Shocking images shame US forces

Fearful women and children arebound by US soldiers.

By Yvonne Ridley and Lawrence Smallman

Nov. 10 — A series of shocking pictures revealing US soldiers tying up Iraqi women and children in their own home has provoked international outrage.

The occupying forces have now come under renewed fire for their treatment of ordinary Iraqis as shown in the pictures published today by Aljazeera.net.

CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, is conducting an investigation and seeking advice before taking further action.

“This kind of image increases resentment of American troops in Iraq and can also play a major part in demoralizing troops who are having to tie up small children. We are seeking to raise this issue further in the appropriate arena,” said Washington CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper.

A six-year-old girl watches nervously as a US soldier ties her.

A spokesman for the London-based Islamic Observation Centre said the pictures showed a “complete disregard for the human rights of the Iraqi people.”

He added, “A normal human being should be repulsed by the very idea of tying up children. You have to question the mental state of soldiers who are being forced to do this.”

The IOC recently supplied pictures to Aljazeera.net showing US soldiers frisking a four-year-old boy in an Afghan village in Paktika as part of a military operation.

A senior officer justified the action at the time saying the child could have been carrying explosives. He added the security of US soldiers came first before any hearts and minds operation.

US soldier frisking a four-year-old Afghan boy.

Those particular pictures provoked a huge, mixed response from Aljazeera users who inundated the website with feedback expressing concern.

This latest series of pictures was sent to US military headquarters Centcom in Florida for a comment. Major David Farlow warned Aljazeera.net not to publish the pictures on this site.

“It would be irresponsible. I can’t second guess what has happened here without knowing all the facts but US forces operating in Iraq have to use the appropriate level of restraint to the mission. US soldiers will use minimum forces wherever possible,” he added.

However, John Rees, head of the British Stop The War Coalition, condemned the behavior of the occupying forces.

“This kind of behavior produced a response which forced the British out of India and will undoubtedly force the British and Americans out of Iraq. The American and British forces in Iraq are showing all the worst traits of colonial occupying forces throughout history.”

A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defense in London said, “There are a range of options available to the commander on the ground based on the information received. Restraint depends on the situation.”

However, a senior military source said, “This sort of action would be highly unusual for British troops and would have to be authorized at the highest level.

“We just don’t do things like that. We are working very closely with Iraqi people on the ground in Basra and prioritize in winning hearts and minds. We made a dreadful error earlier on in the campaign and lost some military police as a result. It was a tragedy which we have learned from and do not want to repeat.”

Source: Aljazeera
Photos courtesy: AlJazeera.net

Israeli abuses the worst in 35 years - UN report

By Thalif Deen

United Nations, Nov. 6 (IPS) — After 35 years of investigations, a UN committee monitoring human rights abuses of Palestinians has concluded that the situation in the Israeli-occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank was the worst ever last year.

“We must sadly report that the situation drastically deteriorated in 2002,” Ambassador Chitambaranathan Mahendran of Sri Lanka, chairman of the Special Committee Investigating Israeli Practices in the Occupied Territories, told IPS.

The Palestinians did not only see their freedom of movement and residence severely restricted through curfews, road closures and checkpoints, but also their economic, social and cultural rights were harshly violated and undermined, he said.

Mahendran said his three-member committee — including Ambassador Rastan Mohd Isa of Malaysia and Ambassador Ousmane Camara of Senegal — was barred from entering the occupied territories once again.

“We made a formal request to Israel, but it was turned down,” he told IPS on Thursday. Israel, he added, “showed hostility towards our committee.”

The committee, which has never been permitted to enter the occupied territories, has been forced to hold sittings in Jordan, Egypt and Syria. Palestinians who appear before the body travel to Amman, Cairo and Damascus yearly to detail the continued human rights abuses by Israel.

In his report to the 191-member General Assembly, Mahendran said the committee tried to establish a meaningful dialogue with the State of Israel, “but to no avail.”

“In view of the gravity of the situation, the time has come for the special committee to be allowed by the Israeli authorities to get access to the occupied territories and assess for itself the current situation of human rights, as well as to ascertain the views of the government of Israel,” he told delegates.

The Israeli government, which is opposed to the very existence of the special committee, routinely refuses UN bodies entry into the occupied territories — particularly if they are probing human rights violations of Palestinians.

“Today the intangible and inalienable right of the Palestinians to a homeland of their own is threatened both by the erection of the separation wall, the unabated policy of new Jewish settlements, and the heavy destruction of infrastructure, properties, and homes,” Mahendran said.

He also pointed out that Palestinian sources believe the controversial wall will eventually annex about 55 percent of the West Bank, its central, western, and eastern sides, including Jordan Valley, and major water sources.

Mahendran’s submission to the General Assembly was backed by the 15-member European Union (EU), which also criticized Israel’s decision to continue building the wall after international condemnation.

“The European Union demands that Israel stop and reverses the construction of the wall in the occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around Jerusalem, which is in departure of the Armistice Line of 1949,” Marco Carnelos of Italy told delegates Thursday.

Construction of the wall also violates various provisions of international law, he added, and entails other illegal activities, such as confiscation of land and demolition of houses.

“The EU is gravely concerned by the continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian cities as well as the severe restrictions imposed on the freedom of movement of persons and goods,” added Carnelos.

While criticizing Israel’s abusive policies in the occupied territories, he also condemned violence against Israelis by Palestinians. “The EU strongly condemns terrorism, in particular the vicious attacks against Israeli citizens,” he said.

In a separate report Thursday, Miloon Kothari, UN special rapporteur on housing demolitions, told delegates that thousands of residents of the occupied territories have been left homeless because of Israel’s policy of “house demolitions.”

According to information received, he said, the Israeli army has destroyed an estimated 4,000 homes over the past three years, leaving thousands of people homeless, many of whom are women, children or elderly.

“Much of the destruction in recent years has been concentrated in and around Gaza,” added Kothari.

Catherine Cook, senior analyst and media coordinator at the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), told IPS that both the EU and the United States have a number of means available to pressure Israel to make its human rights practice comply with international law.

“To date, none have taken action that would put Israel in a position to actually stop its practices or suffer a financial penalty,” she added. Consequently, Cook said, Israel is able to continue a campaign of gross human rights abuses.

Washington alone provides more than three billion dollars in outright grants as economic and military aid to Israel every year.

Cook pointed out that Israel’s ability to manipulate the UN human rights system reveals one of the shortcomings of the international human rights and humanitarian law framework — the absence of an effective enforcement mechanism.

“At present, enforcement relies upon political will, and consequently, it is powerful nations who determine when and where human rights principles will be enforced and when and where those not in compliance will be penalized.”

In the case of Israel’s abuses of Palestinians’ human rights, she added, “the absence of effective enforcement is counter-productive to the creation of a society that respects human rights and the rule of law.”

Today, added Cook, rather than denying the importance of human rights treaties, Israel simply argues that these agreements do not apply to the occupied territories, therefore Israel is not required to report to UN bodies on its practices there.

Case for war confected, say top US officials

By Andrew Gumbel

Nov. 9 — An unprecedented array of US intelligence professionals, diplomats and former Pentagon officials have gone on record to lambast the Bush administration for its distortion of the case for war against Iraq. In their view, the very foundations of intelligence-gathering have been damaged in ways that could take years, even decades, to repair.

A new documentary film beginning to circulate in the United States features one powerful condemnation after another, from the sort of people who usually stay discreetly in the shadows -- a former director of the CIA, two former assistant secretaries of defense, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and even the man who served as President Bush’s Secretary of the Army until just a few months ago.

Between them, the two dozen interviewees reveal how the pre-war intelligence record on Iraq showed virtually the opposite of the picture the administration painted to Congress, to US voters and to the world. They also reconstruct the way senior White House officials, notably Vice-President Dick Cheney, leaned on the CIA to find evidence that would fit a preordained set of conclusions.

“There was never a clear and present danger. There was never an imminent threat. Iraq, and we have very good intelligence on this, was never part of the picture of terrorism,” says Mel Goodman, a veteran CIA analyst who now teaches at the National War College.

The case for accusing Saddam Hussein of concealing weapons of mass destruction was, in the words of the veteran CIA operative Robert Baer, largely achieved through “data mining” — going back over old information and trying to wrest new conclusions from it. The agenda, according to George Bush Senior’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, was both highly political and profoundly misguided.

“The theory that you can bludgeon political grievances out of existence doesn’t have much of a track record,” he says, “so essentially we have been neo-conned into applying a school of thought about foreign affairs that has failed everywhere it has been tried.”

The hour-long film, entitled Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, was put together by Robert Greenwald, a veteran TV producer in the forefront of Hollywood’s anti-war movement who never suspected, when he started out, that so many establishment figures would stand up and be counted.

“My attitude was, wow, CIA people, I thought these were the bad guys,” Greenwald said. “Not everyone agreed on everything. Not everyone was against the war itself. But there was a universally shared opinion that we had been misled about the reasons for the war.”

Although many elements in the film are not necessarily new -- the forged document on uranium sales from Niger to Iraq, the aluminum tubes falsely assumed to be parts for nuclear weapons, the satellite images of “mobile biolabs” that turned out to be hydrogen compression facilities, the “decontamination vehicles” that were in fact fire engines, what emerges is a striking sense of professional betrayal in the intelligence community.

As the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern argues with particular force, the traditional role of the CIA has been to act as a scrupulously accurate source of information and analysis for presidents pondering grave international decisions. That role, he said, had now been “prostituted” and the CIA may never be the same. “Where is Bush going to turn to now? Where is his reliable source of information now [that] Iraq is spinning out of control? He’s frittered that away,” McGovern said. “And the profound indignity is that he probably doesn’t even realize it.”

The starting point for the tarnishing of the CIA was a speech by Vice-President Cheney on August 26, 2002, in which he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program and was thus threatening to inflict “death on a massive scale, in his own region or beyond.”

According to numerous sources, Cheney followed up his speech with a series of highly unorthodox visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in which he badgered low-level analysts to come up with information to substantiate the extremely alarming, but entirely bogus, contents of his speech.

By early September, intelligence experts in Congress were clamoring for a so-called National Intelligence Estimate, a full rundown of everything known about Iraq’s weapons programs. Usually NIEs take months to produce, but George Tenet, the CIA director, came up with a 100-page document in just three weeks.

The man he picked to write it, the weapons expert Robert Walpole, had a track record of going back over old intelligence assessments and reworking them in accordance with the wishes of a specific political interest group. In 1998, he had come up with an estimate of the missile capabilities of various rogue states that managed to sound considerably more alarming than a previous CIA estimate issued three years earlier. On that occasion, he was acting at the behest of a congressional commission anxious to make the case for a missile defense system; the commission chairman was none other than Donald Rumsfeld, now Secretary of Defense and a key architect of the Iraq war.

Walpole’s NIE on Iraq threw together all the elements that have now been discredited, Niger, the aluminium tubes, and so on. It also gave the misleading impression that intelligence analysts were in broad agreement about the Iraqi threat, relegating most of the doubts and misgivings to footnotes and appendices.

By the time parts of the NIE were made public, even those few qualifications were excised. When President Bush’s speechwriters got to work -- starting with the address to Congress on October 7 that led to a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq -- the language became even stronger.

Tenet fact-checked the October 7 speech, and seems to have played a major role in every subsequent policy address, including Colin Powell’s powerful presentation to the United Nations Security Council on February 5. Of that pivotal speech, McGovern says in the film, “It was a masterful performance, but none of it was true.”

Source: Independent (UK)

Riyadh: a new front against US

By John R Bradley

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Nov. 10 — America’s fortunes in the Gulf were in free-fall yesterday after a suicide bombing in Riyadh late on Saturday that appeared to be aimed at undermining the Saudi monarchy, the United States’ key ally in the region.

No one had claimed responsibility by last night, but the shadow of the fugitive Saudi national Osama bin Laden hangs over the outrage. At least 17 people, many of them Arab expatriates, were killed and 120 others, 36 of them children, were injured in a massive car bomb attack on a residential compound in Riyadh.

Those killed included Saudis, Sudanese and Egyptians. No Westerners were believed to have died. Among the wounded were Americans and Canadians, as well as people from Africa, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, Turkey, Pakistan, Romania and Sri Lanka. Two Britons who lived in the compound were found unhurt.

The bombing came a day after American, British and other Western diplomatic missions were closed because of warnings of an attack. Western diplomats believe that as many as 30 people may have been killed in the bombing.

“We pulled out eight bodies from the rubble,” a Filipino rescue worker at the scene of the blast told The Independent. “Most of them were children.”

The attack, the second spectacular suicide bombing in the Saudi capital in six months, was made by a person driving a stolen police car. It caused utter devastation, razing eight villas and blowing out the windows of buildings over an area covering a square mile.

A day before the previous bombings on May 12, a Saudi Islamist group believed to be close to Bin Laden’s al-Qaida network called for revenge attacks on US interests after a huge arms seizure from Islamic militants in Riyadh. Hours before the latest bombing, the same organization, the Mujahedin of the Arabian Peninsula, urged its followers to strike and destroy Western and Saudi regime interests .

It was partly because of that statement, issued on an Islamist website, that the US embassy in Riyadh and diplomatic missions in Jeddah and Dhahran had been closed on the day of the attack. Intelligence reports also indicated that the terrorists had moved from the planning to the operational phase of an attack.

Bin Laden had issued a fatwa in the 1990s urging his followers to refrain from attacks in the kingdom because revenues from its oil industry would be needed to consolidate an Islamic revolution. But the Saudi decision to assist the US-led war on Iraq changed all that, with Bin Laden for the first time explicitly calling for attacks inside the kingdom.

The attack is a clear sign to the Saudi rulers and military that al-Qaida is willing and able to attack in the heart of the kingdom, despite a security clampdown and cooperation between the CIA and Saudi intelligence services.

The bombing provoked near-universal outrage among Saudis, who awoke yesterday to find gruesome images of those injured by flying glass on the front pages of newspapers. No one could understand why fellow Arabs had been the target. Many initially refused to believe it could have been the work of al-Qaida, especially as the bomber struck in the middle of the fasting month of Ramadan. Inevitably, conspiracy theories about CIA and Mossad involvement started to circulate.

If it was al-Qaida, it may be seen ultimately as an own goal. The attack will damage the support the organization has in Saudi Arabia, where anti-US sentiment has been fed by America’s support for Israel’s continuing crackdown on the intifada and the occupation of neighboring Iraq.

The ruling Saud family is now al-Qaida’s number one target, and the kingdom has become the front line in the so-called war on terror. Since May 12, more than 600 suspected Islamists have been arrested and more than 2,000 suspects have been interrogated. Saudi Arabia’s security forces have lost a dozen men in their almost weekly battles with al-Qaida fighters and killed more than 15 suspects.

The bombing could have been launched on the basis of outdated information that the compound was home to mostly Americans and Britons. Until the late 1990s, it was occupied and sponsored by the American aircraft and defense manufacturer Boeing.

Source: Independent (UK)

Dr. Arhun Makhijani calls for nuclear disarmament

By Megan Shepherd

Asheville, North Carolina, Nov. 11(AGR)--Dr. Arhun Makhijani, Ph.D., gave a speech to a packed house Monday night entitled “Nuclear Weapons from a South East Asian Perspective.” The Western North Carolina World Affairs Council (WAC) sponsored the event at UNCA’s Owen Conference Center.

Dr. Makhijani, an internationally known nuclear scientist, presented a clear argument in defense of nuclear disarmament of all nations, including the United States. He spoke with ease and humor, but with utter seriousness about the need to disarm. Yet he never vilified one particular group or country. Instead he made it clear that there are “no safe and proper hands to wield nuclear weapons. Human hands are too fallible.”

Dr. Makhijani stated repeatedly that “peace will not occur through intimidation and nuclear threat, but only when this country sees that we cannot rule imperially by telling everyone else what to do.” He said that peace will occur when “all people sit down with equality, even if humble in military power.” This, he argues, is the only way “to prevent Hiroshima from happening again.” “Above all,” stated Dr. Makhijani, “we need to obey the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and get rid of nuclear weapons.”

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was signed by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and 59 other nations in 1968 and was intended to prevent spread of nuclear technology. The U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union agreed not to assist states in producing weapons, rather to assist states in developing nuclear power for peaceful purposes. The nuclear armament of India and Pakistan in 1998 threatened the viability of the treaty. Also, North Korea withdrew from the treaty this year. Article 6 of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty states that the nations involved will negotiate in good faith to achieve complete nuclear disarmament, yet gives no time frame.

Why should we discuss the buildup of nuclear arms around the world that is over a half a century old? Dr. Makhijani argues that now is a critical time to discuss this issue. In the current global political climate, with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in danger, the threat of North Korea, and the renewed interest in developing new nuclear weapons in the United States, now is a critical time to work toward nuclear disarmament in every nation.

Dr. Makhijani stated in the September 2003 edition of Science for Democratic Action, the newsletter of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), that “for fiscal year 2004, the Bush administration requested $15.5 million for the development of a Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. The administration’s goal is to have a weapon that could destroy a bunker that is located 300 meters below ground.” He also wrote, “nuclear weapons designers are eager to resume design of new nuclear weapons. There is more and more serious talk to abrogating the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the US Senate failed to ratify in 1999.” The Test Ban Treaty bans nuclear weapons tests except those conducted underground. The treaty will not take effect until all countries with nuclear power plants sign it.

The bulk of Dr. Makhijani’s speech covered the dominant nuclear mythology that arose after World War Two. To a lesser extent, he spoke of the history of India’s nuclear development and the subsequent nuclear arming of Pakistan. He tied India’s armament directly to the United State’s nuclear stance.

On May 11, 1998, on the day India exploded its first nuclear weapons, there was singing and dancing in the streets of Delhi. Dr. Makhijani reminded us that there were joyous celebrations in the US on August 6, 1945 and August 9, 1945 after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The mythology that arose following the bombings and the end of the war is that “the bomb is a very good thing in American hands” and that it can save and protect our civilization. Dr. Makhijani also stated that “if you believe your life and family was saved by nuclear weapons, you think it is a good thing.”

He refutes this argument by saying that the outcome to the war with Japan was settled in January 1945, and that it was only a matter of when Japan would surrender, not if Japan would surrender.

The essence of the American nuclear mythology is that by using nuclear weapons as a deterrent, we are therefore safer, that we have essentially won the peace through war and intimidation. Since Hiroshima, the US has “sent the message to the world that it is ready to incinerate people...and announce that it is a good thing and that people have to accept it because the US is powerful and rich.”

Dr. Makhijani argued that this has spurred the nuclear arming of many nations and that “if the US reserves the right to use nuclear bombs on each country, there will be more North Koreas.” He states that now “anybody can make a bomb” and “the capacity for nuclear destruction has spread around the world.” He commented on the widespread belief that “if you have nuclear weapons, you will not be threatened” by nuclear powers, therefore this is justification for armament. He sites the example of India and Pakistan. Pakistan, the country India sought to protect itself from, quickly followed India’s rise to a nuclear power. Dr. Makhijani argues that “India is militarily and strategically weaker now that Pakistan has bombs too.”

Dr. Makhijani is a Berkeley trained expert in nuclear fission, and is a known authority on energy and nuclear issues. He was born in Karachi before the separation of India and Pakistan, moved to India as a child, married a French woman, and now lives in the US. He describes himself as “truly a global citizen” who has the personal right to demand disarmament. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and its Health and Environmental Effects, published in 1995 .Dr. Makhijani is president of The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland. The goal of the IEER is to provide “scientific and technical studies on a wide range of issues. IEER’s aim is to bring scientific excellence to public policy issues to promote the democratization of science and a healthier environment.”

Indians shake up the political scene in Latin America

By Diego Cevallos

Mexico City , Mexico, Nov. 8 (IPS) — In less than a decade, Latin America’s indigenous movements have toppled two presidents, carved out new pathways in political processes and left their mark on parliaments, ministries, municipal governments and even a vice-presidency.

Through protests, electoral participation and ever-stronger organization, in the past decade the region’s Indians have put more than one political and economic system up against the wall.

“In building democracy it is no longer possible to ignore Indians, that is what the mobilizations tell us,” Víctor Hugo Cárdenas, an Aymara Indian who served as Bolivia’s vice-president from 1993 to 1997, said in a Tierramérica interview.

There are nearly 50 million indigenous people in a Latin American population of 400 million. Eighty percent live in poverty, but are slowly rising out of misery to vindicate their culture, their rights and their own political space.

In Bolivia, an uprising of Indians, led by Aymara leader Evo Morales and others, prompted the resignation of president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada on Oct. 17.

Morales, a legislative deputy of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), in June 2002 came in second place in the presidential elections, within just 1.5 percentage points of Sánchez de Lozada.

In Ecuador, massive indigenous protests led to the demise of the Jamil Mahuad government in 2000.

Those two countries, alongside Guatemala, Peru and Mexico, have the largest indigenous presence in the region, and together are home to more than 30 million Indians.

“We have learned from our breakout into politics that with unity we can advance in our objectives and proposals. It is a unity based on the individual and collective self-esteem of the excluded original peoples,” Nina Pacari, Ecuador’s foreign minister during the first seven months of this year, told Tierramérica.

“Our enormous challenge now is to contribute towards building new democracies,” said the indigenous leader.

Thanks to support from the country’s indigenous movement, with which he had signed an electoral agreement, former military officer Lucio Gutiérrez won the Ecuadorian presidency in 2002. Today, four of the 100 deputies in the national Congress are Indians, and dozens more hold local government posts.

Pacari and several of her native colleagues held ministerial posts in the first seven months of the Gutiérrez government, but later broke away from the coalition, saying that the president had not kept his electoral promises.

“We went from nothing to having ministers, deputies, mayors, prefects... and that is tending to grow. Now not only do the different political sectors take us into account, but so do the communications media,” Ecuadorian deputy Ricardo Ulcuango, who heads the Indigenous Parliament of the Americas, told Tierramérica.

In Mexico, with 10 million Indians, the insurgent Zapatista National Liberation Army, made up mostly of indigenous people in the southern state of Chiapas, took up arms in 1994 to demand democracy and justice.

Their presence and other factors combined to shake up a political system dominated since 1929 by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and in 2000 Mexico for the first time swore in a non-PRI government and consolidated a more transparent electoral system.

In Guatemala and Peru, Indians have not achieved the power their counterparts in Bolivia and Ecuador have, but they are headed in that direction, say experts.

“The indigenous peoples have organized politically, and that is a new phenomenon in Latin America to be reckoned with,” Rodolfo Stavenhagen, United Nations special rapporteur on indigenous rights, said in a Tierramérica interview.

He said that political institutions have not taken cultural plurality into account, but it can no longer be ignored under the “fiction that we are all equals,” which was never true in practice, he said.

In Guatemala, where in the 1970s and 1980s Indians bore the brunt of political repression during a bloody civil war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, 17 of the 113 legislative deputies in office today are Indians, an indigenous woman serves as minister of state, and five are deputy ministers.

Furthermore, 106 of the 331 Guatemalan municipalities are headed by Indians, which would have been unthinkable just a decade ago in this Central American nation.

According to Pablo Ceto, legislative deputy of the formerly insurgent Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), indigenous organizations in his country still need to mature, but a process is building “which in two or three years will produce a qualitative leap.”

Ceto, vice-presidential candidate in the Nov. 9 elections, told Tierramérica, “In Guatemala, due to the repression of the 1970s and 1980s, when fighting for indigenous rights was seen as subversion, the organizational process did not recover, so today there are not enough leaders.”

But that will change, he predicts.

In Peru, the political exclusion of the country’s 12 million Indians — the largest indigenous population in the region — is increasingly brought to light.

Of the 120 members of Congress, deputy Paulina Arpasi, an Aymara, is the only Indian. She says she represents the members of her culture.

Some 20 Peruvian lawmakers speak indigenous languages, though they do not identify themselves as Indians, but rather as mestizos (mixed race).

“The Peruvian indigenous organizations lack clarity and unity. But the experiences of our brothers in Ecuador and Bolivia give us a chance to approach a new political space,” Miguel Palacín, president of the Permanent Association of Indigenous Peoples of Peru, told Tierramérica.

According to Roger Rumrrill, who heads the Centre for Indigenous Cultures of Peru, the fact that Indians lag behind politically is due to the political and military efforts of the Maoist group Shining Path in native communities in the 1980s.

Shining Path, which is blamed for the deaths of 4,000 Indians and the enslavement of 15,000 more, tried to destroy the communal structures of indigenous authority “because they were considered counterrevolutionary, primitive and pre-ideological,” Rumrrill explains.

Bolivia’s Cárdenas, the only Indian to reach the vice-presidency in Latin America, maintains that indigenous leadership in the region “has to be fully democratic, leaving behind certain authoritarian temptations, and rise to the historic challenge.”

But he also warned that “the political elite must comprehend once and for all, before worse cases of clashes and bloodshed erupt than those seen recently in Bolivia, that democracy cannot continue to exclude indigenous peoples.”

Kintto Lucas (Ecuador), Jorge A. Grochembake (Guatemala) and Abraham Lama (Peru) contributed to this report.

Rich nations fail aid pledge to the poor

By Thalif Deen

United Nations, Nov. 7 (IPS)-- When more than 50 world political leaders and finance ministers from rich nations gathered in Mexico in March last year, they solemnly pledged to substantially increase their official development assistance (ODA) to the world’s poorer nations.

But 19 months later, the promises of increased aid held out at the International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD) in Monterrey, Mexico, have failed to materialize.

“There is a clear indication that counter-terrorism measures have subsumed the spirit of Monterrey and dashed hopes for international cooperation on financing for development,” Saradha Iyer, of the Malaysia-based Third World Network, told IPS.

“And the prospects for the equitable and sustainable development of the South are bleak,” she added.

Last year, a glimmer of hope appeared when ODA from rich nations to the poor rose to 57 billion dollars, up from 52 billion dollars in 2001.

But the news of a five-billion-dollar increase brought little rejoicing to delegates, senior United Nations officials and representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at a high-level ministerial meeting on FfD in New York last week.

“This increase was totally overshadowed by two other haunting statistics,” Iyer said — the 800 billion dollars spent on military budgets worldwide in 2002, and the 200-billion-dollar net transfer of financial resources from the South to the North.

According to a study by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the flow of net resources was the largest ever from the world’s poorer nations to the rich.

According to Iyer, the money, which could have been used to promote investment in health, education, and infrastructure in the developing world, has instead “perversely been channelled to the North, either because of debt servicing arrangements, asymmetries, and imbalances in the trade system or because of inappropriate liberalization and privatization measures imposed upon them by the international financial and trading system.”

“The implications of these global trends are grave,” she warned, pointing out that the FfD meeting in New York “raised the specter of gloom and doom for the realization of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).”

The goals, endorsed by a special session of the UN General Assembly in September 2000, call for the world’s nations to slash global poverty and hunger in half by 2015. They also call for a global partnership for development.

“The fact that the poor subsidize the rich, to the tune of nearly $200 billion per year, tells us just how seriously the G-8 [the world’s industrial nations and Russia] is taking its commitments to the poor,” says Raj Patel of the US-based Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy.

“Instead of redistributing wealth — wealth often appropriated from poor countries through colonialism — the international financial system legitimizes and encourages the expropriation of the poor,” Patel told IPS.

Worse yet, he said, is that it has been going on for years.

“The hypocrisy of the rhetoric of ‘financing for development’ cannot, ultimately, stand up to the facts.” One can only hope, he said, that with the publication of the UNCTAD study, citizens of conscience in rich countries will turn to their governments to demand justice for the peoples of the Third World.

But Mark Malloch Brown, chair of the UN Development Group and head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), remains skeptical despite new commitments made by rich nations for an additional $16 billion by 2006.

This includes new aid arrangements, including some five billion dollars proposed by the United States as part of its Millennium Challenge Account.

Malloch Brown estimates that if the MDGs are taken into account, the shortfall in ODA would be as high as 100 billion dollars a year — “even assuming developing countries raise domestic resources, pursue good macroeconomic policies and tackle corruption.”

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was equally pessimistic about the deteriorating state of the Third World economy — rising external debts, declining foreign direct investments and distortions in international trade characterized by subsidies and tariff barriers protecting farmers and exporters in rich nations.

Annan also pointed out that funds that could be promoting investment and growth in developing countries, building schools and hospitals, or supporting other steps towards achieving the MDGs, are instead being transferred abroad.

Although the world’s 22 richest countries were mandated by the General Assembly to provide 0.7 percent of their gross national product (GNP) as ODA to developing nations, only five countries — Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Luxemburg, and the Netherlands — have met this target, according to a new UN report on FfD.

Critics condemn US torture by proxy

By Olivia Ward

Nov. 8 -- When Ottawa computer expert Maher Arar arrived back in Canada this week after a year of captivity, his account of torture in Syria and Jordan shocked many.

Arar, who was seized by American officials in New York during a flight back from a family visit, has called for a full investigation of Canada’s role in his ill-treatment, which he said included confinement in a dark, filthy cell, beating, and psychological abuse.

Arar also encountered another Syrian-born Canadian, Abdullah Almalki, in the Syrian jail, and reported he had received even more severe treatment.

For Canada, accusations of complicity in offshore torture and abuse of people suspected of political crimes are unprecedented. And they are directly linked to the worldwide anti-terrorism crackdown following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

But for the US, deportation of suspects to countries where torture is conducted by proxy — “rendition” as it is known in American intelligence circles — is part of a larger pattern that is causing alarm, and critics say it’s damaging America’s image in the international community.

“There have been a series of these renditions, mainly to countries in the Middle East,” says Tom Malinowski, director of Human Rights Watch’s office in Washington. “We don’t really know how many people have been sent there, because it’s kept highly secret.”

In the United States, security services are barred from conducting torture on American soil, and the government officially denies any links with torture.

Both the United States and Canada are also bound by the International Convention Against Torture, which rules out surrendering citizens to countries that brutally violate human rights.

However, intelligence agents, including former CIA operative and author Robert Baer, have admitted in media interviews that turning over suspected terrorists to countries noted for their violent interrogation methods is now common practice in a no-holds-barred war on terrorism.

“We are doing a number of [renditions] and they have been very productive,” says a Washington Post report this week, quoting a “senior US intelligence official.”

In a previous interview with the Post, another official was more explicit: “We don’t kick the s— out of them,” he says. “We send them to other countries so they can kick the s— out of them.”

The most frequently used offshore torture depots are Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Morocco, human rights groups say.

Ironically, those countries are frequently criticized by the US State Department in its annual surveys of international human rights.

Syria, according to the latest report, commonly uses such methods as “pulling out fingernails, forcing objects into the rectum, using a chair that bends backwards to asphyxiate the victim or fracture the spine.”

In a speech promoting democracy in the Middle East, President George W. Bush likened Syria’s leaders to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, accusing them of leaving “a legacy of torture, oppression, misery and ruin.”

In Egypt, meanwhile, the State Department noted that suspects are “stripped and blindfolded, suspended from a ceiling or door frame with feet just touching the floor, beaten with fists, whips, metal rods, subjected to electric shocks.”

In Morocco, an Amnesty International report released this week cites testimony of victims who were “strung up and beaten with metal poles or wooden rods to extract confessions ...”

While there are numerous reports of suspects transported and tortured in Mideastern countries, there are also allegations of severe mistreatment of al-Qaida suspects at the American detention center of Guantanamo Bay.

“Statements made by US officials suggesting that the US government condones the mistreatment, and possibly even the torture of prisoners and detainees, gravely concerns Amnesty International,” says a letter issued by London-based human rights group earlier this year.

However, the use of offshore torture for political ends is not new for Washington.

In the 1960s, the US was accused of sponsoring a campaign of torture in Vietnam, carried out by local mercenaries against suspected Viet Cong guerrillas.

Investigative reports later spoke of a continuing program for “intelligence training for friendly foreign countries,” which included torture techniques used against America’s Cold War enemies, such as Latin American communist guerrillas. In the ’70s, Washington-trained police and militaries were responsible for alleged human rights violations in the region.

In the 1990s, Washington reportedly began a covert practice of “rendition,” using governments in Nigeria, the Philippines, Kenya, and South Africa. After Sept. 11, the number of people shipped to offshore locations to extract information by means that are banned in the US appears to have increased, although the secrecy surrounding the practice has prevented human rights organizations from monitoring exact figures.

“Silence or indifference from the United States will be perceived as an indication that this country condones torture and other egregious abuses,” says Amnesty International.

Source: Toronto Star

Lawyer says Guantanamo detainees tortured

The US military has tortured terrorist suspects held without charges at the Guantanamo Bay military prison, an Australian lawyer representing some of the suspects has claimed this past week. US-based Richard Bourke, who has been working for almost two years on behalf of dozens of detainees at Guantanamo, said American military officials were using old-fashioned torture techniques to force confessions out of prisoners. The methods clearly fell under the definition of torture under international conventions, he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Bourke told ABC his claims are based on reports leaked by US military personnel and from descriptions by released detainees. Media reports that many detainees have attempted suicide and are suffering mental health problems backed up claims of harsh treatment, he said.

About 600 prisoners captured in Afghanistan and over 40 other countries are being held at Guantanamo without charges or access to lawyers, some since January 2002.

Earlier this year, US officials denied using torture and said detainees are interrogated humanely, allowed to practice religion, and given medical care.

Families are denied access and can only communicate with detainees via heavily censored mail. Human rights groups and the media have been given limited and strictly controlled access.

Most of the detainees are said to be members of the al-Qaida terrorist network or the ousted Taliban regime. They are to be tried by secret military tribunals. The US government says they could be held until it declares an end to the “war on terror.”

Bourke said governments around the world must stand up to the US government and demand the United Nations investigate the reports of torture.

Source: Associated Press