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Unrest deepens in Bolivia as
government begins to unravel
Protesters massacred
Compiled by Shawn Gaynor
Oct. 15 (AGR)— Bolivia’s embattled president,
Gonzalo Sanchez, vowed he would not give into opposition demands for
his resignation after a week of bloody massacres of protesters in what
has been dubbed by opposition groups “the gas war.”
One chant is present everywhere: “El gas no se vende” (“The
gas is not for sale”).
Over fifty people have been killed and hundreds wounded in clashes with
the Bolivian Army, who enforced marshal law in El Alto, the impoverished
industrial suburb of the capital La Paz, where blockades by the opposition
have shut down road access to the capital throughout the week.
The blockades and massive street protests that have take place have
been supported by Bolivia indigenous majority, and the country’s
main labor unions.
Despite the enormous repression faced by the impoverished Bolivian people,
including heavy weapons fire from tanks and helicopters, the blockades
have prevented fuel and food from reaching the capital, creating a national
crisis as stockpiles become exhausted.
The latest unrest began on Sept. 29 when Bolivia’s top trade union
body, the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), launched a two-day national
strike against the government’s decision to allow foreign corporations
to market and export the country’s natural gas and petroleum.
The international oil companies involved in the project, Pacific LNG
and Sempras, want the gas exported via a planned five-billion-dollar
pipeline to the Chilean port of Patillos. Landlocked Bolivia lost its
Pacific coast territory in a war with Chile in 1879. The two nations
have not had diplomatic relations since March 1978.
On Thursday, Oct. 9, two indigenous demonstrators were killed in Ventilla,
just outside La Paz, as the demonstration turned violent, sources said.
The two were miners with a group of about 500 people who were to march
on the capital to press their demands, mining federation leader Miguel
Zubieta said.
The situation began to come to a head on Saturday Oct. 11 when fuel
and food shortages in the capital, created by the anti-Sanchez blockades,
were becoming desperate. On Saturday night, a caravan of trucks transporting
fuel for the city of La Paz (which had run out of gasoline and diesel
oil), accompanied by Bolivian police and military, tried to pass the
main entrances of El Alto, leading to a violent confrontation with firearms.
Alex Mollericona (5 years old) was killed, along with 3 others: Jose
Luis Atahuichi (41) a miner from Huanuni, El Alto construction worker
and student Ramiro Vargas Chip (22), and Walter Huanca Shock (27). During
these events, Mollericona died almost instantaneously, when a small
rubber bullet hit him while he was on the balcony of his house. A journalist
who visited the house of his family, told that the boy’s blood
was sprayed all over the balcony.
Sunday saw heavy fighting as the government has announced the deployment
of soldiers in El Alto, the city that has taken the lead in the biggest
social revolt of the recent years of successive neoliberal governments
of Bolivia.
Bolivia sent in thousands of troops backed by tanks and helicopters
on Sunday to control the outskirts of La Paz and open roads blocked
by farmers and workers.
“A military operation is under way to regain control of El Alto,”
presidential spokesman Mauricio Antezana said at a pre-dawn news conference,
adding the government could decree a curfew there “at any time”.
According to Human Rights Watch, which has urged the Bolivian government
to show restraint, twenty-five civilians and an army conscript were
killed on Sunday in El Alto.
Scores of protesters were hurt, and the great majority of those injured
sustained gunshot wounds. Some of the victims were women and children.
The Bolivian president defied mounting calls to quit despite violent
protests that claimed at least 10 more lives on Monday, Oct. 13. Gonzalo
Sanchez de Lozada shelved plans to export gas to new markets, bowing
to a key demand of the protesters. He said his government would consult
the opposition before taking a final decision and the plans were suspended
until Dec. 31..
He would not resign, he added, because it was his constitutional duty
to uphold the democratic decision of the voters who had elected him.
Sanchez, who was elected by only 22 percent of the vote, now has a public
approval rating of about 10 percent.
Protest groups insisted that the concession was too little too late
and maintained their pressure on the government.
The ethnic Indian leaders of the protests, Felipe Quispe and Evo Morales,
quickly rejected the offer of talks on the gas plan and demanded the
president’s resignation.
Protesters have also demanded the nationalization of Bolivia’s
gas resources.
Some media reports said police in El Alto battled protesters on Monday
until their tear gas and rubber bullets ran out. Others, though, suggest
primarily live ammunition -- including heavy weapons -- were used against
the protests at the barricades in El Alto.
“The soldiers are firing on us!”, “There are lots of
dead and injured!” said panicked witnesses in phone calls to local
radio stations. Machine gun fire was audible in the background.
Leaders of the Catholic Church and humanitarian organizations called
the events in El Alto “a true massacre.”
In an open letter to President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, the groups
said they had been able to confirm from multiple sources that the army
used in El Alto “large-caliber weapons, including heavy machine-guns,
against the Bolivian people.”
Thousands more demonstrators thronged the streets of La Paz on Monday.
In another incident on Monday, at least 12 people were reportedly killed
when a petrol station they were trying to set ablaze exploded.
By Tues. Oct. 14 as the Sanchez government began to unravel to the backdrop
of an ongoing massacre of civilians, as the vice president of Bolivia
Carlos Mesa distanced himself from the president on Monday to express
his opposition to the use of deadly force to quell street protests.
“I cannot continue to support the situation we are living,”
he said. Four Bolivian cabinet ministers also left the government.
Airports and major roads remained closed on Tuesday as the protests
spread to Cochabamba, Potosí and other smaller cities.
In total on Tuesday, 26 more people were reportedly killed as protests
continued in the streets of La Paz, according to Bolivian human rights
groups. Thousands of demonstrators had made their way from El Alto to
the capital, calling for President Sánchez de Lozada to resign.
By Wednesday, Oct. 15 the Spanish oil and gas group Repsol has temporarily
halted plans to export gas from Bolivia to Mexico and the United States
because of the violent revolt.
Violence continued to flare on Wednesday in El Alto, when local protesters
called an indefinite strike to oppose the government’s plans to
export natural gas to the United States and Mexico.
Demonstrators fought pitched battles with thousands of police and troops
who were trying to clear roadblocks in the area.
Peasant farmers began their self-proclaimed “war for gas”
almost a month ago as protesters expressed fears that proceeds from
the gas would simply enrich foreign companies investing in the project.
They say they do not trust the government to spend the revenues wisely
and fear that much of the money will be lost to corruption.
Protesters are calling on the government to nationalize the country’s
natural gas resources, saying they should be processed in Bolivia to
make higher value products.
They say that under current law Bolivia would get only 18 percent of
the profits from the project.
The government deal will return as little as $40 million annually to
the Bolivian treasury in the form of taxes and fees.
The unrest is the worst violence since February, when a government austerity
drive backed by the International Monetary Fund sparked massive riots
in which 32 people died.
Bolivia’s economy is in its fifth year of recession, and international
lenders have opposed public works programs designed to create jobs because
of the country’s already high budget deficit of nine percent.
Sources: AFP, BBC, Bolivia
IMC, Miami Herald, Pacifica Radio, Reuters
US soldiers bulldoze Iraqi farmers’
crops
Americans accused of brutal
‘punishment’ tactics against villagers
By Patrick Cockburn
Dhuluaya, Iraq, Oct. 12— US soldiers driving
bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient
groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq
as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not
give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.
The stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown
earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small
town 50 miles north of Baghdad. Local women were yesterday busily bundling
together the branches of the uprooted orange and lemon trees and carrying
then back to their homes for firewood.
Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed,
said: “They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms,
but this is not true. They didn’t capture anything. They didn’t
find any weapons.”
Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker
in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the
farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active in
this Sunni Muslim district.
“They made a sort of joke against us by playing jazz music while
they were cutting down the trees,” said one man. Ambushes of US
troops have taken place around Dhuluaya. But Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh
al-Jabouri, a member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base
to ask for compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American
officers described what had happened as “a punishment of local
people because ‘you know who is in the resistance and do not tell
us’.” What the Israelis had done by way of collective punishment
of Palestinians was now happening in Iraq, Sheikh Hussein added.
The destruction of the fruit trees took place in the second half of
last month but, like much which happens in rural Iraq, word of what
occurred has only slowly filtered out. The destruction of crops took
place along a kilometer-long stretch of road just after it passes over
a bridge.
Farmers say that 50 families lost their livelihoods, but a petition
addressed to the coalition forces in Dhuluaya pleading in erratic English
for compensation, lists only 32 people. The petition says: “Tens
of poor families depend completely on earning their life on these orchards
and now they became very poor and have nothing and waiting for hunger
and death.”
The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front
of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses who
did not want to give their names. They said that one American soldier
broke down and cried during the operation. When a reporter from the
newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers
at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same
paper quotes Lt. Col. Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying:
“We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to
tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn’t tell us.”
Informing US troops about the identity of their attackers would be extremely
dangerous in Iraqi villages, where most people are related and everyone
knows each other. The farmers who lost their fruit trees all belong
to the Khazraji tribe and are unlikely to give information about fellow
tribesmen if they are, in fact, attacking US troops.
Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a
distraught voice: “It is as if someone cut off my hands and you
asked me how much my hands were worth.”
Source: Independent (UK)
Israeli raid leaves eight dead, hundreds
homeless
Compiled by Seán Marquis
Oct. 15 (AGR)— Israeli tanks and bulldozers
pulled out of southern Gaza Oct. 12, leaving hundreds of Palestinians
without homes and eight dead, including two children.
The army fought its way into Rafah refugee camp on the night of Oct.
9, ostensibly in search of tunnels under the border with Egypt which
the military said were being used to smuggle heavy weaponry such as
ground-to-air missiles, but admitted no such weapons had been found.
But by the time the raid was over 48 hours later, just three tunnels
had been found, while more than 100 homes had been rocketed or flattened
by bulldozers, about 1,500 people left homeless and two children killed
after an Israeli helicopter fired a missile into a crowd.
Palestinian medical sources said the majority of the more than 60 people
injured were hurt when an Israeli helicopter fired a missile at a crowd,
many of them women and children.
The army said that there had been gunmen in the crowd and that anyone
on the street was presumed to be hostile.
“Where were we supposed to be?” asked Ashraf Khusa, who lived
on the same street. “They were blowing up our homes. There were
bulldozers crushing our houses. Where could we go but the street?”
In some places, entire rows of houses were crushed under the bulldozers.
In other streets Israeli helicopters picked off two or three homes at
a time with missiles. The army also cut off electricity and water to
the camp.
“When we went back today, there was nothing left of my house,”
said Ehad Abu Taha, 23. “There was nothing left of my neighborhood.”
Once it was clear the Israeli tanks were mostly gone, hundreds of people
loaded up donkey carts and fled their homes.
Women stumbled down the road with doors to their homes strapped to their
backs and children hauled buckets filled with cutlery.
The Israeli military said Palestinian fighters put up fierce resistance
as the tanks went in, throwing hundreds of grenades and bombs. But all
the casualties were among the Palestinians. Of the eight dead, four
were fighters.
Peter Hansen, head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency which
helps Palestinian refugees, said about 1,500 people had been left homeless
as a result of the operation.
“We have had very, very significant damage to the refugee camp
... It would appear between 100 and 120 shelters/houses were completely
destroyed and completely demolished,” he said, after inspecting
the site himself.
Israeli subs go nuclear
The Oct. 13 edition of the German Der Spiegel magazine carried a report
that a special Mossad unit — Israel’s spy agency — received
orders two months ago to prepare plans for strikes on targets in Iran.
Around half a dozen targets in Iran are suspected of being used to prepare
nuclear weapons by Tel Aviv.
US-built F-16 fighter bombers could completely destroy the sites, according
to Israeli security officials quoted in the German magazine.
In 1981, Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear power station near Baghdad,
smashing former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program.
In addition, according to an Oct. 12 story by the LA Times, Israeli
and American officials have admitted collaborating to deploy modified
US-supplied Harpoon cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads in Israel’s
fleet of Dolphin-class submarines, giving the Middle East’s only
nuclear power the ability to strike at any of its Arab neighbors.
Two Bush administration officials described the missile modification
and an Israeli official confirmed it. All three spoke on condition their
names not be used.
Israel ordered three specially designed submarines from Germany in the
mid-1990s, and they were delivered in 1999 and 2000. The diesel-powered
vessels have a range of several thousand miles and can remain at sea
for up to a month.
The Americans said they were disclosing the information about the missile
conversion to caution Israel’s enemies at a time of heightened
tensions in the region and out of concern over Iran’s alleged ambitions.
“We tolerate nuclear weapons in Israel for the same reason we tolerate
them in Britain and France,’” one of the LA Times’ sources
told the paper. “We don’t regard Israel as a threat.”
Despite the anonymity of the source, the sentiment is almost identical
to that of the US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, John Bolton,
who told British journalists last week that America was not interested
in taking Israel to task for its continuing development of nuclear weapons
because it was not a “threat” to the United States.
Bolton’s comments, coming on top of those of the two other sources,
suggest the degree to which senior members of the Bush administration
can now not even be bothered to hide the US’s assistance and encouragement
for Israel’s nuclear program.
“The presence of a nuclear program in the region that is not under
international safeguards gives other countries the spur to develop weapons
of mass destruction,” said Nabil Fahmy, Egypt’s ambassador
to the United States. “Any future conflict becomes more dangerous.”
Arab countries have criticized the United States and the United Nations
for pressuring Iran to accept even tougher nuclear inspections while
ignoring the stockpile in Israel – estimated at some 200 warheads
— which is not a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
and has never been inspected.
To avoid triggering American economic and military sanctions, US intelligence
agencies routinely omit Israel from semiannual reports to Congress identifying
countries developing weapons of mass destruction. The Clinton administration
even barred the sale of the most detailed US satellite photographs of
Israel in an effort to protect that country’s nuclear complex and
other targets.
Arafat’s new govt. on the rocks
The Palestinian Authority, meanwhile, is in chaos. There are serious
doubts over President Yassir Arafat’s health, amid rumors he has
suffered a mild heart attack or has stomach cancer. What is clear is
that he is visibly in bad health, and two teams of doctors are in attendance
at his Muqata headquarters.
Ahmed Qorei’s long-term future as Palestinian premier was thrown
into doubt as he agreed to remain head of a temporary emergency government
and the Palestinian leadership failed to end an impasse over the crucial
role of interior minister.
General Nasser Yousef, Qorei’s choice for the post, is demanding
full authority over the multiplicity of security services, which would
have the main role curbing the militants and inducing Israel back to
the negotiating table.
But Arafat insists on keeping the reins in his own hands. General Yousef
recently accused Arafat of being the “most incompetent revolutionary
leader of all time.”
“We have agreed to continue with the emergency government with
those ministers who have been sworn in by president Arafat,” Foreign
Minister Nabil Shaath said after a meeting of the mainstream Palestinian
movement Fatah’s central committee.
The term of the emergency cabinet will expire on Nov. 6, one month after
Qorei was sworn in as premier.
“The [emergency] government will work for 20-25 days and after
that there will be a new government and a new prime minister also,”
Qorei said in a brief statement to reporters last week, showing a clear
sign of an early departure.
Qorei and six other ministers were sworn in by Arafat at a ceremony
on Oct. 7 after the veteran Palestinian leader declared a state of emergency.
There is no provision in the Palestinian constitution for Arafat to
appoint an emergency government.
On Oct. 10 Qurei told Arafat that he will resign in another three weeks
if the men fail to resolve the dispute over control of Palestinian security
services.
He would be the second Prime Minister to throw in the towel within two
months — his predecessor, Abu Mazen, lost a power struggle with
Arafat. Qurei, who has a reputation as a more skilled political operator,
tried to avoid a clash, but Arafat is still refusing to take a back
seat.
Sources: Agence France-Presse,
Al-Jazeera, BBC, Independent (UK), LA Times, NY Times, Observer (UK),
San Francisco Chronicle
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