Bush visits provoke protests abroad
Compiled by Eamon Martin
Oct. 24 (AGR)— Protests erupted throughout
the Asia-Pacific region this past week in response to US President
George W. Bush’s quick stop tour of the area to promote neo-liberal
free trade policies and his “war on terror”. Offended by
Bush’s visit, thousands of people in Thailand, The Philippines,
and Australia, thronged the streets to protest and collectively call
the US leader the world’s “No. 1 Terrorist”.
On Saturday, Oct. 18, up to 40,000 people across the Philippines demonstrated
against Bush’s presence in their country. A crowd of several
thousand burned 100 American flags outside of the Philippines’
House of Representatives as soon as they heard that Air Force One
had touched down, and another 100 flags as Bush arrived in Malacañang.
At the forefront of the demonstrations was one mounted by seven members
at the House of Representatives, where Bush spoke before a joint session
of the Philippine Congress. When Rep. JV Bautista of Sanlakas unfurled
a small sign reading, “Mr. Bush, stop your wars,” it signaled
the walkout of Bautista and six other members of Congress.
Rep. Satur Ocampo described their action as a “dignified expression
of protest” aimed against the “new imperial world order”
that the Bush-led United States is now establishing.
“We refuse to be a part of a sounding-board for the war-mongering
speech of Bush. Every time this US President speaks, death and untold
sufferings follow,” added Ocampo.
“We will not allow ourselves to serve as vassals of this modern-day
Caesar,” said Rep. Crispin Beltran as they joined the mass protest
outside. “This is a question of patriotism by the Philippine
people against US imperialism.”
“It is time to unmask the real Bush,” said Rep. Liza Maza.
She pointedly noted the discovery that Bush twisted intelligence reports
to falsely accuse Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction to
justify the United States’ preemptive war policy.
Giant effigies of Bush as a pirate and Philippines President Gloria
Arroyo as a parrot were burned with the flags. Marchers in Manila
carried a huge US flag emblazoned with the words “No. 1 Terrorist”.
In General Santos City, 3,000 protesters gathered and another 2,000
converged in Cagayan de Oro City with still some 1,000 protesters
massing in Zamboanga City.
Some 2,000 demonstrators rallied in Panay island, 3,000 gathered in
Northern Luzon, with another 3,000 in Southern Tagalog, and a group
of 4,000 in Masbate.
“We protest Bush’s visit because US intervention has brought
us nowhere except deeper poverty and slavery under the aegis of Uncle
Sam,” said Teodoro A. Casiño, secretary-general of Bagong
Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan, New Patriotic Alliance).
Casiño said that “the myth of Philippine-American ‘special
relations’ crumble down in the face of permanent under-development
due to US-sponsored policies and programs.”
Retired Philippine Navy Capt. Danilo P. Vizmanos, a junior military
officer-turned-activist, belittled official claims that the Bush visit
would be beneficial to the Philippines.
“We have all been treated to this so-called ‘special relations’,
with our military being handled, directed, armed, and trained by American
superiors. But we remain saddled by a most corrupt, a most mercenary,
and most fascist military,” Vizmanos said.
Meanwhile, Bayan spokesperson Renato M. Reyes Jr. urged the people
“not be taken away with Bush’s deceptive act of generosity.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch when we’re dealing
with the most vicious bully in the world. The price we have to pay
is our loss of sovereignty, the capacity to determine our policies
based on an objective assessment of our national interest, under the
cloak of counter-terrorism.”
Bush’s arrival in the country marked the first state visit by
a US leader in this former American colony since Dwight D. Eisenhower
in 1960.
The next day, Bush landed in Thailand to address a summit for Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation (APEC) and was greeted by 2,000 protesters chanting
“George Bush Go Back” while marching through downtown Bangkok.
As 100 police looked on, the demonstrators peacefully took to the
streets, despite an order from Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra
banning demonstrations during the summit. The demonstrators carried
signs in Thai and English reading: “The world’s real terrorist
is George Bush”, “America, Axis of Evil”, and “APEC—a
group of ghouls sucking the blood of the poor.”
“Why should we welcome him? In fact, he is a war criminal,”
said a Chulalongkorn professor, Surat Horachaikul, who took part in
the demonstration. Like many, he criticized Bush for the war in Iraq
and support of free-trade policies that activists condemn for hurting
developing nations like Thailand.
The Thai government took unprecedented anti-terrorist security measures
which included a tough immigration blacklist against 700 known foreign
activists to assure that the conference would be free of the mass
protests that have erupted at many major international meetings in
recent years.
Critics of Prime Minister Shinawatra say his pressure on activist
groups violated the country’s constitution.
The prime minister defended his free speech clampdown by saying that
APEC delegates would “bring investment money to Thailand”
and “street rallies” would be “very bad for the country’s
image.”
Demonstrators also criticized the Thai government for cleansing Bangkok
of homeless people, vendors, prostitutes, and stray dogs and taking
other measures to create an unreal image of the capital. One protester’s
sign read, “APEC—Welcome to Disneyland.”
From Thailand, Bush traveled to Australia to address a joint session
of parliament. But before he even arrived, 2,000 people had gathered
in central Sydney days before to show just what they thought of their
government’s alliance with Washington in light of Bush’s
recent remarks that Australia was the US government’s “sheriff”
in the region.
Protesters took part in a “fall into line” dance, where
their only moves were to the right and then to jump up when a vocalist
called for it, making fun of what they call Australian Prime Minister
John Howard’s penchant for having Australia — the third
nation after the United States and Britain to send troops for the
invasion of Iraq — do Washington’s bidding.
Protesters lambasted both Bush and Howard, saying the Australia-US
relationship serves the needs of US corporations and not the Australian
people.
”Howard, we’re not interested if your friendship with Bush
is going to govern us. Don’t let it intrude on our lives,”
thundered Sharon Burrow, president of the Australian Council of Trade
Unions, to cheers from the rallying audience.
”Bush is coming here to look after his interests, not because
he loves the Australian people,” said Jagath Bandara, national
organizer of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.
Bandara pointed out that one of the reasons for Bush’s visit
was to cement the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the two countries
that “will make the Australian workers worse off because our
manufacturing and television products will be taken over by American
products.”
Bush is scheduled to make a celebrated visit to the United Kingdom
next month, but the potential for a massive, unwelcoming public spectacle
has dramatically altered the plans.
Anti-war protesters plan to topple and dance on a mock statue of Bush
in the center of London as part of demonstrations to “blight”
his stay. Their parody of the famous falling of a Saddam Hussein statue
in Baghdad six months ago will be among running protests including
marches and a mock trial of Bush planned around his Nov. 19-21 state
visit.
Plans for the Queen of England and Bush to make a triumphant procession
through London’s streets have been abandoned because of protest
fears. The procession is traditionally the public high point of a
state visit.
A senior British Palace official said this week that detailed plans
had been made. “But Downing Street, anxious about possible anti-war
protests from the start, has now decided to pull the plug on it,”
said the official. “We are liaising with the White House and
they have made no attempt to hide their disappointment. They saw it,
obviously, as a great photo opportunity.”
Bush will travel by helicopter to avoid protesters who will most likely
line road routes. Other proposed events have also been curtailed or
cancelled, and Bush will not address the British Parliament because
of fears of a boycott by Parliament ministers.
“Whilst we bear them (Americans) absolutely no ill will, indeed
the opposite, we hate their president and think he is one of the world’s
most dangerous men,” said UK legislator George Galloway, whose
anti-war sentiments saw him suspended from British Prime Minister
Tony Blair’s ruling Labor Party. “They should take the opportunity
they have next November to do the world a favor, as well as themselves,
and get rid of him.”
Sources: ABS-CBN News, Agence
France-Presse, Associated Press, Daily Telegraph (UK), Indymedia Pilipinas,
Inter Press Service, MSNBC, Reuters, Voice Of America
Bolivian president flees to Miami
Compiled by Seán Marquis
Oct. 22— Carlos Mesa became president of
Bolivia minutes before midnight Friday, succeeding Gonzalo Sánchez
de Lozada, who resigned earlier in the day after weeks of a popular
uprising, and has fled to the United States.
Mesa was sworn in during a special session of Congress shortly after
Sánchez de Lozada resigned and fled the country to Miami with
his family and political associates.
At least 80 people died and hundreds were wounded in the police and
military crackdown on massive protests, begun a month ago against
a natural gas pipeline project.
Mesa, who served as Sánchez de Lozada’s vice-president,
has agreed to implement some of the demands of the protesters, including
convening a binding referendum on the exploitation of the country’s
natural resources, particularly its vast natural gas reserves.
Mesa told reporters that he would form a non-political cabinet, describing
his presidency as a government of transition. He pledged an early
referendum on the pipeline project, a constitutional convention and
new elections, although he can legally remain in office until the
presidential term expires in 2007.
Sánchez de Lozada finally resigned after having lost the support
of Mesa, much of the Cabinet, and coalition government partners.
In his resignation letter, Sanchez de Lozada said his departure was
“an unfortunate precedent for democracy in Bolivia and the continent.”
According to a report by the BBC, as the letter was read out in the
Congress, some lawmakers shouted “murderer!”
Sanchez de Lozada, a US-educated millionaire mining magnate, was seen
as out of touch with the poverty-stricken Indian population.
As news of the president’s resignation came out, trade union
leader Jaime Solares said: “Let him not just leave the government,
but Bolivia as well. And may he take the ambassador from the United
States with him.”
Parliamentary deputy Evo Morales, the leader of the coca farmers and
of the opposition Movement Towards Socialism, and figurehead of the
protest movement, said his party backed Mesa’s succession to
the presidency but would not participate in his administration “because
we have great cultural and ideological differences.”
Mesa has always supported free-market economic policies, just as Sánchez
de Lozada did.
Morales also said that now, after the president’s resignation,
it is time to initiate legal action against Sánchez de Lozada
for his responsibility in “the deaths at the hands of the military-police
crackdown.”
Indigenous rise up
Since Oct. 11, the Bolivian uprising brought nearly all activity to
a halt in La Paz, the seat of government, and the nearby city of El
Alto.
The indigenous peasants, human rights activists, trade unionists,
and other social groups initially protested a natural gas contract
with foreign oil companies and the fact that the pipeline might go
through a port in Chile.
The organizations and people involved in the protest argue that the
Bolivia sees very few benefits from the natural gas industry, which
is in the hands of big transnational corporations.
But the mobilization extended, reflecting discontent with the free-market
policies that have undermined the livelihoods of workers and farmers,
reduced social expenditures and public services, and intensified the
exploitation of the natural environment in South America’s poorest
country, and with deep-rooted corruption and clientelist political
practices.
That was expressed in a communiqué addressed to “the international
community and the Bolivian people” by the Permanent Human Rights
Assembly of Bolivia on Oct. 17: “We are letting [the Organization
of American States and the United States] know that the democracy
that you are defending has handed over strategic state enterprises
to transnational corporations,” and “is implementing neo-liberal
economic policies that bring wealth to a few and dire poverty for
the majority,” said the statement.
The gas proposal also underscored spreading popular distrust with
the administration’s US-backed anti-coca growing policies, which
have deprived thousands of poor Indian subsistence farmers of their
livelihood and plunged the president’s popularity ratings into
the single-digits.
The broad-based uprising was led by Bolivia’s indigenous majority.
“Globalization is just another name for submission and domination,”
Nicanor Apaza, 46, an unemployed miner, said at a demonstration last
week in which Indian women in bowler hats and colorful layered skirts
carried banners denouncing the International Monetary Fund and demanding
the president’s resignation.
“Today, Bolivia feels like my country,” said Denise Ortega,
41, of the Aymara indigenous tribe as she walked to her vegetable
stand on Oct. 18.
“After 500 years of being invisible and hated, now we are starting
to reclaim it from the Europeans who want to sell the very land out
from under us, who want to give our country away to the foreigners.”
Felipe Quispe, a member of the Aymara and the president of the nation’s
largest peasants’ union has been a leading spokesman for the
indigenous cause.
“If the concerns of the original inhabitants of this land are
not addressed, then the so-called Bolivia will cease to exist,”
he said recently. “The indigenous people will march into La Paz
and an Indian will sit in the presidential chair.”
More than 70 percent of the population of 8.2 million lives below
the poverty line, and three out of 10 Bolivians live in extreme poverty,
according to official statistics.
The US and democracy
The US State Department praised the former president and expressed
regret for the circumstances that led to him stepping down.
On Oct. 13, the State Department had called on Bolivians to follow
their nation’s democratic processes. Spokesman Richard Boucher
said the United States and other countries “will not tolerate
any interruption of constitutional order and will not support any
regime that results from undemocratic means.”
The United states did not have a problem with the “undemocratic
means” that briefly ousted President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela
in April, 2002. On the day a group of renegade military and business
men overthrew Chavez in a coup d’ etat Otto Reich – the
White House’s chief policy maker for Latin America — summoned
ambassadors from Latin America and the Caribbean to his office. He
said the US would support the new government.
Chavez came back to power a quick 48 hours later due to loyal military
units and a mass popular uprising
Sources: AFP, Andean Information
Network, Associated Press, BBC, IPS, LA Times, New York Times, Reuters,
Washington Post
650 Colombian teachers murdered with
impunity in last decade
By María Isabel García
Bogota, Colombia, Oct. 20 (IPS)— The special
United Nations rapporteur on the right to education expressed concern
over the impunity surrounding the murders of 650 teachers in the past
decade in Colombia, on her recent 10-day visit to this war-torn South
American country.
Katarina Tomasevski, a lawyer and professor at Lund University in
Sweden, has worked in the field of human rights since 25 years ago,
when she first visited Colombia to carry out a study on the situation
of minors in prisons.
Since then, Colombia’s armed conflict has increased in brutality
and scope, and the state’s military budget has grown, at the
expense of social areas like education, she said.
“For this government (the administration of right-wing President
Alvaro Uribe) the top priority is military spending,” which “is
not a productive investment,” Tomasevski commented to IPS.
Spending on education should be expanded by 30 percent, “to invest
in a peaceful future for the country,” she maintained.
In Tomasevski’s opinion, “the most dangerous aspect is the
fragmentation of Colombian society. In the 1980s, there was less public
and private security to protect the wealthy in Bogota,” and the
lack of equality, from her “Nordic, egalitarian viewpoint, has
grave consequences for the country.”
Testimony that she gathered during her visit to this country of 42
million will form the basis for a preliminary report containing recommendations
to be presented to the government this month.
“One of the complaints I heard from the children was that education
in Colombia is classist: poor children and rich children never meet.
So how can dialogue and a common strategy be created if the children
never talk to each other?” Tomasevski asked.
In addition, she said, a teacher told her that “it is very difficult
to work with the students” in the midst of the various armed
groups involved in the armed conflict, including the state security
forces, because “there is no protection to isolate the schools
from the conflict.”
The police offer candy and other rewards to children who join the
networks of informers, while the right-wing paramilitary groups and
left-wing guerrillas offer them salaries, said the teacher, who earns
125 dollars a month, less than half of what she said the paramilitaries
pay one of her students, a 16-year-old boy.
Tomasevski spoke of a “lack of monitoring” and oversight
by the state when referring to the failure to investigate and clarify
the 650 murders of teachers and the deaths of 70 university professors
and students since 1993.
Those figures were provided by the 280,000-member Colombian Federation
of Educators (FECODE), the national teachers’ union, in a report
presented to the special UN rapporteur.
Referring to the union’s estimate that a monthly average of three
teachers have been slain this year, Tomasevski said she was “surprised
that the government has not monitored” why, how, and by whom
they were killed.
Since 2000, 191 teachers have been killed, including 58 slain since
Uribe took office on Aug. 7, 2002, according to FECODE.
Oscar Ramón, with FECODE’s Human Rights Commission, told
IPS that more than 50 teachers were forced to flee the eastern department
of Arauca — his home province — in the past year and a half
after receiving death threats, including 30 in the municipality of
Tame alone.
The FECODE report lists 17 different human rights abuses of which
teachers are frequent targets, including telephone and written threats,
drive-by shootings of their homes, ultimatums for them to quit their
jobs, extortion by armed groups, the circulation of “death lists”
containing their names, prohibitions on teaching social sciences,
death threats spray-painted on the walls of schools, and meetings
on school premises organized by the illegal armed groups.
The report also documents the cases of 10 teachers who are in prison
on charges of “terrorism” and “rebellion,” and
states that “constitutional rights were violated in three of
these cases.”
“The government speculates” whether the main reason that
teachers are killed is because they belong to trade unions, or due
to the generalized rise in violence in Colombia, while it fails to
focus on the central question: “how to protect teachers as professional
educators,” said Tomasevski.
She added that the protection must not be limited to security measures
aimed at protecting teachers’ lives, but must include safeguards
for their right to earn a living and for freedom of education and
speech.
The special rapporteur said that “after a teacher is murdered,
the person replacing them cannot explain why the murder happened,
because it is too dangerous to talk.”
Teachers, trade unionists, social activists, and human rights defenders
are frequent targets of human rights abuses, including murder, in
Colombia, especially at the hands of paramilitary groups.
Tomasevski, who met with Education Minister Cecilia Vélez and
Vice-President Francisco Santos, the official responsible for the
government’s human rights policy, said one of the chief recommendations
that will be contained in her report is “to incorporate the international
obligation of providing free public education for all school-age children,”
as is the case in most countries in Latin America.
“In my view, an especially worrisome aspect was to find a situation
where financial obstacles are the big problem facing education,”
she said. “The government has no commitment towards making education
free of charge, at least in primary school, and we know that no education
is available to between one and three million children.”
Tomasevski highlighted the efforts made by the current administration
of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and that of
his predecessor Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002), and by the
governments of presidents Hugo Chávez and Lucio Gutiérrez
in Venezuela and Ecuador, respectively.
Other recommendations, she remarked to IPS, are the need to study
the impact of the armed conflict on the educational community, with
a gender perspective, and the need to respect cultural differences.
It is “extremely important” to protect women teachers, on
whose shoulders rests a large part of the burden of educating Colombia’s
children, she said.
With regards to cultural diversity, Tomasevski will urge respect for
the initiatives of afro-Colombian and indigenous communities in the
western region of Chocó, “about whom the white population
knows so little.”
Even if the funding does come from the state, authorities should accept
the educational model proposed by ethnic communities in Chocó,
because it incorporates their traditions and culture, she argued.
The special rapporteur will present her final report in March or April
2004 at the annual session of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in
Geneva, at which point the Colombian government will have the opportunity
to include its own comments and observations.
Tomasevski said she hoped the authorities would accept her recommendations.
She added that despite the bleak panorama she encountered in Colombia,
she felt optimistic with respect to the attitude held by civil society
and bodies like the Office of the People’s Defender and the Constitutional
Court towards the question of defending the right to education.
