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By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Sept. 17— The United States and other donors must do far more in Afghanistan if the country is to avoid renewed conflict, if not disintegration, according to an unusually frank new policy brief released Wed., Sept. 17 by the US relief organization, CARE and the Center on International Cooperation (CIC).

The eight-page brief finds that Afghanistan’s stability and reconstruction are increasingly threatened by violence, especially against aid workers; the rise of a “neo-Taliban” movement, particularly in Pashtun parts of the country; and narco-trafficking by regional warlords and others.

And it argues that donors have failed to follow through on earlier promises of desperately needed reconstruction assistance. Moreover, what aid is being provided is becoming increasingly expensive due to growing insecurity outside Kabul, the capital—the only part of the country that is patrolled by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

“Putting Afghanistan on the road to peace needs more than good intentions; it needs urgent action,” according to Atlanta-based CARE, which stressed that only $192 million worth of projects were completed in the 18 months after US-led forces ousted the Taliban regime. That constitutes “roughly 1 percent of Afghanistan’s reconstruction needs,” according to the report.

CARE’s brief coincided with the publication of a second report by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) Tuesday which confirmed that human rights abuses, including summary executions, arbitrary detentions, and the use of unofficial prisons by warlords, are also on the rise throughout the country.

“There is no rule of law, [and] the police that are responsible for the rule are themselves violators and are acting against the law,” said Nadir Nadiri, an AIHRC spokesperson, told reporters. She said many people across the country were being held unofficially in prisons by local warlords or authorities due to conflicting land claims and forced evictions. Those detained, she said, often “don’t have money to pay or don’t have any influence with the authorities.”

The new reports come amid new concerns about the situation in Afghanistan, even as Iraq has claimed the media spotlight for most of the past six months.

Washington has been particularly concerned about the resurgence of the Taliban along the border with Pakistan and in the Pashtun areas. While US and allied forces have largely succeeded in turning back ever-bigger offensives by the Taliban and other Islamist groups along the border, security in much of the largely Pashtun areas in southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan has deteriorated sharply in recent months.

In addition, the central government headed by Interim President Hamid Kharzai has not yet succeeded in extending its authority over key regional leaders and warlords who control most of the countryside, while renewed cultivation of opium poppies is contributing to their ability to resist demands from Kabul.

Each of these developments poses a “serious threat” to the country’s security, but together, according to the CARE report, they make for a far more dangerous situation and one that threatens the delivery of desperately needed aid, as well as hope for reconstruction.

“Many areas of the country are now off limits to the aid community,” according to CARE, while half of Afghanistan’s 32 provinces are deemed “high risk” areas for aid work. In the worst incident to date, four aid workers for a Danish relief agency were executed and a fifth badly wounded by suspected Taliban rebels in southern Afghanistan last week.

As a result, reconstruction work cannot proceed over large areas of the country, with potentially disastrous political consequences.

“The longer Afghans are made to wait for concrete signs of greater progress, the easier it will be for extremists to exploit their resentment and for criminals to profit from the institutional vacuum that results,” said Kevin Henry, CARE USA’s advocacy director.

The deteriorating security situation is also illustrated by the rising number of armed attacks against civilians outside of Kabul. During the summer of 2002, according to the report, the ratio of armed attacks outside Kabul to inside the city was approximately 2:1. This past summer, however, the ratio rose to 7:1, CARE said.

This is due primarily to the failure of ISAF to extend its presence beyond Kabul, the report said. While the recent request by Germany and the US to NATO members to contribute to such an expansion constitutes a “positive step,” CARE says “it is time to move from good intentions to action.”

Instead of expanding ISAF, the US has appointed Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) — groups of between 40 and 100 military and civilian personnel deployed to areas in the countryside for small-scale reconstruction projects — their mandate is far too narrow to provide the meaningful security required for regional development.

“Unless they are significantly scaled up in size and mandate, they should not be portrayed as an adequate or even ‘second-best’ alternative to a serious investment in peacekeeping,” the report said, noting that there remains only one peacekeeper in Afghanistan for every 5,380 people. In recent post-war situations, such as Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia, and East Timor, there was one peacekeeper for every 65 people.

“NATO must urgently expand peacekeepers outside the capital before the security situation gets any worse,” said Paul Barker, CARE’s country director for Afghanistan.

More peacekeepers would also help deal with rising opium production, which is fueling the power of warlords and pro-Taliban forces, as well as drug-traffickers, at the expense of the Karzai government. Afghanistan’s share of global opium production skyrocketed from 12 percent under the Taliban to 76 percent in 2002, according to the United Nations.

Above all, says the policy brief, donors must not only follow through on their promises last year to provide $4.5 billion in reconstruction funding over five years; they should add substantially to that total.

The brief noted that the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan are roughly equal, while needs are greater and natural resources fewer in Afghanistan. Yet the Bush administration recently committed an additional $20 billion for Iraq for this year, while Afghanistan is to receive only $800 million.

“The longer the international community waits to take action, the higher the price will be,” the relief group warns.

Afghanistan reconstruction needs grow as world support dwindles

Afghan officials say they need three times as much as previously estimated to rebuild their country in the coming years, but experts and analysts here point out that the world is unlikely to commit more funds unless the worsening security situation there improves.

The officials, attending the joint session of the board of governors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Dubai, said new estimates for the reconstruction of Afghanistan call for $30 billion — three times the amount estimated at the donors’ conference in Tokyo last year.

Afghanistan’s budget for this fiscal year, which started in March, called for about $2 billion, but the country only has $800 million in its coffers.

The US government has responded by promising the “immediate” transfer of $1.2 billion.

But, of that amount only $400 million is immediately available. The other $800 million dollars needs congressional approval, which might be hard to get given that President George W. Bush is asking for an additional $20 billion to pay for the cost of the military operation in Iraq. Against this backdrop, nearly two years after the Taliban regime was ousted in US-led military attacks in retaliation for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Afghanistan may well fall into chaos unless the international community re-commits itself to the country’s reconstruction.

“The need is not just poverty. Yes, we are poor and we have suffered from not only years of war and conflict but drought,” explained the country’s finance minister and a long-time former ranking official of the World Bank, Ashraf Ghani.

Of the $10 billion Afghanistan asked for, only about $4 billion has actually been paid, almost equally divided between the United States and the European Union. (IPS)

Nairobi, Kenya, Sept. 22— Kenyan President, Mwai Kibaki, opened the 13th International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA) Sunday, Sept. 21 in the capital, Nairobi, reiterating the challenges facing the continent worst hit by the HIV/Aids pandemic.

“Generations to come will pass judgement over us on the basis of our action in the management of this disease. What we owe future generations is life: a life free of AIDS,” said Kibaki in his opening speech.

“So within Africa, all of us - men, women, children, everybody - we have a duty to join in fighting against this disease. It is not something that can be fought sometimes. It must be fought all the time. Every moment. Every day... And the more you will assist everybody else, then that’s your best contribution. So let us all make up our minds to fight this time, and not by word of mouth, but by action.”

Held every two years, ICASA is the leading continental forum on Aids in Africa, bringing together thousands of Aids campaigners and grassroots’ activists, people living with the pandemic, care-givers, doctors, health professionals and researchers, as well as policy and decision-makers. An assessment of the impact of the pandemic and best practice in tackling HIV/Aids are at the heart of the biennial conference.

Provision of better, comprehensive care remains the “universal goal,” said a statement by ICASA’s organizers, as does “treatment for HIV/AIDS/STIs (sexually transmitted infections) as a basic necessity in every setting from the richest to the poorest and embracing the whole continuum from home-based and palliative care to treatment of opportunistic infections and management of HIV disease.”

Ludfin Opudo, a Kenyan Aids activist living with the virus for the past seven years, gave a moving speech at the opening of the conference and called on governments in Africa to provide quality health care for Aids sufferers.

“The fight against HIV/Aids must also see the greater involvement of those people living with HIV. We must support networks of people living with HIV and support groups in a programmed way. It can never be a tokenism approach any more,” she said.

Michel Sidibe, a director at UNAIDS - the agency responsible for coordinating global efforts to combat AIDS - released a UN report at Sunday’s ICASA launch, called “Accelerating Action Against Aids in Africa.”

The report warned that Aids represented the foremost challenge to improving the lives of Africans, but that the pandemic could be contained with the right programs and the required resources.

UNAIDS said Africa needed $6 billion to combat HIV/AIDS, but was currently receiving only half of what was required by 2005; the organization’s officials said they were including in their projections the $15 billion pledged by US President George W. Bush to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean, as well as other donor promises.

Highlighting Southern Africa “where HIV prevalence is higher than anywhere else in the world,” the study concluded that “Aids has exacerbated food insecurity, demonstrating how the epidemic and humanitarian crises intertwine.”

UNAIDS reports that 30 million Africans south of the Sahara, that is one adult in 11, are living with HIV and Aids. That figure accounts for three-quarters of the global total. Some 15 million people on the continent have already died from the pandemic, says the UN. Over two million have lost their lives to Aids in the past year alone.

Women and girls make up almost 60 percent of HIV-infected people in sub-Saharan Africa.

Tough talk

The United Nations Secretary-General’s special envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, did not mince his words as he took another swipe at the industrialized world for failing the continent on the crucial question of Aids and ignoring the plight of those living with the virus. Lewis took up the critical question of resources, commitments, and priorities:

“This is a full-blown emergency. In every emergency there is a division of labor. Africa is struggling to hold up its end, the Western world is not. I have to say that what is happening to the continent makes me extremely angry and I don’t feel I have to apologize for being angry. The job of an envoy isn’t merely to observe and to report back, but also to identify with those he serves. And I serve Africa. And I am enraged by the behavior of the rich powers. How much more grievous, by their neglect, they have made the situation in Africa,” he said.

African leaders were also targeted: Lewis said the behavior of some had been indefensible. “But,” he said, “Africa has moved mountains in the last couple of years, while the Western world remains mired in the foothills. Africa needs no instructions from the West. Africa needs no arrogance from the West. Africa needs no churlish lectures from the West. Africans know HIV/Aids in all its manifestations and developments. What’s missing are the tools and support to do the job.”

Calling the lack of cheap, life-prolonging anti-retroviral drugs in Africa a “grotesque obscenity,” Lewis issued another rallying call for Western governments to do more to help the continuing fight against Aids and condemned the cavalier attitude of those who failed to deliver.

Lewis questioned the West’s commitment: “How can this be happening in the year 2003, when we can find over $200 billion to fight a war on terrorism, but we can’t find the money to prevent children from living in terror?” he asked. “We can’t find the money to provide the anti-retroviral treatment for all those who need such treatment in Africa. This double standard is the grotesque obscenity of the modern world.”

President Kibaki said the twin obstacles of access to treatment and the high cost of anti-retroviral medication were as much of a problem as the social stigma still associated with HIV/AIDS and poverty.

The Kenyan leader called on international pharmaceutical companies to reduce the prices of their products. Kenya has one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world and the government has declared Aids a national disaster.

Security fears

UNAIDS Director, Sidibe, also took up the plight of thousands of Aids’ orphans in Africa. Sidibe said African governments needed to do more to provide for the growing number of children affected by Aids and those who now head all-child households. He concluded that 11 million children in Africa had lost at least one parent to Aids and that many would end up on the streets or become part of the ragged band of child soldiers, fuelling crime and conflict all over the continent.

Lewis echoed Sidibe’s concern saying that while the world dithered, Africa’s kids suffered. “In the meantime, millions of children live traumatized, unstable lives, robbed not just of their parents, but of their childhood and futures,” he said.

Other topics at the conference include “Gender taboos and traditions,” “Sex work and HIV prevention” and “Assessing the role of anal intercourse in the epidemiology of HIV in Africa.”

Concerns have also been expressed that Aids is fast emerging as a potential security hazard in Africa, with the possibility that the spread of the pandemic could spark regional wars, civil strife, and terrorism in parts of the continent.

Sidibe warned that if more was not done to curb the threat of HIV/AIDS, the security of the continent could be at risk, with the threat of rising crime and civil war. He also predicted that Africa’s armies and security services would be incapable of coping with the increased threat of instability, because they too had become seriously weakened by HIV/AIDS.

In some African countries, as many as four out of every ten soldiers is reportedly infected with the virus.

UNAIDS chief advisor for Africa, Michel de Groulard, said that uneducated and isolated by society, children became easy targets for criminals and militia, “prey to all kinds of organizations and manipulators, who can turn them into child soldiers or eventually terrorists. It’s a genuine risk.”

Signs of hope

The UNAIDS report catalogued successful HIV/AIDS’ prevention and treatment programs in Africa. These included an Aids awareness campaign in Uganda, a workplace anti-AIDS program in Cote d’Ivoire, and the distribution of generic anti-retroviral drugs in Senegal, a country with a low HIV prevalence rate.

“These examples prove that Aids is a problem with a solution: human intervention works, even under the most difficult circumstances,” said the report. The authors called for more international funding for programs that worked, saying that “The growing number of effective prevention and treatment efforts in Africa proves that a massive expansion of the epidemic need not be inevitable. Aids is not unstoppable in Africa.”

The report concluded: “After two hard, painful decades of experience and accumulated knowledge - much of it gained in Africa - African governments and the international community are beginning to understand what is required.”

The focus in Nairobi is on concrete and workable solutions to the AIDS crisis in Africa and ways to reverse the trend of high HIV prevalence on the continent. “This is a cry for all humanity, let us all unite and fight with one voice. This is the challenge,” sang one of the performers at the opening ceremony.

The Nairobi conference was preceded Saturday by a ten kilometer run organized by Kenyan women to show their solidarity with those living with the pandemic. As she joined thousands of runners, Kenya’s health minister, Charity Ngilu, said “Today marks the day when women and girls have spoken and said we are now joining the world in the fighting against HIV/AIDS. We are going to stop the suffering. We have come together to declare total war and our slogan today is ‘One man, one woman, all the time.’”

Kenya’s first lady, Lucy Kibaki, also took part in Saturday’s race, walking briskly and urging men to support women’s efforts to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. Her husband, President Kibaki, said: “Men are only required to make up their minds today and to promise that they will not continue to spread AIDS.”

With a second warning to his fellow men, Kibaki repeated the same message as he opened the conference on Sunday. He said: “The people so far have shown terrific support. But we need them to continue, particularly men who are doubtful sometimes. I’m not joking. It is not a matter of merely saying it. This is a truth that we need everyone in society to fight this disease vigorously and without any hesitation. Otherwise we cannot succeed and we all know it. It is very serious.”

Half of Malawi’s workforce could be dead by 2005

According to a new World Bank report, up to half of Malawi’s professional workforce could die of HIV/Aids by 2005.

Professionals in the education and health sectors are particularly affected in the impoverished Southern African country, as are members of the army and the police, the study says.

Malawi’s National Statistical Office estimates that 139 Malawians die of HIV/Aids every day, mostly in the economically productive 15 to 49 age group.

An estimated one million Malawians are living with HIV, out of a total population of 11 million. About 250 are infected each day.

At least 70 percent of Malawi’s hospital beds are occupied by HIV/Aids patients.

HIV/Aids has cut Malawi’s life expectancy to just 36, according to the United Nations Development Program. (Globe and Mail (New Zealand))

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What are ‘The Searchers’ looking for?

By Raymond Whitaker and Glen Rangwala

Sept. 21— Some 1,400 British and American experts are supposedly scouring Iraq to prove what Tony Blair and George Bush claimed before the war — that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which (WMD) posed an imminent threat to the world. But most of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the body created by the victorious coalition to replace the UN weapons inspectors, is not even in Iraq at the moment.

And only a small fraction of the ISG is actually assigned to looking for WMD. The site inspections group, known to colleagues as “the searchers,” has 200 personnel, but that includes back-up staff, translators and drivers. Even the searchers do very little work on visiting suspect sites. A source in Baghdad joked: “They have spent their time doing their laundry and napping.”

In Washington, meanwhile, officials claim that former weapons scientists may have to be given immunity from prosecution to “overcome their fear” of the former regime. The hope is that scientists who say that Saddam’s regime destroyed its WMD more than a decade ago might change their tune once they have immunity. But last week their view received powerful support from Hans Blix, the former chief weapons inspector. Dr Blix, who has become ever more outspoken since his retirement in the summer, said he now believes it is almost certain that Iraq got rid of its illegal weapons immediately after the first Gulf War. He condemned British and American “spin” on WMD, saying: “We know that advertisers will advertise a refrigerator in terms they do not quite believe in, but you expect governments to be more serious and have more credibility.”

Speaking of London’s and Washington’s claims about the intelligence on WMD, Dr. Blix added: “In the Middle Ages people were convinced there were witches. They looked for them and they certainly found them. This is a bit risky. I think we [the UN inspection team] were more judicious, saying we want to have real evidence.”

Downing Street quickly urged doubters to wait for the ISG to complete its work. Blair believed the group’s report, due within weeks, would provide clear proof of Saddam’s guilt over WMD, said a government source, adding that the ISG could come up with “interesting findings which will lay those doubts to rest.” But the ISG staff on the ground appear to be in the dark about the outcome of their work. The results of early searches and interviews were fed back to colleagues at the “analytic center” in Qatar, since then staff in Iraq have had little guidance from Qatar about what to follow up.

As for when the group’s report will come out, no draft has been seen in Baghdad and it will be the Pentagon, not the ISG, which decides how much will be released, and when — though there have also been rumors that there is so little to show from the entire exercise that the ISG’s findings will never be made public.

Certainly the main focus of the ISG’s work does not point to major new revelations. It has been concentrating on past weapons programs, with most of the documentary work tracking production before the first Gulf War in 1991. The other principal emphasis has been on how specific facilities could have been switched from civilian use to producing prohibited weapons. All this, however, is highly speculative, and nothing like what the pre-war rhetoric led British and American voters to expect.

And while the parliamentary Hutton inquiry casts doubt on Downing Street’s case for war, the White House is faring no better. Few of its weapons claims have gone unchallenged, and now another has fallen down.

“Iraq has unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons,” President Bush declared last October. “We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States.” His Vice President, Dick Cheney, told congressional leaders at private meetings of the danger of silent death from the skies, while in February the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told the UN Security Council: “Iraq has developed spray devices that could be used on unmanned aerial vehicles with ranges far beyond what is permitted by the Security Council. A UAV launched from a vessel off the American coast could reach hundreds of miles inland.”

However, The Wall Street Journal revealed last week that the US Air Force, after studying Iraq’s pilotless drones, had concluded that they were too small and too ill-equipped to do anything of the sort. It issued a little-noticed report saying so last October, at the time the President was stoking up the threat.

Source: Independent (UK)

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As the current Palestinian uprising enters its fourth year, many commentators appear puzzled by the duration and tenacity of the intifada (meaning “shaking off”).

If the intifada was “orchestrated” by Palestinian Authority (PA) president Yassir Arafat as a pressure tactic on Israel and its US patron, wouldn’t the Palestinian population have finally tired of the daily humiliation and hardship it has brought and quietly gone back to their normal lives?

If the intifada is merely the act of a small group of “terrorists” and “extremists,” as the Israeli rulers have repeatedly claimed, surely the arrest and detention of some 10,000 Palestinians and the killing of another 2,470 over the last three years would have crushed the alleged tiny minority of “extremists” and restored calm to the West Bank and Gaza Strip?

The announcement by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government of its intention to “remove” Arafat — including through assassination — at a time and place of Israel’s choosing indicates that it is unwilling to face up to the real answers to these questions.

Quite simply, the intifada — as the name suggests — is about throwing off a colonial occupation that has continued for 36 years. The resistance to this occupation has a deep and popular support from the Palestinian people, who, despite the enormous difficulties they encounter on a daily basis, will quite simply not give up. This is why each layer of grassroots activists who are killed or arrested by the Israeli occupiers is immediately replaced by a new layer of those determined to keep fighting.

The support of the Palestinian population for the intifada is why — almost 18 months after Israel placed all the major cities of the West Bank under curfew, arresting thousands and killing more than 300 people over the last two months — the Israel military remains embroiled in all of these areas, attempting to enforce daily curfews, carrying out assassinations and mass arrests.

But, as apologists for Israel always object when faced with the question of the occupation, what else is the Jewish state supposed to do when faced with “Palestinian terrorism”? This argument is wearing thin, even among sections of the Israeli population. It is abundantly clear that the strategy of the Israeli government has not made Israelis any safer or brought them any closer to peace.

This is not simply a question of a cycle of tit-for-tat armed attacks between Palestinian resistance fighters and the Israeli military, as the Western media so facetiously describe it. Israel’s illegal military and civilian presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the root cause of the violence.

The massive concrete wall which Israel is now constructing to imprison Palestinians in isolated islands of land surrounded by electric fences and military checkpoints is worse than anything ever witnessed under South Africa’s apartheid system.

Faced with the strongest military machine in the Middle East and the walls of the concrete prison fast closing around them, the only weapons of armed self-defense available to Palestinians are their own “human bombs.” This is an unpleasant fact, but it remains one nonetheless. It is something that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip understand completely and it is why any move to “dismantle the terrorist infrastructure” (as US and Israeli officials repeatedly demand) is absolutely rejected by the Palestinian population.

Understanding this point is key to the riddle of Arafat. It is patently obvious to anyone on the ground that Arafat is not orchestrating attacks against Israelis. Nor is he the head of the “terrorist pyramid,” as Israeli officials brazenly claim. What Arafat has done is refuse to turn the Palestinian security forces against the Palestinian population, as Israel and the US have demanded.

Whether Arafat’s motivations for this lie in his own political survival — realizing that if he were to act as head of a surrogate Israeli police force in the Palestinian cantons his political future would undoubtedly be short — or whether they stem from his unwillingness to go down in history as the leader who sold out the Palestinian national cause, is unclear.

The 7000 people who turned out in support of Arafat in Ramallah in the wake of Israeli government death threats against him represented nearly one-third of the town’s population. They did so because Arafat’s refusal to obey Israel’s dictates have struck a strong popular chord.

This turn out in Ramallah, as well as the hundreds of thousands of people who marched all over the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Lebanon in solidarity with Arafat, proved once and for all that the intifada has deep popular support and is not merely composed of the actions of a few “fanatical extremists.”

Israel is desperately seeking to find a Palestinian leader who will halt the popular resistance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Israeli rulers need this not because they want peace, but because the logic of occupation demands it.

Since 1967, Israel has followed the same basic strategy of attempting to relinquish control of the Palestinian towns in the West Bank and Gaza to a Palestinian leadership willing to do Israel’s bidding in policing the Palestinian population. At the same time, Israel seeks to assure itself of ultimate control over the West Bank and Gaza Strip through constructing a complicated network of Israeli settlements, roads which only Israelis are allowed to use and Israeli military checkpoints.

This vision of occupation — encapsulated in the 1967 Allon Plan and demonstrated in the patterns of Israeli settlement growth and successive incarnations of the 1993 Oslo Accords over the last decade — means that Palestinian life would be completely restricted to the isolated cantons under “Palestinian self-rule” while all borders and natural resources would remain under Israeli control.

The Israeli strategy is clearly illustrated by the contours of the concrete wall that Israel is now constructing, its path coinciding almost exactly with the various plans drawn up by Israeli governments for the Palestinian cantons since 1967.

The US-backed “Road Map for Peace” was the latest version of these plans. With no mention of the wall whatsoever, the Road Map was focused almost completely on fostering a Palestinian leadership that would be willing to suppress the intifada.

For a while it seemed that Abu Mazen (aka Mahmoud Abbas) would be willing to fulfill this role. However, popular opposition to any move aimed at targeting the Palestinian resistance coupled with Arafat’s insistence that the Palestinian security forces remain under his control led to Abu Mazen resigning as PA prime minister.

There are some analysts who claim that the current situation is a result of Sharon’s obdurate unwillingness to try to accept the Road Map. They even go so far as to claim that Sharon wants to provoke suicide bombings by targeting militants in assassination attempts and continuing to demolish homes, impose curfews and confiscate Palestinian land.

This kind of analysis misses the point however. The violence of the Israeli army is not the result of Sharon’s short-sightedness or desire to provoke a violent response from Palestinians; it is inherent in the very system of occupation. In order to achieve the goal of Palestinian bantustans within an Israeli apartheid system, it is absolutely necessary for Israel to destroy the Palestinian resistance.

This is not just a new strategy invented by Sharon; it has been the strategy of successive Israeli governments for the last 36 years. And it is precisely the reason why no Israeli government can agree to a genuine truce with the PA without the latter suppressing the Palestinian resistance.

Israel’s goals in the Occupied Territories can only be achieved through violent means, and as long as the resistance remains intact these goals will prove impossible to achieve.

So, will Israel actually move to deport or even murder Arafat? There are two questions that really need to be answered here. The first is, can Israel find a Palestinian leader who is willingly to crush the resistance and allow the system of Israeli apartheid to be consolidated? Secondly, will this person (or group of people) be successful?

There are undoubtedly a range of figures within the Palestinian elite who are willing to play the role of a Palestinian quisling. However, Abu Ala, the new Palestinian PM and speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, is even less likely to play that role than Abu Mazen.

While Abu Ala is not widely respected in the Occupied Territories and has been strongly criticized for corruption during the Oslo Accord years, he has less of a base within Fatah (the main Palestinian political movement) than Abu Mazen and relies completely on Arafat for his support. It is extremely unlikely that Abu Ala would move against the intifada without Arafat’s approval.

The second question is much more difficult to answer and herein lies the tactical divergence between Sharon and Washington.

While the US also wants to politically eliminate Arafat, it is wary about any move by Israel to physically remove Arafat from the West Bank, either through deportation or assassination. This caution stems from the escalating losses being inflicted on the US occupation army in Iraq and the fear that “removing” Arafat with US public approval might generate even more hostility among the masses across the Arab world to the US and its Arab client regimes.

The danger that Israel faces in “removing” Arafat is that, rather than making it easier to install a politically stable Palestinian quisling regime, it would provoke an intensification of the Palestinian population’s opposition to any Palestinian leadership that seeks to politically collaborate with the Israeli apartheid system.

On the other hand, Israel is in desperate need of a solution to the intifada. It is faced with an absolutely unprecedented economic crisis that preceded the intifada but has only intensified because of the economic costs of maintaining a massive military presence in the Occupied Territories for the past three years, as well as the losses of foreign investment and tourism resulting from repeated Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel proper.

However, there can be no end to the intifada within the logic of Israel’s occupation strategy without the defeat of the Palestinian resistance. The Israeli rulers realize that they cannot achieve this without the assistance of a Palestinian collaborator regime willing to unleash its security forces on the Palestinian population. If Arafat continues to refuse to do this and no other leader is able to do this while Arafat remains in control of the Palestinian security forces, then the Israeli rulers may well decide to take their chances by deporting or killing him.

Washington’s Sept. 17 vetoing of a UN Security Council resolution calling on Israel to “desist from any act of deportation and to cease any threat to the safety of the elected president of the Palestinian Authority” was a signal to the world that Israel’s US patron does not rule out supporting this option.

Quebec City, Quebec, Sept. 22 (IPS)— One hundred indigenous activists and their supporters from around the globe marched into the opening ceremony of the World Forestry Congress here Sunday to demand that governments recognize their rights to the planet’s natural resources.

The representatives had just finished a two-day meeting to discuss experiences and to shape a plan of action to present to the nearly 4,000 delegates who will meet for a week under the sponsorship of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).

The action plan was still unfinished when the delegates from the Indigenous Peoples’ Forest Forum, a few wearing feather headdresses or brightly colored traditional costumes, walked quietly from their downtown hotel along city streets the few blocks to the meeting hall.

But a draft left no doubt that Forum delegates did not want the document they were presenting to political leaders and forestry experts to become yet another inert declaration of principles.

“We have developed this action plan based on all those past declarations and action plans,” it said. “The time for action is now. Our survival and the survival of our natural ecosystem depends on the recognition of our rights as indigenous peoples and on effective action.”

Its main demand: “That the UN, nation states and international multilateral organizations recognize and guarantee indigenous peoples’ self-determination as including the right to govern the use of natural resources and maintain the integrity of our ecosystems in accordance with their respective cosmo-visions.”

While Forum delegates labored over their plan of action, other indigenous activists were meeting in Geneva to try to resuscitate the UN Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which appears likely to die after 10 years of work because various governments object to some of its principles, particularly article 3, recognizing self-determination.

“We don’t think that (the declaration) is going to be really finished by this year or the next,” Victoria Tauli-Corpuz of the Philippines-based organization Tebtebba told the Indigenous Forum.

“We’re all starting from the basic premise that we do have inherent rights to our territories, to our land,” she added. “We do have customary laws which have governed how we relate to these resources.”

But “these have never been perceived nor respected by nation states,” Tauli-Corpuz said.

She was scheduled to deliver a speech on indigenous issues to the Congress on Monday. In the audience will be 2,000 government officials, 1,000 researchers and hundreds of representatives from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the private sector worldwide.

During the week, delegates are scheduled to hear speakers at seven plenary sessions, participate in some 38 theme sessions, and then choose representatives for further talks at five roundtables representing the earth’s ecological regions.

Topics of the sessions vary from “Underlying Causes of Forest Degradation and Deforestation” and “Urban Forestry, Trees Outside Forests,” to “Plantations: Threat to Biodiversity or Opportunities for Conservation?”.

On Wednesday, indigenous delegates will deliver their plan of action to the Congress, which has promised to incorporate its ideas into its deliberations. But that is only a start, according to Crescencio Resendiz-Hernandez from the Ottawa-based National Aboriginal Forestry Association, which helped organize the Indigenous Forum.

“Everyone who’s here knows that once we have the documents (written) we’ll have to go out and lobby for support from governments and NGOs. We want to make sure that we all go there with one voice,” he said.

Indigenous activists are focusing increasingly on the actions of international bodies like the World Bank and World Trade Organization (WTO).

Tauli-Corpuz told IPS that the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS) would give private companies the right to bid for work in a country’s “environmental services,” including management of parks and other undeveloped land, territory that is often disputed by governments and indigenous peoples.

A survey of 27 multilateral development agencies earlier this year found only eight had specific policies on indigenous peoples, and only four of those included binding standards, Tom Griffiths of the Forest Peoples Program told the Forum.

The policies of the eight organizations “are statements of value, but in practice, how do you hold, for example, the European Commission — which is the second biggest donor in the world — to account?” he asked.

“I came from a community where we fought against a World Bank-funded project, a dam project, and we stopped it, but not many indigenous peoples’ communities are in that state,” Tauli-Corpuz told IPS.

“That’s why I wanted the World Bank to be (mentioned) here in the declaration, to say that they should really examine how they are implementing or formulating their policies insofar as they affect indigenous peoples.”

Sept. 22— “Organize yourselves and we will give you the political and economic support,” was Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s advice to the revolutionary movement in his country. Workers and peasants in Venezuela are heeding it.

The government in 2001 introduced an ambitious land reform program, named “Plan Zamora” (after a 19th century peasant leader who struggled for land reform and social justice). When complete, some 40 percent of the population (around 10 million people) will receive redistributed land.

Plan Zamora is not land reform by decree, but is directly linked to the creation of organs of participatory democracy and a “self-transformation” movement in the countryside. Popular community councils have been formed in order to counter opposition from local landlords and capitalists, and their police and paramilitaries. In the last year, around 80 land-reform leaders have been assassinated — all cases remain unsolved.

Alex Contreras Baspineiro, writing on the Narco News web site on Sept. 6 (www.narconews.com/Issue31/article862.html), reported that Plan Zamora has already redistributed more than one million hectares of land and more than 31,000 land deeds to 40,000 families, together with 120 farm machines and $20 million in credit. The government plans to redistribute another two million hectares by the end of this year.

As a result of capital flight from Venezuela, a continent-wide economic crisis and the effects of the shutdown of the vital oil industry during a strike by bosses and managers at the beginning of the year, the Venezuelan economy is going through a serious crisis. For example, in the first quarter of 2003, more than 2,000 firms were forced to close.

While the economy has begun to recover following the collapse of the bosses’ strike, as well as increased government investments and the movement of unemployed people into workers’ cooperatives, many workers still face large reductions in wages, the loss of their jobs and closure of the factories in which they work.

In response, according to the Aug. 27 Vheadline.com, several companies have been taken over by their workers, including a paper producing firm, a Pepsi bottling factory and a garbage collection firm. In the case of the paper firm, the workers have defended the factory by force.

While Venezuela’s national leaders have come out in support of these workers, many governments at the city and regional levels are still controlled by the right-wing opposition. This has usually meant workers are evicted by heavily armed local or provincial police.

Most of the worker takeovers are occurring in the Aragua state, where the newly formed revolutionary National Union or Workers (UNT) has a very strong presence. One of the UNT’s demands is that the national government nationalize and put under workers’ control companies that attempt to shutdown.

Meanwhile, the opposition’s campaign to force the holding of a referendum to recall President Chavez suffered a major setback when the newly appointed National Electoral College (CNE) ruled on Sept. 12 that signatures collected to force the poll were inadmissible.

Venezuela’s constitution states that once a president has served half of their term, they must face a referendum if 20 percent of voters demands one. The CNE ruled that the signatures submitted by the right-wing opposition had been collected before Chavez’s mid-term date of Aug. 19.