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International force pondered as Middle East explodes

Compiled by Seán Marquis

June 18 (AGR)— Calls are growing for a large-scale international force to be sent in, as the only hope of imposing some sort of a ceasefire between Israelis and Palestinians.

The dispatch of a multinational force is increasingly seen by some as the only means of securing a breathing space, allowing meaningful negotiations to begin.

In an interview with an Israeli newspaper, the United Nations (UN) Secretary General, Kofi Annan, said only a substantial armed force could halt the fighting.

The Palestinian president, Yassir Arafat called on the US, Europeans, and the UN to intervene to halt the escalation. “We are in need of strong pressure to stop this aggression against our people,” he said.

Sen. John Warner, the Virginia Republican who heads the powerful Senate armed services committee, says that a robust NATO force should be dispatched, since it was clear that both Israelis and Palestinians had “lost control of events.”

In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Sen. Richard Lugar, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said US forces might be part of an international force to help stop attacks by Hamas and other militant groups.

“It may not be just Hamas,” he emphasized, “but clearly Hamas is right in the gunsights.”

But an Israeli government spokesman, reacting to Lugar’s interview, was cool to the possibility of US or other international forces battling Palestinian terror groups.

“We are always happy to see American actions against terrorism, but with all due respect, we don’t need them to do our fighting for us,” said Raanan Gissin.

On June 15, US president George W. Bush chimed in with his thoughts on the matter, saying: “It is clear that the free world, those who love freedom and peace, must deal harshly with Hamas and the killers. And that’s just the way it is in the Middle East.”

Hamas condemned Bush’s comments, saying in a statement that his call for action against the militant group amounted to “a new aggression” against the Palestinians.

For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon vowed June 16 to press Israel’s assault on Hamas, while truce talks fell apart.

Egyptian mediators returned to Cairo after they and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, failed to win over the militants to a temporary truce.

Top Hamas official Ismail Abu Shanab said it was premature to talk about a cease-fire. “Now is not a time for truce. It is time for solidarity and standing united against Israeli attacks on our people,” he said.

More than 32 months of violence have killed 2,400 people on the Palestinian side and 801 on the Israeli side. Most of those killed have been civilians.

Israeli attacks kill Hamas members, civilians

On June 11, between three and six missiles slammed into a line of slow-moving cars in the Saja’iya district of the Gaza City.

When the attack occurred, thousands of people were milling around and cars were jammed around the market place.

A car carrying two Hamas militants was in the traffic jam when it was hit by missiles from an Israeli Apache helicopter. Instinctively, crowds rushed to the burning wreck to see what had happened and to try to help.

Two more missiles then hit the car or its immediate vicinity, killing three men and two women standing near it.

“When we started trying to evacuate them from the car, another missile attack took place while a huge number of people were gathering trying to help the wounded,” said shopkeeper Massoud Ramadan, 65, who was wounded by shrapnel and among a number taken to the hospital.

Hamas operative Yasser Taha, his wife, and 18-month-old daughter were all killed, along with four bystanders, when Israeli helicopters fired rockets at a taxi carrying the family on June 12 in Gaza.

At nearby Shifa Hospital, Zahara Mahmoud Barakat, 43, stood watch in the sweltering children’s ward over her son Mustafa, 11, who was flying kites with a brother and cousins when shards ripped into his stomach and leg.

Zahara Barakat, who has 11 children, said she had heard about June 11’s suicide bus bombing in Jerusalem that killed 17 Israelis. While she did not justify the bombing, she said she understood it.

“Let me tell you something: For all the pressure we’re under, there’s bound to be an explosion,” she said. “There’s hunger here, and no work, and our life is very difficult, while the Israelis are living an easy life. They are the real terrorists, not us.”

Leila Saleh, 55, said her 2-year-old grandson wrapped a belt around his waist one day and played suicide bomber. “I said ‘What’s this?’ and he said ‘I want to blow myself up and kill the Jews.’ “

Saleh said she was unfazed. “Listen, if it would be permitted to me, I would go myself,” she said. “You only die once.”

But not everyone was enthusiastic about an escalation in the confrontation.

“We have our children to consider,” said Mada Jabali, a middle-aged woman with four children in tow.

“We don’t want them to go on living under occupation but we do want them to live. There have been too many martyrs and too many of them have been children. We don’t want more.”

Sharon ‘pouring oil on the bonfire’

At an emergency Israeli cabinet meeting on June 13, Sharon vowed to stick with the “road map” but derided Palestinian leaders as “cry-babies who let terror run rampant” and then complained when Israel retaliated against attacks. Sharon described Abbas as a “chick without feathers.”

“We have to help him fight terror until his feathers grow,” he added.

But a Palestinian cabinet minister, Yasser Abed Rabbo, dismissed Sharon’s comments as duplicitous.

“His aim is to discredit the Palestinian government and to assassinate his real enemy, which is the road map,” he said.

Sharon was criticized by some opposition lawmakers who said he encouraged the June 11Hamas suicide bombing by ordering the June 10 attempt to assassinate Hamas political leader Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi in a missile strike in Gaza City. Dr. Rantissi survived and vowed revenge.

Targeting Dr. Rantissi was like “pouring oil on the bonfire of terrorism,” Avshalom Vilan, a Knesset member from the opposition Meretz Party, told Israel Radio.

A poll for the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth last week found that 40 percent of Israelis believed Sharon had ordered the assassination attempt on Dr. Rantissi, as a deliberate ploy to delay the implementation of the “road map.”

Gush Shalom, a peace movement set up and run by Israelis, was more forthright. In an ad taken out in Ha’aretz newspaper last week, the movement said the aim of the assassination attempt on Dr. Rantisi was “to bury the roadmap right at the beginning, destroy Abu Mazen and prevent the planned hudna [truce], in order to save the settlements, continue the occupation, and prevent the establishment of the state of Palestine.”

Adam Keller, a spokesman for Gush Shalom later said: “After assassinations had this same result so many times before, one need not be a brilliant strategist, or have access to confidential files, to accurately predict the result of sending helicopter gunships to Gaza to assassinate the well-known Hamas spokesman, Abdel-Aziz Rantisi.

“Prime Minister Sharon certainly knew exactly what he was doing.”

On the day the helicopter rockets were fired at Dr. Rantissi’s car, Hamas leaders were talking about coming back to the negotiating table after initially rebuffing Abbas. Also, Egyptian intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, who has acted as a mediator between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, was on his way to try to restart the talks at the time.

Sources: Associated Press, BBC, Bloomberg News, CNN, Independent (UK), Guardian (UK), Reuters, The Scotsman, Washington Post, Washington Times

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Senate approves offshore oil and gas exploration

By J.R. Pegg

Washington, DC, June 12 (ENS)— The Senate voted today to keep a provision within its version of the Energy bill that calls for a comprehensive inventory of the nation’s offshore oil and gas resources. Critics of the measure fear it is the first step toward lifting a 20-year-ban on offshore drilling in many of the nation’s coastal waters and could harm the environment and the economies of affected coastal states.

The amendment to strip the provision failed by a vote of 44 to 54, with a dozen Democrats joining 42 Republicans to defeat it. Supporters of the study say it makes sense for the federal government to identify available energy resources and contend that critics are misguided in their belief that it is a precursor to lifting the ban on offshore oil drilling.

The provision requires the Secretary of the Interior to take an inventory of potential oil and gas resources of the entire US Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), including coastal areas from Maine to Florida and Washington to California.

For the rest of this article, please see www.ens-news.com.

Women, unions reach landmark settlement against Ontario government

Toronto, Canada, June 13— About 100,000 women in predominately female, public sector workplaces across Ontario will receive up to $414 million in pay equity funding from the Ontario government as the result of a settlement of an Ontario Superior Court of Justice Charter application brought by five unions and four individual women.

“These landmark settlement funds mean that low-paid public sector women denied their pay equity adjustments because of discriminatory government funding practices will now finally start to receive the equitable wages required by the Pay Equity Act,” said Mary Cornish, lawyer for the applicants in the CUPE et al v. Attorney-General (Ont.) et al case.

The applicant unions are the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Ontario Nurses’ Association, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, the Service Employees International Union, and the United Steelworkers of America. The individual applicants are a registered nurse, a health care aide, a child care worker, and a developmental services worker. The unions represent more than 44,000 workers in over 2,300 public sector workplaces, including nursing homes, child care, centers, developmental services agencies, shelters, home care, and other community agencies.

“This is a tremendously exciting victory for women and their unions who have been fighting the Ontario government to make sure all women are paid wages that recognize the true value of their work,” said Judy Darcy, national president of CUPE. The settlement covers both unionized and non-unionized workers in the proxy sector — predominantly female workplaces where there are no male job classes to compare for pay equity purposes. The government agreed to pay the applicants their reasonable legal costs in bringing the Charter proceeding.

The applicants claimed that the Ontario government was knowingly perpetuating sex discrimination contrary to the Charter’s section 15 by failing to provide the necessary pay equity funding in this sector. In September, 1997, in a previous Charter challenge, Ontario Superior Court Justice O’Leary found that the government’s 1995 repeal of these same women’s proxy pay equity entitlements was unconstitutional. Justice O’Leary, in upholding the challenge brought by the SEIU also found that these women’s public sector employers would go bankrupt without the necessary pay equity funding.

Contrary to this ruling, the government decided in 1998 to end proxy pay equity funding after paying out $250 million in adjustments owing up to that date. The government knew this payment only brought these low-paid women’s wages to one-third of the pay equity amount they were entitled to. It declared anyway that proxy pay equity funding was now the responsibility of employers, not the government, causing hardship to many women in the proxy sector who were deprived of the money they were owed over many years. Other public sector women had received public pay equity funding until their wages were fully adjusted to eliminate discriminatory pay gaps. Ontario women were forced to use the courts to challenge the government’s decision to end pay equity funding by bringing the second Charter application challenge in April 2001. Finally, after two years of court proceedings, this application was successfully settled through a mediation process facilitated by the skillful efforts of mediator Gerry Lee.

“This has been a long, slow, and grinding fight for justice,” said Leah Casselman, OPSEU president. “The pay-outs that will soon go to a huge number of underpaid workers, most of them women, make the fight worthwhile. The shame is that the government dragged its heels for so long and only settled in the face of a provincial election.”

“Women workers should never have been forced to litigate their lawful rights to pay equity,” said Barb Wahl, president of the Ontario Nurses’ Association. “It took our court action to get the necessary funding so that women will finally get paid what’s been owed while maintaining critical community services for some of Ontario’s most vulnerable citizens.”

Under the settlement agreement, enhanced accountability mechanisms apply to the Government and proxy employers to make sure that employers comply with their pay equity obligations and that the funding required for any such adjustments is properly reflected in budget requests. Estimates are that, on average, the women in this sector will achieve their full pay equity rate by 2011 through the phase-in of adjustments at one percent of payroll per year.

“Our fight for justice for women workers is not over. This settlement funding covers the next three-year period, but we will fight on to make sure that our members and other public sector women continue to receive their required annual pay equity adjustments until pay equity is achieved,” said Sharleen Stewart, international Canadian vice-president of SEIU. The government will provide a yearly report to the applicant unions on the funding disbursed under this agreement, under the terms of the settlement.

“This is a great victory for all women in the province of Ontario. This settlement forces the government to recognize that pay equity is a right and not ‘discretionary.’ Ensuring that women are paid equally for the work they do is a fundamental right and one which this government must fund accordingly,” said Wayne Fraser, Director of District 6, USWA.

Source: SCIU

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