300 protest racism and police brutality
in Benton Harbor
Benton Harbor, MI July 13— Some 300 people from throughout
the Midwest took over the streets of downtown Benton Harbor, MI on Saturday,
July 12, in a mass march and rally against racism and police brutality.
Benton Harbor residents were joined by protesters from Toronto,
Cleveland, Chicago, Indiana, Detroit, Muskegon, Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo,
Traverse City, Lansing, and elsewhere in Michigan.
The march and rally was sponsored by the Southwest Michigan Coalition
Against Racism and Police Brutality, the Benton Harbor chapter of the
Black Autonomy Network of Community Organizers (BANCO), and the Detroit
Coalition Against Police Brutality.
Protesters defied an order by city officials restricting them to the
sidewalks and spilled into the streets for the mile-long march mile
from Benton Harbor City Hall to a rally at the Berrien County Courthouse
in St. Joseph.
The march and rally was held in response to the black community’s
two-day rebellion protesting the June 16 death of Terrance “T-shirt”
Shurn, 28, a black motorcyclist who crashed to his death after a high-speed
chase by white police officers.
“We are here today in solidarity with the black community of Benton
Harbor and the youth who rebelled on June 16 and 17 against years of
racism and police brutality in this city,” said JoNina M. Abron,
acting chair of the Southwest Michigan Coalition. “We are also
here to put the white racist officials of Berrien County on notice that
they can no longer conduct business as usual. We have to continue the
protests, and work to build an even larger base of support inside and
outside of Benton Harbor.”
Abron said the coalition is a regional organization that has been active
in Benton Harbor for the last three years. It has held meetings with
local residents and protests against police brutality.
Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, acting vice president of the coalition, said it
was important to build a mass movement in Benton Harbor that reflects
the desires of the people of the city. He said that “like Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists of the 1960s,
the marchers were falsely depicted by local officials as ‘outside
agitators.’”
“Benton Harbor is a symbol of racism and injustice, just like South
Central Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and other cities that have had
rebellions against racist police crimes,” Ervin said.
Ervin gave the demands of the marchers, which include an end to
police brutality and the prosecution of Wes Koza, the police officer
involved in the chase that resulted in Shurn’s death. Ervin said
the coalition supports the campaign for the recall of the Berrien County
Prosecutor, James Cherry, whom Ervin accused of covering-up for the
police.
Ervin also said that the coalition is calling for an international boycott
of the Whirlpool Corp., the economic power base of Benton Harbor, whose
headquarters are located here, and a boycott of the tourist economy
of St. Joseph. “Officials of St. Joseph, a popular tourist attraction
in the Midwest, have stolen all of the wealth that rightfully should
have gone to Benton Harbor,” Ervin said. “Over the course
of time,” he explained, “the boycott would hurt the economy
of St. Joseph.”
The Rev. Edward Pinkney, acting chair of the Benton Harbor BANCO, said
that he has been leading marches at the courthouse for almost two years
to protest the county’s racist criminal justice system. According
to Pinkney, Benton Harbor has the highest per capita rate of incarceration
in Michigan. He is seeking the recall of several county judges.
Ron Scott, spokesman for the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality,
recalled the black rebellion that erupted in Cincinnati after a white
policeman killed Timothy Thomas, a black man, in 1999. “The people
of Cincinnati have organized to fight police brutality, and the people
of Benton Harbor can do it, too,” Scott said.
Other speakers included Arnetta Grable, a member of the board of directors
of the October 22 Coalition, a national anti-police group; Fred Hampton
Jr., of the Prison Activist Coordinating Committee and son of slain
Chicago Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton; and Yvette Cruz, of
the Comite Exigimos Justicia (We Demand Justice) of the Humboldt Park
community of Chicago.
In addition to the Comite Exigimos Justicia, the two dozen organizations
and individuals who endorsed the march and rally included the Coalition
for a Just Cincinnati; the Committee for Justice in Palestine at Ohio
State University; Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Justice;
Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Detroit;
and David Sole, president of United Auto Workers Local 2334, Detroit.
Source: Southwest Michigan Coalition Against Racism and
Police Brutality
Corporate money co-opts nonprofit groups,
says report
Washington, DC, July 9-- Corporate financial support of
many of the country’s most prominent health-related nonprofit organizations
threatens the independence and credibility of such groups, according
to a report released today by the Center for Science in the Public Interest
(CSPI). More than 170 disease-related charities, health-professional
societies, and university-based institutes enjoy the largesse of food,
agribusiness, chemical, pharmaceutical, and other corporate interests,
but that generosity may exact too high a price on an important sector
of American life, charged the report.
The report recalls the negative publicity generated by the American
Medical Association’s (AMA) endorsement deal with medical equipment
supplier Sunbeam, which eventually forced the group to cancel the deal
under pressure. More recent corporate “partnerships” indicate
that the AMA scandal has done little to deter nonprofit leaders from
pursuing six- or seven-figure grants that seem to have strings attached.
One such arrangement documented in the report is that of Coca-Cola’s
$1-million gift to the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry (AAPD).
Before the 2003 donation, the AAPD recognized the connection between
sugary drinks and dental disease. When AAPD president David Curtis defended
the Coke deal, he told reporters that the “scientific evidence
is certainly not clear” on the role soft drinks play.
“What a difference a million dollars makes,” CSPI executive
director Michael F. Jacobson wrote in the report’s introduction,
referring to the AAPD’s coupling with the world’s leading
soda manufacturer. “And what a coup for Coca-Cola, turning a potential
opponent into an ally. You can bet that the AAPD will not be terribly
supportive of measures to reduce soft-drink consumption. At best, it
will probably be silent on such matters. At worst, it will support its
generous new friend.”
Other nonprofit groups with questionable corporate ties include:
• American Dietetic Association. The leading professional associations
for registered dietitians takes outright donations from food companies.
It also lets companies fund fact sheets: The National Soft Drink Association
“sponsors” the association’s fact sheet on soft drinks;
McDonald’s sponsors “Nutrition on the Go,” and so on.
• International Society for Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology.
Sponsored by Dow AgroSciences, Eastman Kodak, Gillette, Merck, Procter
& Gamble, RJ Reynolds Tobacco, and other corporations that have
an interest in weakening government regulation of chemicals. ISRTP publishes
a journal with a strong anti-regulatory editorial slant.
• Society for Women’s Health Research. In addition to advocating
for more research into women’s health, this group leapt to the
defense of a major benefactor, Wyeth, when the safety of hormone replacement
therapy (HRT) was questioned. The society also lent its name to a Novartis
campaign to market a drug for irritable bowel syndrome.
Sometimes, according to the report, corporations literally create nonprofit
organizations from scratch. They may have beneficent-sounding names
and seemingly objective programs, but are designed primarily to advance
their sponsors’ interests. Some of those include the Foundation
for Clean Air Progress (funded by petroleum, trucking, and chemical
companies), the Coalition for Animal Health (funded by cattle, hog,
and agribusiness concerns), and the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF)
(originally funded by Philip Morris but now funded by chain restaurants
and bars, although it refuses to disclose its contributors.) Part of
CCF’s focus is to downplay obesity-related health concerns.
The report also identifies more than 30 university-based research centers
that draw substantial financial support from companies or corporate
trade associations. Among those are several university centers on forestry
funded by timber or paper industries and several centers on nutrition
funded by food and agribusiness companies. All such centers let corporations
put an academic sheen on industry-funded research, according to CSPI.
“People would be far more skeptical of a ‘Corporate Polluters
Lobbying Association’ than an industry-funded ‘Harvard University
Center on Important Issues,’” said Jacobson. “Companies
hope that a nonprofit’s or university’s good name will burnish
their reputations. Call it ‘innocence by association.’”
CSPI released the report as it prepared to convene a July 11 conference
in Washington on how corporations use science and scientists to manipulate
public opinion and regulatory policy on health and the environment.
Source: Center for Science in the Public Interest
Interior Dept. and BIA desperation mounts
as Indian trust case draws to a close
By Brian Awehali
July 14 (AGR)— Most Americans are familiar with the
sad history of the US government’s shameful treatment of the American
Indian. If asked, most would probably say the worst chapters of this
account were written in the distant past. Today’s crimes against
the nation’s poorest people, carried out over the course of decades
and mummified in reams of bureaucracy, are a kind of institutionalized
villainy journalists find it difficult to write about.
Perhaps that’s why the media has paid so little attention to the
largest-ever class action lawsuit against the US federal government.
Filed more than seven years ago by Blackfeet tribe member Elouise Cobell
and her legal team on behalf of more than 500,000 individual Indian
landholders, Cobell vs. Norton is easily one of the biggest stories
of government criminality in modern US history.
At stake is over $100 billion dollars rightfully belonging to the nation’s
poorest people. The Department of the Interior (DOI), Bureau of Indian
Affairs (BIA), and Treasury claim to have simply “lost” the
money, and claim they cannot now provide an accurate accounting of how
much is owed to whom. In the course of the lawsuit, the government has
repeatedly destroyed vital accounting documents, deliberately filed
false reports to the court, and generally conducted itself in such bad
faith that a stunning total of 37 past and present government officials,
including current Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton and former
Secretary Bruce Babbitt, have been held in contempt of court for their
misconduct.
Thanks in no small part to a “genius” grant from the MacArthur
Foundation and the more than $4 million dollars from the Santa Fe-based
Lannan Foundation, the plaintiffs in Cobell vs. Norton stand poised
for a victory of epic, David-and-Goliath proportions. However, the government
is not going to cede an inch or a penny without a fight, particularly
to a group who represent less than one percent of the voting population.
Desperate to avoid accountability, the government is hoping for an eleventh-hour
bailout from The House Appropriations Committee, which has proposed
a provision to end the lawsuit and force Indians to accept a settlement
devised by the Interior.
The provision—Section 137 of the Interior Appropriations Bill for
fiscal 2004 is called the “Mandatory Account Adjustment Directive
(MAAD).”
“MAAD is a most repressive measure designed to eviscerate the rights
of Indian beneficiaries and steal from us the victories we have achieved
through seven years of litigation,” Cobell told the Appropriations
Committee on July 10. Rep. Nick Rahall, (D-WV), the ranking Democrat
on the committee, has also expressed strong reservations about the provision.
“The alleged solution,” Rahall said, “which would have
the wolf guarding the hen house, is not the answer.”
Bad faith at every step
“I’ve never seen more egregious misconduct by the federal
government,” noted Judge Royce C. Lamberth, the Federal judge overseeing
the suit. His comments were elicited upon being told in May of 1999
that the Department of the Interior and Treasury Department had “inadvertently”
destroyed 162 boxes of trust records during the course of the trial,
then waited months to notify the Court of the “accident.”
Many other records crucial to any accurate accounting of the Individual
Indian Trust (IIT) monies were destroyed or simply allowed to deteriorate
to the point of uselessness in rat-infested warehouses in New Mexico,
among other places.
“You tell me if that’s fair,” Elouise Cobell told Mike
Wallace in a 60 Minutes interview in 1999. “When they have to manage
other people’s money according to standards, why aren’t they
managing our money to standards? Is it because you manage brown people’s
money differently?”
Cobell, a member of the Blackfoot nation in Montana, lives in Browning,
MT, where she founded and helps run the first tribal-owned bank in the
country. She also served as Treasurer of the Blackfeet tribe from 1970
when she was 30 years old, through 1983.
Growing up, Cobell’s family had no plumbing, no electricity, and
no running water. She remembers they would often complain about sporadic
or suspiciously small checks from the government for the land given
to Cobell’s grandmother during “allotment” at the turn
of the century and now leased out by the Department of the Interior
and the BIA to ranchers and timber companies.
Allotment was the policy of theft and seizure ushered in by the Dawes
Act in 1887, in an attempt to break down tribal structures and reduce
Indian land holdings. Individual Indians were given up to 320 acres
of land each, but were forbidden actual ownership. Instead, the government
forced upon Indians a trust relationship, where the Interior and the
BIA would oversee the land and disburse all revenue from its use to
the individual Indian landholders. The Act also allowed for the sale
of “surplus” land, a provision white settlers exploited fully
in their purchase of around 90 million acres -- almost 65 percent of
all Indian lands -- by 1932. The government openly stated during this
period that this trust relationship was necessary because it did not
believe Indians were capable of managing their own affairs.
Yet it’s difficult to conceive of how anyone could have done a
worse job managing the trust.
After discovering all kinds of anomalies in the Blackfeet tribe’s
trust including an account drawing negative interest, as well as a host
of unauthorized transactions, Cobell began asking questions. She claims
that her initial questions to the BIA were met with a response, more
or less, of “learn how to read a financial statement.”
“They said, ‘Oh, you don’t know how to read the reports,’
and I sat down,” she said. “I think they were trying to embarrass
me, but it did the opposite -- it made me mad.”
Steadily more resolved, Cobell caught a break when a deputy commissioner
for Indian Affairs in the first Bush administration, David Matheson,
arranged for her to meet with several well-connected, influential government
officials and banking experts. Among this group was Dennis Gingold,
known as a tough litigator, who is quoted in the Los Angeles Times as
saying of his first meeting with Cobell that he was expecting to meet
with East Indians. “From my experience, American Indians were not
involved in banking,” he recalls. “I was looking for a bunch
of people with turbans.”
What Gingold came to learn about the case astonished and enlightened
him, however. Each year more than $500 million comes into the Individual
Indian Trust (IIT) from companies leasing Indian land for grazing, oil,
timber, coal and other natural resources. The money is collected by
the Department of the Interior and sent to the Treasury, where it’s
then theoretically deposited into individual trust accounts.
The problem is, the Department of the Interior and BIA are widely regarded
as the worst-run agencies in the entire federal government. 50,000 trust
accounts don’t have names or proper addresses. One such account
has $1 million in it. The Interior and BIA, by their own admission,
simply cannot account for as much as $100 billion that’s passed
in and out of the trust since 1887.
In 1992, a House Committee on Government Operations issued a damning
report entitled “Misplaced Trust: The Bureau of Indian Affairs’
Mismanagement of the Indian Trust Fund.” Two years later, in 1994,
Congress passed the Indian Trust Fund Management Reform Act, appointing
a trustee to oversee the process. This was Paul Homan, who had a reputation
for cleaning up problems at financial institutions. Before being appointed
the first trustee, Homan had been CEO of four problem banks and the
executive vice president of another. No shrinking violet, Homan eventually
quit in disgust because he recieved no cooperation from the Interior
or the BIA, and from Secretary of the Interior of the Clinton Administration,
Bruce Babbitt, specifically.
Before he left, Homan reported bluntly that it was impossible to tell
how many people were owed money. Of the 238,000 individual trusts Homan’s
crew located, 118,000 were missing crucial papers, 50,000 had no addresses,
and 16,000 accounts had no documents at all. Homan further reported
that one could assume money had been skimmed extensively from the trust.
“It’s akin to leaving the vault door open,” he said.
Faced with the prospect of a wide open vault door the government seemed
to have no interest in closing, Cobell was eventually compelled to file
a lawsuit on June 10, 1996, demanding a full accounting of all IIT monies.
It’s doubtful that anyone at the Interior or BIA expected Cobell
and her team to have as much success as they’ve had. The government
now has more than 100 lawyers assigned to the case more than they employed
in the Microsoft antitrust litigation.
In the intervening seven years, Cobell’s team has piled up an impressive
series of victories. On Feb. 22, 1999, former Secretary Babbitt, Treasury
Secretary Robert Rubin and Assistant Interior Secretary Kevin Gover
were held in contempt of court by Judge Lamberth. On Aug. 10, 1999,
Judge Lamberth ordered the Treasury to pay $600,000 in fines for misconduct.
And on Dec. 21 of that same year, Judge Lamberth issued his Trial One
opinion (the case is divided into two phases), wherein he found that
the government had breached its trust responsibilities to the Indians,
and ordered the government to file quarterly reports detailing its reform
efforts. Lamberth also retained jurisdiction over the reform for a period
of five years.
During the first phase, the Interior seems to have bungled things in
every conceivable way. The Senate Government Affairs Committee cited
the Interior’s management of the Indian trust as one of its “Ten
Worst” examples of federal government mismanagement. It came to
light through a report filed by court-appointed Special Master, Alan
Balaran, that Interior and Justice Department lawyers were destroying
e-mails at the same time they were assuring the court the emails were
being preserved.
The second phase of the trial, to ascertain the amount of money owed
to Indian trustees, is now underway. Predictably, as the suit draws
to a close, desperation on the part of the government has led them to
try every means available to them, ethical or otherwise, to derail or
minimize the imminent settlement.
The destruction of vital documents has continued, and been cited repeatedly
in reports to the Court. Numerous experts have testified that a true
accounting of the trust based on existing records is impossible. As
a result, the Cobell plaintiffs have submitted an accounting plan employing
a satellite mapping technology known as Geographic Information Systems
(GIS) to estimate how much money individual Indians should have received
from oil leases on their lands. “This methodology is necessary
where the trustee has destroyed the records necessary for an accounting
of all funds,” said lead prosecuting attorney, Dennis Gingold.
Using detailed production records from every well drilled in the West,
the plaintiffs can determine how many of those wells are on Indian reservations.
With this information, the amount of revenue those wells managed through
government leases would have produced can be estimated. The mapping
technology also includes ways of calculating for timber, grazing and
mineral leases on Indian lands in the West.
Divide & conquer?
A letter sent Apr. 7 from the Indian Affairs Committee, signed by co-chairman
Sens. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-CO), and Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI) to
plaintiff attorneys John Echohawk, Keith Harper and Dennis Gingold,
and to Interior Secretary Norton, spoke of the toll trust reform is
taking on the national treasury, and urged a speedy settlement. The
administration has requested $554 million in the 2004 budget to reform
the Indian trust fund, an increase of $183.3 million above the $370.2
million that was set aside in 2003. In the letter, Campbell predicted
that Congress would intervene soon and negotiate a settlement if the
suit was not resolved.
To give another idea of how costly the government’s evasions are,
and why pressure is mounting for a settlement, in a January 2001 interview
with Harlan McKosato on the radio show “Native America Calling,”
Cobell noted that “just by not settling the case, it’s costing
the government and taxpayers $160,000 an hour, $7 million a day, $2.5
billion a year.”
Support for Cobell’s efforts in the Indian community is far from
universal, however, and this may prove the greatest remaining obstacle
to a fair and final settlement. Because part of her team’s efforts
involve removing trust responsibilities from the BIA and Interior, some
Indians worry that this would be to their detriment because it could
provide grounds for terminating the government’s trust relationship
with tribes that depend on funding.
And in March of this year, five Tribal chairmen Burton Hutchison, Sr.,
(Northern Arapaho) Ron Allen (Jamestown S’Klalam), John Berrey
(Quapaw), Fred Matt (Confederated Salish and Kootenai, Flathead Reservation),
and Ross Sockzehigh (Yakama Nation), published an article in Indian
Country Today, the country’s leading Indian newspaper, alleging
that the Cobell suit was employing “scorched earth” tactics,
and that ‘an attorney for the plaintiffs has publicly stated that
the Cobell suit has the potential to destroy tribal governments.”
Overheated alarmist rhetoric aside (the Cobell team flatly denies ever
commenting on the suit’s “potential to destroy tribal governments”),
the concerns of the chairmen seem to hinge on three main assertions:
that the tactics of the Cobell legal team are akin to “warfare,”
that the Cobell team has not utilized opportunities for diplomacy and
negotiation to the fullest extent, and that in requesting a third-party
receiver to resolve the trust’s problems (taking it away from the
Interior and BIA) without first consulting Indian tribes, Cobell and
Co. demonstrated a disregard for tribal governments.
A reply written a week later by Cobell and John Echohawk, Executive
Director of the Native American Rights Fund, pointed out that the “consultation,
communication and cooperation” urged by the chairmen in their letter
are doomed to failure because of the Department of the Interior’s
manifest, well-documented bad faith.
In defending the “warlike” decision to bring the authority
of a Federal Court to bear on the Interior, the letter reasoned, “Our
approach is to ensure accountability when people mismanage Indian assets
and that can no more be described as ‘scorched earth’ than
holding Enron and Arthur Anderson executives accountable for their misdeeds.”
The letter went on to note that the Cobell team has appeared at more
than 20 meetings at either the National Congress of American Indians
or the Intertribal Monitoring Association “for the purpose of engaging
tribal leaders on these very issues. The chairmen’s accusation
that plaintiffs have shown a disregard for tribal governments is groundless
and borders on the absurd.”
“It is curious that now when a multi-billion dollar judgment and
accountability seems inevitable, officials within Interior are pushing
the notion that there is ‘no end’ and that a congressionally
forced ‘settlement’ is the only solution. Tribal leaders and
Indian people must not fall for this ploy” the letter closed, “and
must see these actions for what they are an attempt to get Congress
to step in at the eleventh hour and bail out the government…We
cannot allow the Interior Department, their proxies, or anyone to ‘divide
and conquer us’. The government is losing and they are desperate.
They are banking on being able to make us war against one another.
“[But] what’s wrong with the Indians winning for once instead
of the cavalry?”
As the suit draws to a close, this unlikely scenario seems closer and
closer to being a reality. “I’ve heard from friends that the
government thinks I’m tired and that they’ll wear me down,
so that I’ll just go away,” says Elouise Cobell.
Just outside of her hometown of Billings, Montana, is a marker that
tells the story of the winter of 1884, when 500 Blackfeet died of starvation
and exposure while awaiting government-promised supplies. They were
buried in a mass grave now referred to as Ghost Ridge. During the more
difficult stages of the lawsuit, Cobell has said she visits Ghost Ridge
and thinks of her ancestors who perished in the cold almost 120 years
ago while waiting on the government’s good will.
With that lesson from history firmly in mind, it seems unwise for the
government to bet on Elouise Cobell or her team going away anytime soon.
Brian Awehali is a freelance writer and editor of LiP
Magazine: www.lipmagazine.org. He may be reached at brian@lipmagazine.org.
US Congress again punishes UN Population
Fund
By Katrin Dauenhauer and Jim Lobe
Washington, DC, Jul 15 (IPS)— In a close 216 to 211
vote on Tuesday, the US House of Representatives adopted the Smith Amendment,
which blocks the United States from contributing any funding to the
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
Anti-abortion forces led by New Jersey Republican Rep. Christopher Smith
stripped a provision from the 2004 State Department authorisation bill
that would have granted UNFPA a total of 100 million dollars over the
next two years.
“The House has again missed an opportunity to replace a failed
policy with a successful one,” said Amy Coen, president of Population
Action International (PAI). “Supporting UNFPA is supporting a great,
but largely untold, success story — the story of how access to
family planning saves and improves lives.”
Many House members agreed. “This is a sad day for women around
the world,” said Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat from New York. “UNFPA
saves thousands of women’s lives each year by giving aid to pregnant
women in countries where unhealthy pregnancies are common, yet the world’s
superpower has chosen to turn its back on women in less prosperous countries.”
“The other side misled members of Congress and the American people
about the meaning of this vote,” Maloney said. “We suffered
a disappointing, bitterly close loss on the House floor today, but more
importantly, the women of the world have suffered an even greater loss.”
The bill would have authorised 50 million dollars per year for fiscal
years 2004 and 2005 to UNFPA, the preeminent global source of multilateral
funding for family planning and maternal health programs.
At the same time, the passage of the bill would also have clarified
a 1985 law, called the Kemp-Kasten Amendment, which enabled Pres. George
W. Bush to deny funds for UNFPA last year because of its presence in
China.
Kemp-Kasten prohibits US aid money to go to “any organization or
program which, as determined by the President of the United States,
supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive
abortion or involuntary sterilisation.”
In the broadest interpretation of Kemp-Kasten ever, Bush ruled last
year that UNFPA’s support for China’s Health Ministry, which,
in some counties in China, subsidises hospitals that perform coercive
abortions or sterilization, disqualified it from any US aid.
Contrary to earlier administrations — Democratic and Republican
alike — Bush insisted on a complete defunding of UNFPA, instead
of following his predecessors and simply subtracting the amount of money
the agency spends in China each year.
UNFPA’s annual budget is about 350 million dollars, which means
that Bush’s refusal to disburse the 34 million dollars approved
last year resulted in an 10 percent cut in its spending.
UNFPA officials estimate that the lost 34 million would prevent two
million unwanted pregnancies, nearly 800,000 induced abortions, 4,700
maternal deaths, nearly 60,000 cases of maternal illness or disability,
and 77,000 infant and child deaths.
Under the new provision, called the Crowley Amendment after its sponsor,
New York Democratic Rep. Joseph Crowley, contributions to UNFPA would
have been cut off only if it “directly supports or participates
in coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization..”
The companion bill in the Senate was sponsored by California Democrat
Sen. Barbara Boxer, who argued in part that the policy was contrary
to both US First Amendment rights and the right of women to receive
the best medical advice from their doctors.
A strict interpretation of the policy would bar any foreign beneficiary
of US population aid from testifying before their own legislatures in
favor of easing legal curbs on abortion or informing patients who may
have suffered rape about the availability of abortion services.
“Because of the politics in this country, we have a very unfortunate
policy right now worldwide, that says to the private non-profit organizations
that are helping the poorest of the poor that they cannot use their
own money to advocate for changes in the abortion laws of their own
country,” Boxer said. ”Worst of it all, they may not use their
own money to provide full and accurate medical information about what
options a women has.”
UNFPA’s multi-faceted work helps women in the world’s poorest
countries plan and space the number of children they wish to have.
Contrary to the Bush administration’s accusation that it supports
coercive abortion, a special State Department investigation last year
found explicitly that UNFPA does not provide direct support for abortion
services in China or anywhere else.
Indeed, it found that UNFPA has tried to coax health authorities in
China where coercive practices persist into stopping.
In the run-up to the vote in the House today, population activists were
mobilizing allies in the environmental, human rights and public health
communities to lobby their representatives.
“UNFPA is the place where the help arrives to the poorest of the
poor countries,” including those which do not receive US bilateral
population aid, noted Bob Perciasepe, vice president for the Audubon
Society.
The effort was also supported by the “34 Million Friends”
Campaign founded by two grassroots activists who, outraged by Bush’s
cancellation of UNFPA’s funding, have raised more than 1 million
dollars in small contributions over the past year for the UN agency.
Yet all lobbying efforts seem to have remained unheard.
Despite the negative outcome of the vote today, however, “the closeness
of the vote demonstrates that representatives from both sides of the
aisle question this Administration’s policy toward UNFPA,”
said Terri Bartlett, vice president for public policy at PAI.
At the same time and not surprisingly, the refusal to resume UNFPA funding
met with strong criticism and disappointment.
“Today in the House of Representatives, politics prevailed over
doing the right thing for the world’s poorest women. Once again
the House has taken a giant leap backwards,” said Bartlett. “We
are, and the American public should be, very disappointed.”
