 in favor, 17 against and 10 abstentions. Among the votes in favor were Muslim nations, as well as Argentina, China, and India.

Voting against were Brazil, the European nations — with the exception of Ireland, which is strongly Catholic and chose to abstain — as did the Latin American countries Costa Rica, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay.

Tidball commented that in addition to the Islamic support, the vote results clearly show the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, which, like Islam, rejects homosexuality.

He said the Vatican had exerted pressure to halt what was originally unconditional support from Latin American countries for the Brazilian initiative.

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US detains children at Guantanamo Bay

Apr. 23— The US military has admitted that children aged 16 years and younger are among the detainees being interrogated at its prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, a US military spokesman, yesterday said all the teenagers being held were “captured as active combatants against US forces,” and described them as “enemy combatants.”

The children, some of whom have been held at Guantanamo for over a year, are imprisoned in separate cells from the adult detainees, Lt. Col Johnson said. He would say only that the teenagers are “very few, a very small number” and would not say how old the youngest prisoner is.

The US military confirmed their presence yesterday after Australia’s ABC television reported that children were being held at Guantanamo, the controversial detention center where prisoners from the war in Afghanistan have been held by the US, in breach of the Geneva conventions, for over a year.

The news sparked outrage from human rights groups already campaigning against the indefinite detention of the roughly 660 males from 42 countries, held on suspicion of having links to al-Qaida or Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime. They have not been charged or allowed access to lawyers.

“That the US sees nothing wrong with holding children at Guantanamo and interrogating them is a shocking indicator of how cavalier the Bush administration has become about respecting human rights,” said an Amnesty International spokesman, Alistair Hodgett.

Human Rights Watch said the US was exacerbating a contentious situation. “[The detention of youths] reflects our broader concerns that the US never properly determined the legal status of those held in the conflict,” said James Ross, legal adviser for Human Rights Watch in New York.

Lt. Col Johnson said the juveniles were being held because “they have potential to provide important information in the ongoing war on terrorism.

“Their release is contingent on the determination that they are not a threat to the [US] nation and have no further intelligence value.”

Lt. Col Johnson said officials determined that some detainees were younger than 16 during medical and other screenings after their arrival in Cuba. He added that all the prisoners aged under 16 years were brought to Guantanamo after Jan. 1, 2002 - suggesting that some were 15 or younger when they were first imprisoned.

In Sept. 2002, Canadian officials reported that a 15-year-old Canadian had been captured on July 27 after being badly wounded in a firefight in eastern Afghanistan. Canada’s prime minister, Jean Chrétien said he was seeking consular access to the boy.

Last week, Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper reported that the youth, now 16, is being held in Guantanamo and that US officials have refused access to Canadian officials.

The newspaper quoted unidentified sources as saying that the youth allegedly threw a grenade that killed Sergeant 1st Class Christopher James Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Globe and Mail said US officials would want to interrogate the Canadian because his father has been identified as a senior financial leader of al-Qaida.

Lawyers have blamed the indefinite detentions for increasing depression and suicide attempts at the camp, which received the first detainees in Jan. 2001.

According to the US military, there have been 25 suicide attempts by 17 prisoners at Camp X-Ray, with 15 attempts made this year.

Just this Monday the US military announced that one prisoner, who it said was under supervision in the acute care unit of a new mental health ward, made a repeated suicide attempt.

Source: Guardian (UK)

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Bush admin. appoints corporate CEOs
to direct Iraqi economy

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Apr. 30 (AGR)— The Bush administration is aggressively appointing a series of former private sector executives to run the Iraqi economy, prompting warnings that it will impose failed free market policies on Baghdad and open the oil-rich nation further to US business interests.

Last week, US Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman appointed controversial agricultural industrialist Dan Amstutz “to lead the US government’s agriculture reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”

Amstutz, who spent most of his professional life working for the US agriculture industry and lobbying for its interests, will serve as senior ministry advisor for agriculture and will coordinate US government activities in the sector.

The businessman also worked for Cargill, the largest privately owned corporation in the world and the third largest food processor on the globe. It controls a large portion of US grain exports and is a leading promoter of genetically modified foods. Also last week, US Treasury Secretary John Snow appointed the two officials who will coordinate the economic restructuring of Iraq.

Peter McPherson, a long-time Washington insider who was deputy US Treasurer in the Reagan administration in the late 1980s, will be financial co-coordinator for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA).

McPherson was also the group executive vice president of Bank of America. His deputy in Iraq will be George Wolfe, a senior US Treasury Department lawyer and a strong loyalist of the department’s foreign policies.

Both men will work to reorganize the Iraqi finance ministry, the central bank, and the banking system.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that next week, the United States will appoint a former head of Shell Oil to run Iraq’s oil industry.

Installing an American chairman on the planned management team of the Iraqi oil industry provides further ammunition to critics who have questioned the Bush administration’s agenda in the Middle East.

The administration is planning to structure the potentially vast Iraqi oil industry like a US corporation, with a chairman and chief executive and a 15-strong board of international advisers.

According to the report, it has lined up the former chief executive of the US division of Royal Dutch/Shell, Philip Carroll, to take the job of chairman.

Washington has been the subject of sharp criticism that one of the motivations behind its military campaign in Iraq was to gain control of Iraq’s oil reserves, estimated to be the second-biggest in the world after those of Saudi Arabia.

Washington has repeatedly denied any imperial ambitions in the Middle East region but said the new appointments will further its efforts to create a “democratic, market driven economy in Iraq.”

As Cargill vice-president, Amstutz drafted the original text of the current Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture within the World Trade Organization (WTO), considered by many developing countries and social and environmental justice groups as innately unjust. The agreement allows rich countries to dump their subsidy-backed agricultural surpluses on world markets, depressing prices to levels at which producers in developing nations can no longer compete.

Oxfam Policy Director Kevin Watkins said Monday that “putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission.”

With Bush on record as saying he wants American farmers to feed the world, Oxfam is worried that the Iraqi agricultural sector will be left unprotected from cut-price US competition at the crucial early stages of its reconstruction.

In a statement on Amstutz’s appointment, the US agriculture secretary, Ann Veneman, said the head of reconstruction would “help us achieve our national objective of creating a democratic and prosperous Iraq while at the same time best utilize resources of our farmers and good industry in the effort, both for the interim and the long term.”

“This guy is uniquely well-placed to advance the commercial interests of American grain companies and bust open the Iraqi market - but singularly ill-equipped to lead a reconstruction effort in a developing country,” Watkins said.

On Carroll’s appointment, oil analyst Michael Renner of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute said the move might be intended to boost plans to privatize the Iraqi oil industry, without consulting the Iraqi people.

“There’s no shortage of Iraqis who know how to run the oil industry, so why exactly do you need someone like Carroll?” he asks. “It’s likely that Iraqi oil is headed toward de facto privatization - a scheme that puts real control in the hands of the oil multinationals.”

The Pentagon announced this week that they have begun sending a team of 150 Iraqi exiles to Baghdad to be a part of the “temporary American-led government” there.

The exiles are supposed to take up positions at each of 23 Iraqi ministries, where they will work closely with US and British officials under Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general and former weapons contractor who is serving as Iraq’s day-to-day administrator.

The group of technocrats was assembled two months ago and has been working from an office in suburban Virginia.

The team of Iraqi technocrats was selected by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. The team is headed by Emad Dhia, an engineer who left Iraq 21 years ago and who will become the top Iraqi adviser to Gen. Garner.

Victor Rostow, a Pentagon policy official who is serving as a liaison to the Iraqi team, said its task would be to help Gen. Garner “turn over functioning ministries to the new Iraqi interim authority after a period of time.”

By the end of next week, at least 25 are expected to be in Baghdad, including officials designated by the Pentagon to be in charge of the ministries of oil, planning and industry.

Dhia, chosen by Wolfowitz, is on a leave of absence from Pfizer, the pharmaceutical multinational based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Speaking on his first visit to Baghdad since the US invasion, American Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday told the Iraqi people: “Let me be clear: Iraq belongs to you. We do not want to run it.”

“Our goal is to restore stability and security so that you can form an interim government and eventually a free Iraqi government - a government of your choosing, a government that is of Iraqi design and Iraqi choice,” Rumsfeld said.

Sources: Agence France-Presse, Guardian (UK), Inter Press Service, New York Times, Wall Street Journal

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United States tests Islamic jihad in Iraq

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Apr. 30 (AGR)— On Monday thousands of Iraq’s Shia Muslim majority took to the streets of Baghdad as former weapons contractor and retired US Army general Jay Garner convened a meeting of over 200 Iraqis to discuss the country’s future.

As tanks and soldiers ringed the convention center venue in the bombed-out heart of the city, clear divisions emerged at the meeting over Washington’s role in the interim period ahead of planned elections. Although the removal of Saddam Hussein was widely welcomed by Iraqis, many fear Washington will now try to impose its will on them.

American and British spokesmen conceded that the meeting, which its critics have called a gathering of US puppets, was “not sufficiently representative to establish an interim authority.” About half the delegates were exiles, and the rest had remained in Iraq under the previous regime.

US and UK officials would not say how they had worked out the invitation lists. The two parties which had the largest representation in Iraq, before Saddam’s Ba’ath party imposed one-party rule, were excluded. Abdel Karim al-Anazi, a member of the political bureau of the Islamic Dawa party, said: “We have no idea what they plan to do at today’s meeting. We wish the United States would leave Iraq quickly. Even today would be good.”

There were no representatives from the powerful Shia clergy, who have also called for an immediate withdrawal of US forces. One important group representing Shiite Muslims, the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, refused to take part in the talks because it believes the future politics of Iraq should be entirely in Iraqi hands.

Apart from the two main Kurdish parties, which run separate administrations in northern Iraq, none of the parties attending the meeting has a solid following. Many were small, newly created parties.

Gen. Garner, the installed, de facto US governor of Iraq, has been embarrassed by increasingly vocal protests by Shia and Sunni crowds at mosques calling for an early end to the US occupation. Garner’s efforts have been made against a background of rising religious and nationalistic fervor, highlighted in the million-strong Shia pilgrimage to Karbala last week, which ended with demands for the establishment of an Islamist state and threats of a jihad against the “American occupiers.”

Islamic administrations have already been established in a series of towns and villages in the Shia heartland of the south and east. In much of the country the only functioning social system is that of the mosques and the only leaders with any credibility are the prayer leaders.

In the northern city of Mosul last week it was local clerics, such as Sheikh Ibrahim al-Namaa, who were the only effective authority. Although several hundred American soldiers have moved into the city, they are nowhere near enough to control a metropolis of more than a million people that is riven with ethnic tensions.

On the day Mosul fell, Sheikh al-Namaa sent young men with guns to guard hospitals and homes. A few days later he successfully ordered looters to return stolen property to mosques. Elsewhere, particularly in the Shia-dominated south-west, local clerics took the lead in establishing order, organizing law enforcement, the protection of property, even healthcare. And, swiftly, their moral authority assumed political dimensions.

In the past week, American forces have been shot at daily. Throughout southern Iraq, confrontations between Shia Muslims and the US forces are rising.

In Baghdad and most small towns it is still only a battle of words, but in others it has gone further.

On Wednesday in Kut, four US army trucks and a Humvee were ambushed by 400 people on a bridge over the Tigris. Backpacks and other loose gear were ripped from the back of the Humvee and a window was smashed.

Crowds of 250-300 Iraqi teenagers hurled stones at US Marines patrolling the holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq on Thursday and Friday.

In the northern city of Mosul, at least 200 children and a few adults crowded around some soldiers on foot patrol this weekend and soon the stones came raining in.

On Sunday, a US soldier was killed when a roadblock in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, came under fire. Four other US soldiers were also wounded that day when their two Humvees were ambushed in downtown Baghdad. The soldiers were stopped in midmorning traffic when an assailant approached and fired at them with a small-caliber weapon.

Last Thursday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld painted a mostly optimistic picture of progress in stabilizing the country and moving it in the direction of establishing a new government.

The next day, hundreds of worshippers at a leading Sunni mosque in Baghdad denounced the occupation and vowed to launch a holy war if the troops did not withdraw soon.

“We are running out of patience with the Americans here,” said Ammar al-Azami after prayers at the Abu Hanifa mosque. “But they’re wrong to believe they’ll succeed and that we’ll stay silent. We were waiting for a fatwa [religious decree] from our ulemas to fight back. We’re keeping quiet just because our ulemas have asked us to,” he warned.

“Our silence won’t last. The day our ulemas tell us to fight, the Iraqi people, Sunnis and Shiites united will rise in arms,” said Ibrahim, another worshipper.

Meanwhile, over at Baghdad’s Shia al-Muhsen mosque, about 13,000 people gathered outside where the imam, Jabal al-Khafji called for an Islamic state in Iraq. While the crowd listened to the imam’s address, young men with ammunition belts and Kalashnikovs, charged by their religious leaders with maintaining order, directed the traffic and the crowds, and stood o the rooftops, guarding against attack. These are part of the Shia apparatus which currently runs the show in this part of the capital, just as they do in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and some of the border towns.

Sources: Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, BBC, Guardian (UK), Independent (UK), International Herald Tribune, MSNBC, Observer (UK), Reuters, Sydney Morning Herald

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