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Bush’s look to Big Pharma for AIDS czar evokes concern

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, July 2 (IPS)— US President George W. Bush’s surprise pick of a former top executive of a major US pharmaceutical company and major Republican contributor as his global AIDS coordinator has drawn expressions of concern and even outrage among Africa and AIDS activists here.

Bush’s choice of former Eli Lilly & Co. boss Randall Tobias was announced at the White House July 1, just four days before Bush’s first trip as president to Africa. The nomination must be confirmed by the US Senate.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and a special advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on the AIDS crisis, called the appointment “surreal”.

“This is an emergency that requires someone who’s worked in the field and knows it thoroughly. We don’t need someone who raises all sorts of questions about commitment and agenda,” he said.

The activists called for senators to closely scrutinize Tobias’s credentials and philosophy and determine whether, given his past ties to the industry, he will be able to fight on behalf of the millions of poor HIV/AIDS victims in desperate need of cheap anti-retroviral drugs in the face of opposition from the major western pharmaceutical companies, often referred to as Big Pharma.

“This decision is another deeply disturbing sign that the president may not be prepared to fulfill his pledge to take emergency action on AIDS,” noted Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance.” It raises serious questions of conflict of interest and the priorities of the White House.”

“Both the people of Africa and the people of the United States will lose if the president’s AIDS initiative fails to use the lowest-cost, generic medications,” Zeitz said, noting that the pharmaceutical companies have successfully pressed the Bush administration to go back on an earlier pledge to carve out an exception in international patent laws that would enable needy countries to import generic anti-AIDS drugs. “Africans will be left with less medicine, and more will die,” he said.

Others were openly scornful about the appointment. “We know he has little experience with AIDS, but lots as a major Republican donor,” said Salih Booker, director of Africa Action, a Washington-based fusion of several long-standing anti-apartheid groups. “This is where US policy on AIDS is; it’s with Big Pharma.”

Tobias, who retired from Lilly in 1998 and more recently has served as vice chairman of AT&T where he also worked before going to Lilly in the early 1990s, is supposed to receive the rank of ambassador and report to Secretary of State Colin Powell, a major force behind a five-year, 15-billion-dollar anti-AIDS initiative — called the “Emergency Program” — first proposed by Bush last January and approved by Congress in a somewhat amended form in May.

Implementation of that initiative, which is targeted at 12 sub-Saharan African and two Caribbean countries, will be Tobias’s first responsibility, according to Bush. “Randy Tobias has a mandate directly from me to get our AIDS initiative up and running as soon as possible,” he said on July 1.

A corporate executive throughout his career, Tobias has no background in public health and little or no experience of working in poor countries. In short remarks at the White House on July 1, he described the statistics of the AIDS toll taken in Africa — where almost 20 million people have been killed by the disease — as “really nearly incomprehensible.”

At the same time, Tobias is known as a no-nonsense businessman who is particularly close to the recently departed director of the administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a bureaucracy that could play a key role in securing the money to actually fund Bush’s 15 billion-dollar program.

“This is clearly a person with tremendous stature and management acumen,” said Sandra Thurman, who served as former President Clinton’s global AIDS director and now heads the International AIDS Trust.

The key test for many activists, however, will lie in how Tobias responds to three major questions regarding the Bush administration’s global AIDS policies, of which the Emergency Program is the central feature.

The first concern involves the availability of generic anti-AIDS and other life-saving drugs to poor countries under the Program. While major pharmaceutical companies have sharply cut prices on their brand-name anti-viral medicines for AIDS victims in poor African countries, similar generic drugs produced in India, Thailand, and Brazil, for example, still cost significantly less — as little as under 300 dollars per person per year for triple combinations of anti-viral drugs.

While the administration has suggested it will use generics in the Emergency Program, it has not made a formal decision. “Tobias will have tough questions to answer about whether the Bush AIDS Plan will make efficient use of funds by maximizing purchases of affordable generic medicines,” noted Eustacia Smith of Health Global Access Project (Health GAP.)

A related question is whether Tobias will push the administration to follow through on its promise at the World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting in Doha in November 2001 to permit poor countries that face public health emergencies to import generic anti-AIDS and other life-saving drugs.

Under pressure from Big Pharma, the administration has since reversed its position by pressing its bilateral trade partners in Africa to sign agreements committing them to respect international patent laws that, from a practical viewpoint, would make importing generics much more problematic.

“It’s very difficult to believe that a man coming from the US pharmaceutical industry would be willing to respond to the calls from impoverished countries to expedite access to life-saving mechanisms,” said Zeitz.

“Purchase of lowest-cost medicines, including generics, is a must,” according to Asia Russell of Health GAP. “The pharmaceutical industry calls that piracy. Which side will Tobias be on?”

Finally, activists are particularly worried about the fate of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, a two-year-old multilateral mechanism to expedite the funding of anti-AIDS work around the world. Although Congress has authorized an annual contribution of up to one billion dollars for the Fund — which is already fast running out of money — the administration has said it intends to provide only 200 million dollars a year.

Big Pharma has been cited as a major culprit behind the administration’s miserliness towards the Fund because of its support for making generic anti-AIDS drugs accessible to all needy countries.

“Whether Tobias will push within the administration for the funding of the Global Fund really needs to even begin to catch up with the need will be a critical test of whether he’s independent,” said Booker.

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Argentine activists alarmed by anti-terrorism bill

By Viviana Alonso

Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 3 (IPS)— Human rights groups in Argentina say passage of a counter-terrorism bill submitted by a right-wing senator of the governing Justicialista (Peronist) Party would have grave consequences for the state of law.

The fight against terrorism must not become a new “reason of state” that would allow the trampling of human rights, argue local non-governmental organizations like the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) and the Civil Rights Association.

The draft law introduced by Senator Miguel Angel Pichetto “runs counter to our laws, to our constitutional, due process and penal guarantees, and to human rights instruments,” CELS activist Carolina Varsky told IPS.

The bill presented by Pichetto, who represents the southern province of Río Negro, would give the executive branch the power to declare a state of siege or emergency without consulting Congress, and would also allow it to call on the armed forces in questions of internal security in case of a “terrorist emergency.”

That runs counter to the calls issued by human rights activists and politicians of different stripes since the end of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship to “demilitarize” internal security and clearly establish that the only duty of the armed forces is national defense.

With respect to investigations of citizens, Pichetto proposes the authorization of wire-tapping phones, opening mail, or spying on other kinds of communications without a legal warrant.

The bill would remove the limitations that the existing laws set on the National Intelligence System (SIN), in order to enable it to gather or store information about people based on race, religious faith, political views, and membership or involvement in political parties, trade unions, social or community organizations, cooperatives, cultural or labor groups, and any other legal activity in which they may be involved.

Pichetto proposes a life sentence — the stiffest punishment provided for under Argentine law — for those who commit acts of terrorism or have knowledge about imminent or future actions and fail to inform the authorities.

“Many countries in which terrorism has taken on important dimensions have fallen into the temptation to adopt emergency penal legislation that affects guarantees of due process,” CELS stated in a message presented to the Senate.

The local human rights group argued that the risks of the “penal emergency” model arise from the fact that it does not treat suspects as citizens who should be tried and sentenced, but “as enemies, as mere sources of danger who must be neutralized in any way possible.”

Two major terrorist attacks staged in Argentina in the 1990s have not yet been resolved. A bomb blast in the Israeli Embassy on Mar. 11, 1992 claimed 12 lives. Two years later, on July 18, 1994, an explosion in the Israeli-Argentine Mutual Association, a Jewish community center, left a death toll of 85 and hundreds injured.

Leaders of the Delegation of Israeli-Argentine Associations (DAIA) have met with President Néstor Kichner, who took office on May 25, and asked him to push through a “general anti-terrorism law,” the president of that group, José Hercman, commented to IPS.

Hercman, who said he was not familiar with Pichetto’s draft law, added that “we neither support nor fail to support any specific bill. We agree with the recommendations that emerged from the Organization of American States [OAS] meeting last year in Barbados.”

At that meeting, the OAS approved the First Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism, in which the party states committed themselves to stepping up intelligence-sharing and beefing up border controls, as well as confiscating funds and assets from terrorist groups or those linked to such organizations.

The signatories of that document also agreed not to grant political asylum or refugee status to anyone suspected of terrorism. In addition, the treaty excluded, for the first time, the “political offense exception,” stating that “a request for extradition or mutual legal assistance may not be refused on the sole ground that it concerns a political offense or an offense connected with a political offense or an offense inspired by political motives.”

“We would add that terrorism should be considered a crime against humanity, so that it is subject to no statute of limitations,” said Hercman.

He emphatically stated, however, that the DAIA, the political representative of Argentina’s Jewish community — the largest in Latin America — “will not support anything that restricts constitutional liberties or that can be used as a pretext for other ends.”

But Varsky argued that Argentina already “has laws on interior security, intelligence, or defense that are adequate for preventing and investigating terrorist offenses and for punishing the perpetrators.”

“It is not necessary to pass a counter-terrorism law that grants the government exceptional powers,” as Pichetto’s bill would do, because if such a law were enacted, “no one could go about in public with an easy mind,” she said.

According to CELS, the bill also violates the constitutional guarantee against arbitrary detention, because it stipulates that “any illegal foreigner [undocumented immigrant] suspected of being a terrorist or of involvement in acts related to organized crime” can be detained and held for 72 hours.

If the law is enacted, “the Argentine state would be violating its international commitments, and regressing with respect to the state of law and democratic institutions,” asserted CELS.

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CIA’s secret war revealed as Laos jails European journalists

By Phil Reeves

Bangkok, Thailand, July 6— International diplomatic efforts are under way to secure the release of two respected European journalists who were this week given 15-year prison sentences after setting out to explore a remarkable forgotten legacy of the CIA’s covert operations in the Vietnam War.

The harsh sentences passed in Laos against the Belgian reporter Thierry Falise, 46, Vincent Reynaud, a 38-year-old French photographer, and their translator Naw Karl Mua — an American citizen — have outraged human rights activists and journalists.

But the affair has also proved counter-productive for the Lao authorities — who preside over one of the world’s last surviving Communist regimes — by throwing a spotlight on a murky conflict that they prefer to deny exists.

The journalists, who entered the country on tourist visas, were researching the fate of ethnic Hmong who were hired by the CIA during the Vietnam War to fight on the side of the Americans against the Communists.

At the height of the conflict, more than 30,000 Hmong were engaged in what became known as America’s “secret war” against the North Vietnamese and Communist Pathet Lao. Small pockets of them — hiding in the jungle and mountains of the north — have continued fighting; it appears they are still waiting for the Americans to come to their aid.

In the last five months, reports from Xaysomboune militarized zone — the jungle- bound northern area where they operate — suggest that they have carried out at least three attacks on buses, killing more than 30 people.

Several years ago the Lao government began a fresh military drive to flush the Hmong fighters out and eradicate them. According to Grant Evans, an expert on Laos, the conflict is no longer driven by ideology, but rather is fuelled by rivalry and tit-for-tat attacks involving the insurgents and local army commanders.

The few people who have managed to reach the Hmong have returned with accounts of a desperate rag-tag band of fighters, living on yams, tree roots, and wild potatoes, and equipped with the same guns that they used in the 1960s and 1970s.

Supported by Hmong exiles in the US, the guerrillas, who number several thousand, are thought mostly to comprise the children and relatives of the CIA’s original secret army.

In December 2001, three Americans, led by a retired Los Angeles detective, went to the area to try to gather information about their fate. They belong to a California-based organization called the Fact-Finding Commission, which is pressing the US government to negotiate safe passage for the beleaguered fighters, to repay their loyalty. But they say there has been no sign of interest from Washington.

The three subsequently presented a report to the US Congress which said: “When the United States pulled out of the war in Vietnam and left South-east Asia [in 1975], we left the Hmong, Mien, Khamu, and Lao soldiers who fought in the CIA-sponsored Secret Army of Laos to fend for themselves.”

The report alleged that Lao and Vietnamese forces were “systematically exterminating” them, and warned that “without immediate intervention” there was “little hope” for these people.

The Fact-Finding Commission drew a harrowing picture of an ill-armed and tattered force, moving steathily around the mountains and facing starvation, not least because of dwindling supplies of yams.

“For 26 years these people have lived in the jungle holding on to the hope that their American allies would come to their rescue,” the report stated. It said this was their first contact with Americans for more than a quarter of a century.

Two Time magazine journalists managed to reach the guerrillas earlier this year, and returned with pictures of emaciated fighters, weeping and begging on their knees for their help.

The Lao government denies the existence of the insurgent army, blaming the sporadic attacks on civilians and skirmishes with troops on “bandits.”

Analysts say that Laos has recently been working to improve relations with the nation’s Hmong minority, of whom the fighters are a tiny part.

But it is clearly a hugely sensitive issue for the Communist government, as the two journalists and their translator discovered.

Discussions between the Lao government, and US, French and Belgian officials are under way, amid hopeful signs that the correspondents — officially convicted on charges of being involved in the death of a village security guard — may soon return to tell their story.

Laos’ Foreign Minister has said that they may soon be freed if their governments petition to have their sentences commuted. And its ambassador to France has also said that they would be free “within a matter of days.”

The European Parliament on July 4 adopted a resolution calling for the immediate release of the two European journalists and condemning the deterioration of the human rights situation in Laos.

Source: Independent (UK)

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Kenyan women sue British army over mass rapes

By Sanjay Suri

London, England, July 3 (IPS)— Attempts to investigate complaints that at least 650 Kenyan women were raped by British army soldiers have run into “a wall of silence,” according to Amnesty International.

Amnesty is demanding an independent inquiry into the complaints that the women were raped by British army soldiers sent to remote areas of Kenya for military exercises over a 30-year period.

A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defense in London told IPS: “There is an ongoing Royal Military police investigation, so we are not in a position to comment.”

Amnesty says that kind of inquiry is not good enough. “This investigation is being carried out by another wing of the military,” Judith Arenas from Amnesty told IPS. “You cannot investigate yourself.”

Amnesty published a report on July 2 following investigations by a team it sent to Kenya last month. The report “United Kingdom: Decades of impunity: Serious allegations of rape of Kenyan women by UK Army Personnel”says the British army had turned a blind eye to reports of rape by British soldiers over the period.

“The fact that so many rape claims over such a long period of time were neither investigated nor prosecuted shows a systemic failure of the UK army and may amount to institutional acquiescence which encouraged a pattern of grave human rights violations by members of the UK army,” said Amnesty’s secretary-general Irene Khan.

Amnesty International has received information that British army officials in Kenya may have become aware of some of the rape allegations as early as 1977.

“It is particularly worrying that both the UK and Kenyan authorities failed to investigate these allegations, and the fact that there were no repercussions for the perpetrators of these crimes inevitably contributed to their widespread repetition,” Khan said.

“The women, and children born allegedly as a result of these attacks have been suffering in silence for over thirty years —stigmatized, discriminated against and outcast within their own community. They have suffered a double injustice —not only were they sexually abused but the crimes against them have never been properly acknowledged let alone thoroughly investigated.”

The Amnesty demand follows legal action being brought in Britain on behalf of the women who have come forward to make complaints. Solicitor Martyn Day, who was given information through local groups in Kenya trying to support the women, has taken up the case of the women.

“When the women first came to see me about six months ago, I couldn’t believe it could be true,” Day told BBC Radio. “But the more we went to police stations, clinics, hospitals and local government offices, the more we were able to find contemporaneous documentary evidence to show the women had been complaining about the rapes over a 30-year period.”

Day said: “One of the big issues is going to be finding the individual soldiers who carried out these terrible atrocities. After so many years, it’s going to be very, very difficult.” The primary case he is making is against the British army, he said. “The fact that they failed systematically to ever take steps to stop this happening is the primary source of our case for civil compensation.”

The testimony of one of the women recorded by the Amnesty team gives a vivid glimpse of the kind of trauma the women endured. Oseina Thomas Koitat says she was attacked when she was in her teens by a group of seven British soldiers. One of the soldiers ran towards her. She tried to run away, but tripped and fell on her knees.

The soldier reportedly caught up with her and held her down. Oseina Koitat told Amnesty International that she remembers being raped by four of the soldiers, and that she then lost consciousness. When she regained consciousness, she found herself in a pool of blood. After she wandered back, some neighbors took her to her husband, who took her to the hospital. Her husband reported the rape to the police.

She says that after the rape, some people stopped socializing with her, and she feels ashamed because everybody — even her grandchildren — know what happened to her.

Amnesty wrote to Prime Minister Tony Blair about the complaints on May 21. It received a response from the Ministry of Defense on June 23 that said the aim of the investigation of the military police is to “investigate the authenticity or otherwise of the documents” in which the complaints of rape were made.

“We need these complaints investigated impartially and we need to look at these complaints in their wider perspective,” Arenas said. “There have been cases in Cyprus and Germany where the Ministry of Defense has prosecuted British soldiers for rape. And Amnesty has investigated bullying within the British army, and has investigated complaints about the British army in Northern Ireland and in Iraq.”

The complaints from Kenya need to be investigated fully because soldiers from the British army are posted in several countries around the world “on the pretext of peacekeeping,” Arenas said.

“The circumstances surrounding these complaints are dreadful,” she said. “There would have been a far stronger outcry in the media if such a thing had happened in Northern Ireland.”

The Amnesty investigation found that more than half the women, who have complained, have spoken of gang rapes. “These were not isolated cases,” the report says.

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Isolated indigenous groups face extinction

By Diego Cevallos

Mexico City, Mexico, July 1 (IPS)— Native South Americans shunning contact with “civilization” are facing cultural genocide, warns a United Nations official. While government rhetoric and laws guarantee the existence of isolated indigenous groups still living in the Brazilian, Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon jungle and in Paraguay’s Chaco region, their path to extinction appears to be already laid out.

The Korubos of Brazil, the Tagaeri of Ecuador, the Ayoreo of Paraguay and the Mashco-piros, Ashaninkas and Yaminahuas of Peru, which together amount to a total of only 5,000 individuals, are feeling the pressure of “civilization” advancing on their territories.

These isolated native communities are facing “true cultural genocide,” Roberto Stavenhagen, UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous People, told news agency Tierramerica.

“I’m afraid that under the current circumstances it will be difficult for them to survive more than a few more years, since what we call development denies them the right to continue living as they are,” he said.

These groups have decided to live apart from modern society hoping to avoid the cultural and physical extinction that other native communities have suffered in their interaction with Western society. But their culture and existence are being threatened by companies and individuals wishing to exploit the rubber, wood, oil, gold and genetic resources that could be found in their territories.

They also face threats from missionaries, anthropologists and tourism, and are being killed in large numbers, as happened last May in the Ecuadorian Amazon when a dozen Tagaeris, of the less than 300 still alive, were massacred by Huaoranis who now live a Western lifestyle. The murders were done in the interest of logging companies keen on exploiting virgin territories.

Many of these groups came to Western attention less than 60 years ago because of violent incidents committed in their territories and business interests wishing to exploit their riches.

They were long considered violent and cannibalistic “savages” by some religious groups, businesses and even members of other indigenous groups. But violence is a common theme in stories about these isolated communities, groups which themselves have been hunted down like animals and then put on exhibition for the viewing pleasure of the “civilized world.”

In 1956, for example, a group of Paraguay’s Ayoreos was pursued by one company’s workers. The workers captured a boy, Iquebi, not yet 12 years old, who became the first Ayoreo put on display in the country.

“The economic system does not respect cultural diversity, and indigenous groups who have voluntarily isolated themselves are considered obstacles,” says Sebastiao Manchineri, himself a member of Brazil’s indigenous community and the spokesperson for the Association of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin.

“The future of these sister communities is not guaranteed, and they are heading for extinction,” he lamented.

According to the UN-financed study, The Amazon Without Myths, when the Europeans arrived in the Americas, the Amazon basin was home to some 2,000 indigenous groups, about seven million people.

More than five centuries later, after persecution, epidemics caused by contact with foreigners and exploitative labor arrangements, less than 400 groups and only about two million individuals remain. Of these, around 5,000 shun contact with “civilization.”

National and international laws and government rhetoric promise to defend the existence of these last holdouts to “modern civilization,” but there is also the recognition that this will be difficult to accomplish.

For Sydney Possuelo, the head of the Isolated Indigenous Groups department in the National Foundation of Native Peoples of Brazil, the future of the country’s indigenous groups looks bleak.

The survival of these groups depends “on a reduction in consumerism. Without this change they will continue to be destroyed in the name of progress,” he told Tierramerica.

“With each disappearance of a community, a whole people dies and that is lamentable,” he said.

Brazil’s Korubo, estimated at around 300, is perhaps one of the largest ethnic groups still living in isolation in that country. There are other groups with as few as four members.

There are also groups with just one member “who does not want any contact with the outside world, lives alone in his hut, and uses arrows to attack anyone who comes close,” Possuelo said.

The constitutions of Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay, but not Peru, recognize the rights of indigenous groups over their territories. All four are signatories to Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization, which guarantees the rights of native populations over their physical and cultural surroundings.

But these countries often fail to live up to their constitutions and their international agreements. Studies in the Peruvian jungle, for example, show that companies that operate in the Amazon do nothing to preserve the rights accorded to the isolated communities, says Cristina Valdivia of the state’s Program for the Defense of Peru’s Native Communities.

That country’s Mashco-piros, numbering some 1,100, are harassed by several companies, and their territory has been invaded by firms engaged in natural gas exploration activity.

The Mashco-piros are in danger, as are the Ashaninkas and Yaminahuas, whose combined population hovers around 2,200 individuals.

Pressured on all sides, the Peruvian native communities have been involved in bloody attacks, as have those in Ecuador, Paraguay and Brazil. In the late 1990s in Paraguay, the Ayoreo Totobiegosode attacked with spears a group of employees of a company that had opened up a route to the jungles in the Chaco region.

The territory of the Ayoreo encompasses some three million hectares along the border with Bolivia, but it is under constant pressure from the advance of the agricultural frontier.

Paraguay’s natives, like those in other countries with Amazon territory, also face harassment from religious groups —in their case, the evangelical New Tribes Mission from the United States.

The government’s responsibility to the Ayoreo Totobiegosode is “to protect them from outside interference, which takes many shapes as they have to fight many people with designs on their territory,” says Oscar Centurión, president of the Paraguayan Institute of Indigenous Peoples.

Sociologist Tarcila Rivera, with the government’s Center for Indigenous Cultures of Peru, maintains that there is no lack of laws to protect the rights of native peoples, since as Peruvians they fall under Peruvian law.

The problem, she said, is that “there is a tendency to think of them as ‘savages,’ lying outside the reach of the protection offered to the rest of the citizens.”

“Without the help of their governments, those communities wishing to live apart from ‘civilization’ will become extinct, and there is nothing we can do about it,” said Manchineri.

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US punishes 35 countries for signing onto intl. court

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, July 1 (IPS)— Raising its war against the International Criminal Court to a new level, the administration of President George W. Bush cut off military aid to 35 friendly countries on July 1 in retaliation for their support of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and refusal to exempt US soldiers from the ICC’s jurisdiction.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have supported the ICC immediately denounced the cuts, which will mostly affect countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, East and Central Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the countries are democratic and firmly allied with the US and the West, more generally.

“The US campaign has not succeeded in undermining global support for the court,” said Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Program at New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW). But it has succeeded in making the government look foolish and mean-spirited.”

“At a time when America is losing vital public support abroad,” said Heather Hamilton, program director of the World Federalist Association. “This kind of bullying of some of the world’s poorest countries will only undermine our long-term safety and security.”

But administration officials said the cuts were mandated under the American Service Members Protection Act (ASPA) which was passed by Congress last year. Its express purpose is to ensure that the ICC, which has just launched work at its headquarters at The Hague in the Netherlands, can never gain jurisdiction over members of the US military.

“This is a reflection of the United States’ priorities to protect the men and women in our military,” said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, while his State Department counterpart, Richard Boucher, told reporters that Washington hopes to “continue to work with governments to secure and ratify Article 98 agreements that protect American service members from arbitrary or political prosecution by the International Court.”

He added that most US military aid for fiscal year 2003 has already been allocated, and that only some 47.6 million dollars in military aid and training was affected by the cut-off.

Under the ASPA, which includes a provision giving the president authorization to use all necessary means to free US servicemen being held by the ICC, the administration was obliged to cut off military aid to countries that have ratified the ICC unless they are NATO allies or specially designated non-NATO allies, such as Argentina, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Israel. In addition, the president is empowered to “waive” sanctions on other countries if it serves the national interest.

The administration has determined that governments signing so-called Article 98 agreements with the United States committing them not to transfer any US soldier to the ICC’s custody is sufficient to warrant a waiver.

Under the 1998 Rome Protocol, which has been ratified by 90 countries, including Washington’s closest NATO allies, the ICC was set up to investigate and prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in cases for which countries with direct ties to such crimes were not able or willing to prosecute themselves.

Former President Bill Clinton signed the Protocol in December 2000, just a few weeks before Bush became president. In May last year, the administration renounced Clinton’s signature and withdrew from all negotiations to set up the ICC. It also threatened to veto extensions of UN peacekeeping operations unless the UN Security Council gave all US citizens a one-year exemption from the ICC’s jurisdiction. That exemption was extended under US pressure for a second year earlier this month.

Washington has argued that the tribunal gives too much discretion to prosecutors who may bring politically motivated cases against US officials and soldiers. With some 150,000 US troops deployed in Iraq, another 9,000 in Afghanistan, and tens of thousands more in scores of countries across Eurasia and in and around the Gulf, it is worried that it will become a prime target for politicized prosecutions.

But rights groups, like HRW and the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights, and European governments, including Britain, say these fears are greatly exaggerated. “The US experts know that there is practically no justification for the Security Council exemptions and the likelihood that a US peacekeeping soldier would come under the jurisdiction of the Court is almost zero,” according to William Pace, convenor of the Coalition of the ICC, which includes some 2,000 NGOs worldwide.

Nonetheless, Washington has made the negotiations of Article 98 agreements a top diplomatic priority and, according to US officials, has so far persuaded 51 governments to sign them, including seven that have asked Washington to withhold their identity.

Countries that are known to have either signed or ratified the Protocol and signed Article 98 accords with the US include Afghanistan, Albania, Bahrain, Bolivia, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Djibouti, the Dominican Republic, East Timor, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, Honduras, Israel, Macedonia, Madagascar, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Mongolia, Nauru, Nicaragua, Panama, the Philippines, Romania, the Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, Togo, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.

The administration’s inclusion of Botswana, Nigeria, and Senegal — all countries which Bush will be visiting on his week-long Africa trip next week — prompted speculation that they may not have made their signatures public yet.

The 35 countries which have signed or ratified the Protocol but have refused to sign Article 98 agreements include key South American countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela; Belize and Costa Rica in Central America; Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia in Europe; Benin, Central African Republic, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Namibia, Niger, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia in Africa; Fiji and Samoa in the South Pacific; and the island countries of the English-speaking Caribbean.

Of these, the Andean and European countries are the biggest recipients of US military aid, although, in the Andean and Caribbean cases, most of the aid is considered anti-drug assistance that will not be blocked, according to Boucher. Most of the European countries will be able to receive military aid once they accede to NATO membership.

In Africa, however, some of the affected states have participated in US military training for peacekeeping forces. It is unclear how this will be handled.

Washington has persuaded a number of other countries also to sign Article 98 agreements, even though they have not signed the Protocol. These reportedly include Azerbaijan, Bhutan, El Salvador, India, Maldives, Mauritania, Micronesia, Nepal, Rwanda, Thailand, Tunisia, Tonga, Maldives, Micronesia, Sri Lanka, and Tuvalu.

NGOs have deplored the pressure put on small, poor and often democratic states to sign the Article 98 agreements. “Because most ICC member states are democracies with a relatively strong commitment to the rule of law,” noted HRW executive director Kenneth Roth in a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell on July 1, “the threatened aid cutoffs represent a sanction primarily targeting states that abide by democratic values.”

The letter cites one instance where a senior US diplomat recently informed Caribbean foreign ministers that they would lose the benefits for hurricane relief, rural dentistry, and veterinary programs if their governments did not sign.

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Afghan elections in doubt

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, July 2— Plans to draft a constitution and hold elections for a new government in Afghanistan in June, 2004, are increasingly doubtful, according to a number of recent reports and senior Afghan officials who complain that the United States and the rest of the international community are not providing adequate support to the transitional government headed by President Hamid Karzai.

Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah reportedly delivered the bad news to visiting British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on June 30. According to the London Guardian, Straw replied that election plans could be put back to September or even October, but he rejected Karzai’s call to significantly increase the number of international troops deployed to Afghanistan to help extend his government’s authority into the countryside. With the exception of a number of US Special Forces and civic action teams, the 5,000-man International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is confined to Kabul.

Karzai has said the lack of security outside the capital is one of the major factors making it difficult to see elections taking place less than one year from now, an assessment on which non-governmental organizations active in Afghanistan increasingly agree.

“The constitutional and electoral processes have fallen behind schedule and, even if lost time can be retained, the security situation in the country — which in the view of many observers is deteriorating — reduces the possibility for success of a national elections one year from now,” according to a report released in late June by Refugees International (RI).

The report said that the United Nations, which is supposed to help organize the process along with the government, does not itself have the resources to organize and oversee what is expected to be a complex elections involving 12 to 15 million potential voters in a country much of which is accessible only by four-wheel drive vehicles.

Moreover, about one-third of Afghanistan is presently off-limits for travel by UN employees without a security escort, while training and deployment of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and police forces have barely begun, according to RI, which also notes that much of the country is under the control of warlords, some of whom are overtly hostile to the central government’s plans.

“If present trends are permitted to persist, many experts in Afghanistan doubt that successfully, fair, free, and universal elections can be held in June 2004,” the report concludes, calling on all donors, the UN, and the Kabul government to review the situation.

Delaying the elections would be a serious embarrassment to the Bush administration which appears to have its hands full in dealing with the occupation of Iraq and launching the reconstruction process there. With some 150,000 US troops in Iraq compared to only about 7,000 in Afghanistan, Washington has clearly made Baghdad its top priority.

The view that the situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, deteriorating was bolstered by an alarming report issued in mid-June by a joint task force of regional specialists and former policy-makers associated with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Asia Society that has been monitoring Afghanistan since well before the US-led military campaign that ousted the Taliban government in November-December, 2001.

Entitled “Afghanistan: Are We Losing the Peace?”, the report found that US and Western efforts to secure Afghanistan and launch a credible democratic process appeared to be unraveling.

“Without greater support for the transitional government...,” it said, “security in Afghanistan will deteriorate further, prospects for economic reconstruction will dim, and Afghanistan will revert to warlord-dominated anarchy.”

“This failure could gravely erode America’s credibility around the globe and mark a major defeat in the US-led war on terrorism,” stated the report, which was signed by, among others, two top retired foreign service officers with extensive experience in Southwest Asia.

In a visit with Bush at Camp David last week, Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, reportedly conveyed much the same message. While he called for ISAF forces to be at least doubled in strength and deployed outside Kabul, Bush pressed him to contribute several thousands of his troops to peacekeeping forces in US- and British-occupied Iraq.

In a feature column in the New York Times on July 1, Sarah Chayes, field director of Afghans for Civil Society, warned that Washington was itself contributing to the problem by maintaining alliances with the warlords, including some who remained hostile to Karzai. Washington’s failure to turn against the warlords “discourages ordinary Afghans from helping rebuild their country,” she wrote, adding that, “without the people, the process is doomed.”

The same attitude is contributing to pessimism about the election process as well, according to Shayes. “At a recent meeting [in Kandahar] with representatives from the commission that’s drafting a new constitution, a nursing student asked, ‘How can we freely elect our representatives with warlords controlling the countryside?’”

In assessing whether elections could take place next June, RI compared the current situation with that faced by the international community in Cambodia between 1991 and 1993 when it held national elections. The UN, according to the report, had “vastly more resources available to its job,” including 16,000 peacekeeping troops, 12 battle-ready infantry battalions , 3,500 police, and more than 2,000 election organizers and monitors. While the elections had flaws, according to the report, they were largely considered a qualified success.

Given Afghanistan’s significantly larger size and population, the comparable commitment there would include 50,000 peacekeeping troops, 10,000 police, and several thousand civilian organizers and monitors, RI said, noting that “nowhere near these numbers of foreign and trained Afghan military, police and civilians will be available lest dramatic increases are made in international resources available for Afghanistan.”

Moreover, the central government had established control over virtually all of Cambodia, while Afghanistan’s central government controls only a fraction of the country’s territory at a comparable stage in the process.

Source: OneWorld.net

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Riot police evict Montreal Tent City

Compiled by Shane Perlowin

July 6 (AGR)— At around 1am on June 30, Montreal police moved in and dismantled a Tent City of over 100 affordable housing activists in Lafontaine Park.

The protesters, comprised of a coalition of social housing and anti-poverty groups, cordoned off an area in the center of the park around noon and pitched dozens of tents and makeshift shelters. A pirate radio station broadcast about the Tent City (104.9fm in Montreal), and a Tent City website is online, with web streaming and updated information (http://tentcity.taktic.org).

The Tent City was a response to Montreal’s housing crisis, increasing gentrification of formerly low-cost working class areas, and increasing homelessness. The Tent City activists have three demands: decent housing for all, the end of the criminalization of poverty and homelessness, and the repossession of empty buildings for community use. They are stressing the anti-capitalist nature of their action, critiquing the root causes of the housing crisis in Montreal.

According to a flyer that was passed out at the Tent City (“Decent Housing for Everyone”):

“Behind the evictions and rent hikes, the homelessness and police, there is a logic—the logic of capitalism. Under capitalism, things are produced, not because they are needed, but because they can be sold for a profit. It’s not that there simply aren’t enough roofs to cover everyone in Montreal that there is homelessness. There are unused buildings all across the city. But under capitalism, houses are only made available to people who can buy (or rent) them. The poor don’t factor into the equations of supply and demand. When landlords evict their tenants, it is because they want tenants who can pay more—they want more profit out of their property. When police harass, brutalize and jail the homeless, it is in order to raise the property values of the area.”

The flyer ends on the following note: “Of course our demands won’t be welcomed by the slimeball politicians who run this city, or the scumbag landlords who profit off the housing crisis, but that’s only natural. They are the enemy. And we look forward to the day when each of their mansions in Westmount will house 30 people, not a few rich bastards.”

Every July, hundreds of Montreal residents with expired leases are rendered homeless by the lack of affordable housing, while potentially thousands more are forced into substandard or unaffordable apartments.

“The housing crisis is no joke,” said 23-year-old Éric Denis, who raised his tent in the park. “I’m getting evicted in three days, so this is where I’m going to sleep. This is going to be my home.”

“We want this to be very visible,” said John Hodgins of the Housing Committee of the Anti-Capitalist Convergence (CLAC Lodgement).

“The city has tried to make this problem invisible, to hide it from tourists during the festivals. We want to challenge that and bring it back into the open.”

Hodgins said that activists had been working for weeks to prepare meals and schedule a week’s worth of activities--which included educational workshops, barbecues and movie nights.

“We’re ready to stay as long as it takes,” said Mathieu Therriault of Comité des sans emploi.

At midnight, police informed media that the activists would have to leave the park or face fines as they were in violation of a city bylaw.

Using floodlights, police proceeded to push back the Tent City participants with shields and batons. Protesters lit fires and clashed with riot police, using picnic benches as barricades. Many people scrambled to gather their belongings, including their tents and tarps, while others maintained a line in front of the riot police, chanting defiant slogans in defense of the Tent City. Twelve people were arrested in total.

The breaking-up of the Tent City comes on the heels of an announcement by city officials of a zero-tolerance policy for squatting in public parks. Two weeks ago, councilor Peter Yeomans, the executive committee member in charge of public security, said Montreal would not allow city parks to be “overtaken by a group of young people.”

One Montreal municipal councilor, Nicolas Tetrault, was on hand to defend the police action, and insist that the municipal bylaws that force parks to close at midnight was justified, despite the housing crisis. The councilor, who was denounced as a yuppie by bystanders, was forced to leave the scene.

Some Tent City participants vowed to return every day next week, and stay every night until the police evictions at midnight.

There have been several squat projects across Canada in the past two years, including the Pope Squat in Toronto, the Woodwards Squat in Vancouver, the Chevrotire Squat in Quebec City, the Seven-Year Squat in Ottawa and many other actions. These public squat actions have sometimes lasted for several months, but in the end, the city has always intervened — sometimes quite brutally — to prevent autonomous groups and projects from reclaiming abandoned buildings.

Sources: Indymedia Montreal, Montreal Gazette

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