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Wealth-sharing agreement gives southern
Sudan economic independence
By Naivasha
Jan. 8— The government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s
Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) on Wednesday signed an agreement on
wealth sharing that will give southern Sudan significant economic independence
during a six-year interim period.
“For the first time the government will be self-reliant in the
south and will have the resources and wealth for development and providing
basic services,” said Yasir Arman, SPLM/A spokesperson. “We
will have a meaningful autonomy for the south supported by resources.”
Speaking of “a paradigm shift,” SPLM/A Chairman John Garang
said for the first time the south would have much needed resources to
provide services and engage in poverty eradication. “It will lead
to a democratic and structural transformation of Sudan,” he said.
Under the agreement, the southern government is to retain half of its
oil and non-oil revenue and give the other half to the Khartoum-based
central government during the interim period, at the end of which a
referendum is to be held to determine whether or not the south remains
part of Sudan. Each oil-producing state is to receive two percent of
net oil wealth, while a National Petroleum Commission, with representatives
from both sides, will be established to manage the oil sector.
The agreement provides a number of guarantees to the south and other
war-affected or marginalised areas of Sudan. It says that “all
parts of Sudan are entitled to development,” and that the national
government “shall not withhold an allocation due to a state/region
or the Government of Southern Sudan.” Underdeveloped areas are
to be “brought up to the same average level of socio-economic and
public services standard as the Northern States.”
“Persons whose rights have been violated by oil contracts are entitled
to compensation,” says the document, and communities where oil
development is taking place, “have the right to participate through
their respective states/regions in the negotiation of contracts for
the development of these resources.” Existing oil contracts are
to be respected.
Two separate bodies, an independent Southern Sudan Land Commission and
a National Commission, are to arbitrate land disputes, and to decide
on appropriate compensation for claimants who are allowed to make claims
against “the relevant government and/or parties interested in the
land.”
A dual banking system is to be established, with an Islamic system in
the north — which is not allowed to charge interest — and
a western system in the south, while a new national currency is to be
introduced.
Arman welcomed the agreement but added that in the interest of national
unity “Southern Sudan should also get wealth from the north.”
He said, “we could have better encouraged unity if the south was
being given wealth from the north.”
Sudanese Vice-President Ali Osman Taha called upon the international
community to “actively participate with us in the reconstruction
of Sudan and in rebuilding what has been destroyed by two decades of
war.”
A donor conference, to be hosted by Norway, is to be held within two
or three months after the signing of a comprehensive agreement, said
Hilde Johnson, Norwegian development minister.
Talks are to continue on Thursday with the status of Abyei, the Nuba
mountains, and southern Blue Nile first on the agenda. The SPLM/A is
insisting on the right to self-determination in the Nuba mountains and
southern Blue Nile, while Abyei — currently part of western Kordofan
in northern Sudan — should become part of the south, said Arman.
Under the colonial borders drawn up in 1956, all three areas in central
Sudan found themselves under the control of northern-dominated administrations.
Currently controlled by both the government and the SPLM/A they have
regularly been attacked by northern militias, denied humanitarian aid,
and have experienced systematic marginalisation and discrimination,
according to political analysts.
It is hoped that a comprehensive agreement will be reached by the end
of January.
Source: UN Integrated Regional Information
Networks
Report rebuts US’ pre-war WMD claims
By Jim Lobe
Washington, DC, Jan. 8 (IPS)— The administration of US
President George W. Bush “systematically misrepresented” the
threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD), three
non-proliferation experts from a prominent think tank charged Thursday.
In a 107-page report, Jessica Mathews, Joseph Cirincione and George
Perkovich of the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace (CEIP) called for the creation of an independent commission to
fully investigate what the US intelligence community knew, or believed
it knew, about Iraq’s WMD program from 1991 to 2003.
The probe should also determine whether intelligence analyses were tainted
by foreign intelligence agencies or political pressure, they added.
“It is very likely that intelligence officials were pressured by
senior administration officials to conform their threat assessments
to pre-existing policies,” Cirincione told reporters.
The Carnegie analysts also found “no solid evidence” of a
co-operative relationship between the government of ousted Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist group, nor any evidence to
support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD to al-Qaida under
any circumstances.
“The notion that any government would give its principal security
assets to people it could not control in order to achieve its own political
aims is highly dubious,” they wrote.
In addition the report, “WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications,”
concluded that the United Nations inspection process, which was aborted
when the agency withdrew its inspectors on the eve of the US-led invasion
of Iraq last March, “appears to have been much more successful
than recognized before the war.”
The report, the most comprehensive public analysis so far of the administration’s
WMD claims and what has been found in Iraq, will certainly heat up the
simmering controversy over whether Bush and his top aides might have
deliberately misled Congress and the public into going to war.
While that controversy has cooled since last month’s capture of
Saddam and a palpable rise in the military’s confidence that it
can subdue the bloody insurgency against the occupation, two congressional
committees are only now resuming their own probes of US pre-war intelligence
on WMD, which were interrupted by the long Christmas recess.
The report also comes amid new indications that the administration itself
has decided that its pre-war claims about Iraq’s WMD were wrong.
The New York Times reported Thursday that a 400-member military team
has been quietly withdrawn from the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group (ISG)
that has spent months scouring Iraq at a cost of nearly one billion
dollars for any evidence of such weapons.
That report followed another in mid-December that said ISG head David
Kay had told his superiors at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
he planned to leave as early as the end of January.
Kay, a former UN inspector who had long charged Saddam with holding
vast supplies of WMD, submitted an interim report last October that
no weapons had been found.
“I think it’s pretty clear by now that they don’t expect
to find anything at all,” said one administration official.
The Carnegie report also comes on the heels of the publication Wednesday
of an extraordinarily lengthy article by the Washington Post that concluded
that Iraq’s WMD programs were effectively abandoned after the 1991
Gulf War.
The article, which confirmed that Iraq was developing new missile technology,
was based on interviews with the country’s top weapons scientists
and mostly unnamed US and British investigators who went to Iraq after
the war.
The new report is likely to be taken as the most serious blow yet to
the administration’s credibility. Carnegie is the publisher of
Foreign Policy journal, and while its general political orientation
is slightly left of center, it has long been studiously non-partisan.
The journal also houses right-wing figures, such as neo-conservative
writer Robert Kagan.
Carnegie President Mathews travelled to Iraq last September as part
of a bi-partisan group of highly respected national-security analysts
invited by the Pentagon to assess the situation there.
The report, which is based on declassified documents about Iraq from
UN weapons inspectors and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),
reaches a similar conclusion regarding both WMD and the missiles, but
is much broader in scope.
It concedes that Iraq’s WMD programs could have resumed and might
have posed a long-term threat that could not be ignored. But, the authors
wrote, “they did not pose an immediate threat to the United States,
to the region or to global security.”
Despite Vice President Dick Cheney’s insistence early last year
that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, the Carnegie
report concludes there was “no convincing evidence” that it
had done so, and that this should have been known to US intelligence.
Similarly, with respect to Baghdad’s chemical weapons, US intelligence
should have known that all facilities for producing them had been effectively
destroyed and that existing stockpiles had lost their potency already
by 1991.
Uncertainties regarding Iraq’s biological weapons program were
greater, the report concludes. Dual-use equipment and facilities, however,
made it theoretically possible for some limited production of both chemical
and biological weapons to occur.
As of the beginning of 2002, according to the report, the intelligence
community appears to have overestimated the chemical and biological
weapons in Iraq, but had a generally accurate picture of both the nuclear
and missile programs.
But in 2002 the community appears to have made a “dramatic shift”
in its analyses.
The fact that this change coincided with the creation of the Office
of Special Plans (OSP) in the Pentagon—a still-mysterious group
of intelligence analysts and consultants hired by prominent hawks to
assess the community’s reporting—“suggests that the intelligence
community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers’ views
some time in 2002,” the report states.
But beyond the failures of the intelligence community, “administration
officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq’s
WMD and ballistic missile programs” in several ways, it adds.
They treated the three different kinds of WMD as a single threat when
they represented very different threats; insisted without evidence that
Saddam would give whatever WMD he had to terrorists; and routinely omitted
“caveats, probabilities, and expressions of uncertainty present
in intelligence assessments from (their) public statements.”
In addition, the administration misrepresented findings by UN inspectors
“in ways that turned threats from minor to dire.”
The report goes on to rebut a number of other administration claims,
arguing, for example, that the notion that Saddam was not “deterrable”
does not stand up to the historical record, given his past reaction
to international pressure.
The strategic implications of the failure of US intelligence to provide
accurate information on Iraq, when there was no imminent threat, should
call into question the administration’s new national security doctrine
of pre-emptive military action, say the authors.
As applied in Iraq, the “doctrine is actually a loose standard
for preventive war under the cloak of legitimate pre-emption,”
they wrote, and should be rescinded.
In a brief reaction, Secretary of State Colin Powell said he remained
“confident” of the claims he presented to the UN Security
Council last February.
At the same time, he stressed that they represented the views of the
intelligence community. “I was representing them,” he said.
“It was information they had presented publicly, and they stand
behind it.”
Tensions continue between Iraqi people
and their invaders
Compiled by Josh Ferguson
Jan. 13 (AGR)-- On January 7th US administrator Paul Bremer
announced that US occupation forces would free 506 of some 12,800 Iraqi
detainees. The first 100 were to be released the next day from Abu Ghraib
prison, as a sign of goodwill on the part of the coalition. However,
the entire exercise appeared to have the opposite effect.
Hundreds of Iraqis waited for hours outside a Baghdad prison in hopes
their relatives would be included in the much-publicized release. Finally
late in the afternoon, two truckloads of prisoners emerged from the
compound, were driven a half-mile away, and were deposited in the middle
of the road. About 80 men were freed, but US officials said they weren’t
part of the amnesty, and most Iraqi families left disappointed and angry
at America. A coalition spokesman insisted the prisoner release was
on track, but would be done quietly for reasons of “security and
privacy.”
A few of the released prisoners were interviewed by the press. Released
prisoner Sa’d Hamed ‘Ali related that he was arrested after
being shot at on a street where there was a gun battle involving American
occupation forces. But Sa’d, who was imprisoned for four months
and ten days does not know what the charge against him was, nor the
reason for his arrest. He was never interrogated.
Most of the stories of those freed indicated that they had been arrested
merely “on suspicion” and that they were not people who had
actually been involved in attacks on the American occupation forces.
Hasan Ahmad Hamzah, for example, who was subjected to a harsh interrogation
lasting four days during which he was beaten and deprived of food and
water, said: “The charge against me? What charge? I don’t
know why I was arrested.”
This also comes at a time when occupation forces are being criticized
for a failure to listen to Iraqi claims of human rights abuses by the
coalition.
Occupation Watch, an international group of peace and justice organizations
set up to monitor the conduct of occupying forces in Iraq, said the
process for Iraqis to make claims was purposely opaque and US treatment
of families pursuing claims was often offhand and bordering on cruel.
In a 30-page report covering three months of research, Occupation Watch
lists several of the most serious cases among the 77 claims it has followed.
None of those claims has so far been successful.
In one case, Mazen, a 32-year-old pharmaceutical salesman, was shot
seven times and killed while standing by the side of the road waiting
for a taxi. US forces were firing on insurgents nearby and Mazen was
mistaken for an “enemy fighter.” His father, 72, went to claim
the body, which had been taken to Baghdad airport for forensic examination.
The corpse was eventually released and he was told to take it home in
a taxi.
When he complained, US forces agreed to take the man and the corpse
back to his home. But fearing they may come under attack, soldiers made
the man run in front of their truck as a shield, the report says. They
finally left him by the road to carry the corpse several hundred meters
to his house.
The family’s claim for compensation was rejected because the son
was killed in something other than a non-combat situation, Occupation
Watch said. An appeal was also refused, although the family did receive
$2,500 in so-called sympathy money.
Human rights abuses are not the only thing troubling the Iraqi people.
Unemployment has been another major concern for Iraqis under occupational
rule, with a nearly fifty percent national unemployment/underemployment
rate as of October, 2003. Recently, a US-backed Iraqi politician said
an ongoing purge of members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party had
pushed 28,000 Iraqis from their jobs, with tens of thousands more former
high-level Baathists set to lose their jobs in the near future. US administrator
Paul Bremer dissolved and banned the Baath party in May, after US forces
swept into Baghdad to remove Saddam from power and end 35 years of the
party’s rule.
Another major loss of jobs comes from the Iraqi military, which was
also abolished by Bremer. Before the US invasion, the military employed
some 400,000 Iraqis. Now, those without jobs are challenging the coalition’s
willingness to provide for unemployed Iraqi people.
On January 6th, police in Basra opened fire on former Iraqi soldiers
who were demanding payment of a promised stipend. The soldiers tried
to storm a branch of the Central Bank to get their money, lobbing stones
first at the building and then at Iraqi police who tried to stop them.
The police fired into the crowd of a few thousand, killing one ex-soldier
and wounding three, according to relatives of the victim and hospital
sources. Protesters were sent away empty-handed and told to return at
a later date. The former soldiers dispersed quietly, apparently heeding
a coalition statement that warned they would be paid only if there was
no more violence.
Four days later, in Amarah, 230 miles southeast of Baghdad, hundreds
of Iraqis gathered to express frustration over broken promises of employment
made by Iraqi and British officials. The protest began peacefully, but
soon escalated with stones being thrown at the town hall, which doubles
as a regional British military headquarters. Makeshift bombs were reportedly
thrown, and British soldiers claimed to hear gunfire coming from the
crowd and from some surrounding buildings. Some witnesses and human
rights groups question whether the noises were in fact gunfire or simply
the shattering of nearby windows. Soldiers and police opened fire soon
after hearing the noises. Six Iraqis were killed and at least 11 wounded,
said Dr. Saad Hamoud, of the Al-Zahrawi Surgical Hospital.
Protests the following day were led by hundreds of people, many of whom
were family members of those killed on Saturday. Screaming protesters
demanded justice for slain family members, and for coalition promises
to be kept in regard to employment. Representatives from the coalition
met with a group of demonstrators, promising the creation of some 8,000
jobs. However, protesters pointed out that similar promises had been
made previously, with no results. After starting peacefully, the Sunday
demonstration ended with demonstrators rushing British troops surrounding
town hall. They were beaten back with batons and riot shields.
Another element of contention has been that of US plans to establish
an independent Iraqi government by July 1st. Iraq’s top Shiite
Muslim cleric recently hardened his opposition to a US plan to select
a provisional national assembly — a possible further complication
in American efforts to hand over power to Iraqis. Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Husseini al-Sistani demanded the assembly be directly elected —
saying a body chosen by local caucuses, as intended by the Americans,
will not have legitimacy. “This will, in turn, give rise to new
problems and the political and security situation will deteriorate,”
he said in a statement released by his office. Sistani also demanded
the assembly approve a draft constitution and proposed agreements regarding
the continued presence of US and other coalition troops in Iraq beyond
July 1.
Sistani’s views are widely respected by Iraqi Shiites, and his
opposition forced the Americans to change their transition plans once
already. Participation by Shiites -- who make up 60 percent of Iraq’s
25 million people -- is essential to the success of the transition.
But drafting a new plan to accommodate his views would further anger
Iraq’s minority Sunnis, who had dominated politics in Iraq for
decades under Saddam and are already bristling at the attention given
now to the Shiites that they traditionally oppressed. This has at times
resulted in violence as well. On the evening of January 9th, at least
five people were killed by a bomb blast at a Shia mosque in central
Iraq. The bomb went off as Friday prayers ended in Baquba, a largely
Sunni Muslim town, about 40 miles north of Baghdad. Medical sources
reported that dozens of people were hurt in the attack.
Sources: AFP, AP, Reuters, New York Times,
al-Arab al-Yawm, CNN, BBC, Los Angeles Times
Letter bombs attributed to anarchists
raise questions
Jan. 5— Four letter bombs have been sent to various European
Union dignitaries throughout Europe in the last week, all of them, according
to government officials, originating from the Italian city of Bologna.
A group calling itself the Informal Anarchist Front (“FAI”)
has claimed responsibility in a letter printed by an Italian newspaper.
Although no known Italian anarchist groups have ever heard of this association,
the acronym matches exactly that of another above-ground, revolutionary
organization in Bologna: the Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI) The
FAI has denounced these attacks, and consider the Informal Anarchist
Front “imaginary,” invented to justify the repression of anarchists
in Bologna and throughout Italy.
This suspicion harkens back to similar incidents in the recent past,
such as 1997 in Milan when a series of letter bombs were used as a justification
to raid squats, social centers, and make sweeping arrests. Anti-globalization
activists may also recall the letter bomb scare in the days leading
up to the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy. In fact, the use of such a
tactic by fascist forces in Italy has been historically documented.
During the 1970’s, when electoral support for communists was at
an all time high, fascists engaged in a deadly bombing campaign they
described as part of a “strategy of tension.”
By blaming the bombings on the communists, the fascists hoped to incite
a breakdown of public order to justify the imposition of military rule.
The most horrific bombing took place in Bologna in 1980, in which a
bomb was detonated at a rail station killing 85 people and injuring
over 200. Bologna was a communist stronghold at the time. The Italian
Secret Service was later implicated in the bombing and high ranking
officials in the organization were made to stand trial ten years later.
Their convictions were overturned.
One twist in the latest incidents is that the bomb addressed to European
Commissioner Romano Prodi in Bologna was wrapped in a book by Gabrielle
D’Annunzio, a supporter of fascism in the 1930’s. Prodi remarked
that the choice of the author was probably meant to be ironic. Whether
ironic or not, these incidents have created considerable tension among
Italian anarchists in general, and members of the Italian Anarchist
Federation in particular. As one reader on Infoshop commented, “Imagine
if the ‘casual Republican party’ started claiming responsibility
for bombings, how much heat would the Republicans get?” The possibility
remains, however, that such bombings have been carried out by self-proclaimed
“anarchists” that are disconnected from groups such as the
FAI, who struggle to promote autonomy, social and economic justice in
Italy. It seems questionable whether anarchists working in communities
of struggle would knowingly place their comrades in danger for such
imperceptible gains. The letter bombs in question have been poorly made,
causing no injuries even when detonating in the hands of their recipients.
The history of fascism in Italy has demonstrated that the “strategy
of tension” is served equally well by the brash actions of “useful
idiots,” whether their ideology is purported to come from the extreme
Left or the extreme Right.
The Commission for the Correspondence with the Italian Anarchist Federation
has issued a communique in which they suggest that, far from promoting
revolutionary consciousness, “letter bombs are more useful for
provocation and the criminalization of dissent.” The arsenal of
the FAI, on the other hand, includes the weapons of social organizing,
local autonomy, trade unions, opposition to state terrorism, and the
creation of a new and free society. There are reports that raids of
squats have already begun taking place in Bologna, though no arrests
have yet been made.
Source: A-infos
Brazil: social safety net steadily expanding
By Mario Osava
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Jan. 12, (IPS)— Brazil has a new
law that promises all Brazilians, as well as foreign nationals who have
lived in the country for at least five years, an income sufficient to
cover basic needs like food, education and health.
The new measure, which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed
into law last Thursday, is to be cradle-to-grave and universal. The
underlying concept is recognition of the right to life, independently
of whether someone has a paying job.
But the law, approved 12 years after being introduced to Congress thanks
to the persistence of its author, Senator Eduardo Suplicy, will go into
effect gradually, starting in 2005. Suplicy hopes it will be fully in
force by 2008 or 2010 at the latest.
Over the past few decades, the Brazilian state has been increasing welfare
payments and non-monetary benefits to the poor, with the aim of reducing
social inequalities — of which Brazil is a world champion —
and alleviating extreme poverty and hunger.
Examples of efforts by the Brazilian government to battle inequality
include a school grant program that makes a cash payment to low-income
families who keep their children in primary school, a program that provides
a stipend for food, and one that gives families a small payment to buy
cooking gas every two months.
The success of the school grant program in Brasilia, the capital, over
the past decade led the United Nations to recommend it as a best practice,
and it has begun to be emulated in a number of countries in Latin America
and around the world.
After President Lula took office in January 2003, his government set
up the Zero Hunger plan, which includes cash assistance as well as “structural”
actions such as support for small farms, a literacy drive, and water
tanks enabling families in arid parts of the country to collect rainwater
from their rooftops.
In October, the government decided to unify four of the strategies,
which up to then were implemented by different cabinet ministries, in
the Family Grant Program, which provides a minimum of 50 reais (17.40
dollars) per family, plus the school, food and cooking gas payments.
To be eligible for the assistance granted by the program, as well as
the other benefits that have not yet been unified under the Family Grant
umbrella, families must make certain commitments, such as keeping their
kids in school and their vaccinations up-to-date, and participating
in adult literacy, nutritional education, and vocational training courses.
By the end of 2003, 3.6 million families had been transferred to the
new program, according to official statistics.
The various programs cost around $1.5 billion to run in 2003, and the
total cost is expected to increase by 23 percent this year, representing
a major transfer of money to the poorest populations and areas of Brazil,
Ana Fonseca, executive secretary of the Family Grant Program, told IPS.
The consolidation of the array of programs made it possible to increase
the average monthly benefit for each participating family from 8.45
to 25.30 dollars, said Fonseca. A large part of the increase was made
possible by the reduction in bureaucratic costs, red tape and banking
expenses.
Arandir Andrade Maia, a 25-year-old peasant farmer, said he was pleased
with the new program, which increased his monthly benefits to 33 dollars
since November, nearly double what he was previously receiving through
the Zero Hunger plan. The equivalent of 5.20 dollars a month were added
for each of his young children.
But “It’s a pity that the improvement was not extended to
many other poor people who need it,” he told IPS by telephone from
Guaribas, a municipality in the northeastern state of Piauí,
one of the poorest parts of Brazil, where the Zero Hunger plan was launched
a year ago.
What is really needed is rain, to make it possible for people to find
work in agriculture, and “so I can plant beans and corn on the
small bit of land that my family has,” because the drought has
aggravated poverty in the area, said Maia.
The Family Grant Program has benefited hundreds of families in Guaribas,
but many complain because they were not included in the program, Wagner
Correia Alves, a local employee of the federal bank that distributes
the payments to the families, commented to IPS.
Drawing up a nationwide registry of impoverished families, considered
a necessary step towards improving social programs, is one of the big
challenges facing the government, said Fonseca.
Income level “is not the only face of poverty,” she said,
explaining that officials had begun to assess other aspects, like years
of schooling, place of residence — rural or urban, and the size
of the city or town — whether the family owns or rents, and access
to utilities like electricity and piped water.
The aim of the Family Grant Program is to reach 11.4 million families
by 2006. That would be equivalent to 41.4 million people — average
family size in Brazil is 3.6 members — approximately the number
of hungry people in this country of 175 million, according to the government.
Ecuador: capture of Colombian guerrilla
not what it seemed
By Kintto Lucas
Quito, Ecuador, Jan. 5, (IPS)— Analysts say the capture
of Colombian guerrilla Simón Trinidad in the capital of Ecuador
pointed to direct involvement by the previously neutral Ecuadorian government
in fighting Colombia’s leftist guerrillas.
An anonymous source told IPS in Ecuador that the capture of the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) commander, whose real name is Ricardo
Palmera, was the first joint intelligence operation between those two
countries and the United States in the framework of the heavily US-funded
Plan Colombia anti-drug and counterinsurgency strategy.
In addition, Colombian press reports that described Palmera — whose
“nom de guerre” is Trinidad — as a top guerrilla commander
and stated that his arrest dealt a severe blow to the FARC were greatly
exaggerated, according to an academic interviewed by IPS in Colombia.
Palmera was the commander of one of FARC’s 62 military fronts,
and was neither a member of the national secretariat, the insurgent
group’s seven-member executive body, nor of the 32-member central
command, said the source in Colombia who specializes in research on
the leftist group.
The scholar, whose identity will not be revealed for safety reasons,
said that far from being one of FARC’s top leaders, Palmera held
the equivalent rank of lieutenant-colonel in the guerrilla hierarchy.
Palmera was, however, well-known as a negotiator in the peace talks
between the Colombian government of Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002)
and the 17,000-strong FARC, which broke off in early 2002.
The Colombian newspaper Hoy touted Palmera’s capture as “the
most important achievement in the struggle against the FARC in the organisation’s
entire history.”
But the academic who spoke with IPS in Colombia said Palmera’s
arrest last Friday “means nothing” in the balance of military
forces in Colombia.
Palmera, a 53-year-old Harvard-educated economist, is a former university
professor, bank executive and politician.
He is also one of the few survivors of the leftist Patriotic Union (UP)
political party, some 3,000 of whose members were killed after it was
created in 1984 as part of peace accords between the insurgents and
the government of Belisario Betancur (1982-1986).
Some UP leaders, like Palmera, joined the guerrillas “to strike
back at those who were killing us,” according to Imelda Daza, one
of Palmera’s fellow politicians in the UP, who now lives in exile
in Sweden, where she is a town councillor.
Her story appears in a book, “The Red Dance,” published in
December by anthropologist Yezid Campos, who compiled testimony from
survivors of the UP.
If the UP had not been wiped out, “Ricardo would have stood out
in Colombia’s national political scene, and would have had great
success. He would have contributed enormously to coming up with solutions
to Colombia’s problems,” said Daza.
In Ecuador, an armed forces officer who did not want to be identified
told IPS that the conflicting versions of Palmera’s capture put
out by Ecuador’s minister of the government (interior) Raúl
Baca and Colombian defence minister Jorge Alberto Uribe, and the way
the operation was carried out, point to coordination between the two
countries’ security forces.
The officer also said the coordination formed part of the second phase
of Plan Colombia, which will involve participation by Ecuador. Up to
now, this Andean nation had remained studiously neutral towards the
four-decade civil war raging in neighbouring Colombia.
Minister Uribe himself said Saturday, the day after Palmera’s arrest,
that the operation was carried out with the support of the US government.
“This is the result of exemplary action by our police and army,
with the vital support of the Ecuadorian government and police, and
of the US government,” said the Colombian minister.
But Baca flatly denied that the arrest had involved joint action between
the Colombian and Ecuadorian police. “This operation was carried
out by the Ecuadorian police as an absolutely normal aspect of law enforcement
in the city of Quito,” the minister said Saturday.
Palmera “was taken into custody by the police because he lacked
the necessary documents to be in Ecuador,” said Baca.
Sociologist and political analyst Alejandro Moreano also said the capture
formed part of the second phase of Plan Colombia, which will require
direct participation by the Ecuadorian army and police in combating
Colombia’s leftist insurgents.
“It would seem that the meeting between Otto Reich and Ecuadorian
President Lucio Gutiérrez a month ago helped strengthen a clear
position of support for US geopolitical aims in the region,” said
Moreano.
Reich, US President George W. Bush’s adviser on Latin America,
visited Ecuador in early December at a moment of weakness for Gutiérrez,
who was facing accusations that part of his campaign was financed with
drug money.
The accusation emerged after the arrest of alleged drug trafficker César
Fernández, who backed Gutiérrez’s campaign.
The director of public relations in the US Embassy in Ecuador, Marty
Estell, also contradicted Baca, saying Palmera’s arrest was an
example of cooperation between the Ecuadorian and Colombian police,
a “joint operation” that “we consider a success in the
campaign against regional terrorism.”
Furthermore, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe congratulated the Colombian
and Ecuadorian security forces on Saturday, and praised the Ecuadorian
president’s cooperation.
But Baca denied a statement by Colombia’s defence minister that
eight members of the Colombian security forces took part in Palmera’s
arrest.
According to reports in the Colombian press, however, the Colombian
army has a video showing that members of the military had mounted surveillance
over Palmera in Quito for months.
On Monday, Baca stated in an interview aired by the TV station Red Teleamazonas
that his remarks were based on a report by the Ecuadorian police, and
that he was concerned about the contradictions with statements coming
out of Bogota.
He insisted that participation in the capture by members of the Colombian
military and US intelligence services would amount to a violation of
Ecuador’s national sovereignty, and said he would demand an investigation
to get at the truth.
Political analyst Francisco Velasco, the director of La Luna radio station
in Quito, said that “According to the interior minister and police
chief, police officers were just walking along and by chance decided
to ask to see the documents of someone who turned out to be Palmera.
Somebody is lying here.”
Velasco said the most far-reaching aspect of Palmera’s arrest is
that “for the first time, Ecuador has been drawn into fighting
the guerrillas, in coordination with the Colombian and US intelligence
services.”
“It is irresponsible for the government of Lucio Gutiérrez
to put an end to 40 years of neutrality maintained by a number of Ecuadorian
governments towards Colombia’s armed conflict, and to involve us
in that conflict,” said Velasco.
But retired general René Vargas Pazos, a former Ecuadorian defence
minister and current member of the Group Monitoring the Impacts of Plan
Colombia in Ecuador, argues that Ecuador began to be drawn into the
Colombian conflict when it leased the Manta air base in the northwest
to the US armed forces in 1999.
* Constanza Vieira in Colombia contributed to this report.
Housing ‘bombs’ highlight shortages
By Mark Bourrie
Ottawa, Canada, Jan. 9, (IPS)— A group opposed to the gentrification
of working-class areas in Canada’s second-largest urban center
planted fake bombs at construction sites in Montreal this week to protest
the city’s lack of affordable housing.
The unusual scare, which injured no one but twice brought out the city’s
bomb squad, drew attention to the growing housing crisis in Montreal,
which has left many poor families, especially those headed by single
mothers, without affordable homes.
On Monday, police collected six parcels that were said to be bombs and
evacuated several hundred people from a condominium construction site
in Montreal’s working-class east end.
On Wednesday, they were called again to investigate two suspicious packages,
none of which contained explosives.
A group calling itself the Comite anti-gentrification (Anti-Gentrification
Committee) sent e-mail messages to several media outlets in the mainly
French-speaking city to claim responsibility for the acts.
The group said its protest was “aimed at denouncing the construction
of such buildings [condos] in the third poorest neighborhood in Canada.”
“This is shameful,” the statement read. “We need low-cost
housing. We’ve had enough of being turfed out of our neighborhoods
by the well-to-do, their luxury condos, and their hip little cafes.
“You want to wage war with the poor. Well, the poor won’t
take that lying down and will respond.”
Residents living near the construction site said the group’s tactics
are too extreme, but agreed that the condos, whose minimum price is
nearly 80,000 US dollars, are not the answer to their housing problems.
“We are poor and we don’t need condos here,” one resident
told a local television news reporter. “We need affordable apartments
so that we can find places to stay.”
Lucia Kowaluk, a founding member of Save Montreal, and who has spent
40 years working as a social worker in the city, says skyrocketing rents
are forcing families with three children or more to live in one-bedroom
apartments.
The city’s rents used to be reasonable but, in the past three years
they have risen dramatically, adds Kowaluk, often doubling from about
400 dollars to 800 dollars a month. Landlords are also now illegally
demanding an extra month’s rent as a deposit and “key money”
— lease-signing bonuses from tenants.
“Things have completely flipped around. Condo conversions and gentrification
have made it just about impossible for people on fixed incomes and the
working poor — many of them women with children — to be able
to afford a place to live,” she said.
Students coming to Montreal to study at the city’s four universities
have also driven up prices and spurred on conversions of rental apartments
to condos which are then sold, added Kowaluk.
“There’s been a big increase in the number of students coming
from the United States. Because of the exchange on the US dollar (about
1:1.25 Canadian dollars), parents and students think nothing of paying
1,000 Canadian dollars a month, plus key money and last month’s
rent.
“Units have been chopped up and made smaller, and apartment buildings
have been turned into condos because many parents believe it’s
worth buying an apartment here if their child is going to be studying
at one of the universities,” added Kowaluk.
“This has effectively priced housing in the central part of the
city out of reach of poor people.”
The City of Montreal is building about 5,000 affordable units, but the
national and provincial governments are doing little to fix the housing
problem, Kowaluk said.
The bomb threats, she noted, got massive media coverage in Quebec and
exposure across Canada, and the same day Montreal Mayor Gérald
Tremblay addressed the issue of affordable housing. “It’s
too bad that it takes something like that to throw light on this issue,”
she said.
Gentrification has been a fixture of Canada’s other large cities
for more than two decades. In Toronto, the country’s largest city,
most houses in poorer downtown neighborhoods were renovated in the 1970’s
and 1980’s, driving low-income families into suburban government
housing projects.
The process reverses the 20th- century trend of people moving to suburbs
when their economic situation improved. Newcomers to city cores tend
to be professional couples with no children who want to be close to
cultural facilities, shopping, and nightlife, and will spend large amounts
of money to transform working-class houses into designer homes.
Housing in downtown Vancouver is the most expensive in the country,
so many low-income people live crowded into small apartments or have
moved to suburbs that extend 50 kilometers from the downtown core.
Montreal urban planner John Zacharias says his city has lagged behind
other Canadian urban centers, but now its core is being priced out of
reach of the working poor.
“A lot of people should have foreseen this, and yet no one did
anything about it,” Zacharias, chairperson of the Geography, Planning
and Environment Department at Concordia University, told the Gazette
newspaper.
That lack of preparedness is “irresponsible,” he added.
Global consumers gobbling up precious
resources
By Jim Lobe
Washington, DC, Jan. 9 (IPS)— Following the dubious example
of their US counterparts, a growing global consumer class is increasingly
devouring the world’s natural resources, yet appears unlikely to
be growing healthier or happier, says Worldwatch Institute’s annual
‘State of the World’ report released here Thursday.
US consumption styles have not only spread to other industrialized nations,
according to the study, they have also succeeded in penetrating much
of the developing world.
In China alone, 240 million people have joined the ranks of the “consumer
class,” accounting for about five percent of the estimated 1.7
billion people worldwide who have adopted the diets, transportation
systems, and lifestyles pioneered by the United States and quickly taken
up by other industrialized nations during the last century, adds the
245-page report.
By contrast, some 2.8 billion people live on less than two US dollars
a day, while 1.1 billion of them lack access to safe drinking water.
Some 122 million Indians are also living an essentially western lifestyle
— more than the roughly 121 million Japanese, 76 million Germans,
61 million Russians, 58 million Brazilians, and 53 million French people
who also enjoy the fruits of consumer society, the report said.
It defines membership in the consumer society as people with annual
incomes greater than 7,000 dollars of purchasing power parity or roughly
equivalent to the official poverty line in the European Union (EU).
Members, says the report, typically use television, telephones, and
the Internet, “along with the culture and ideas that these products
transmit.”
Consumption of physical goods is important, Worldwatch stresses, particularly
in providing jobs and income to families and societies. That income
is vital to securing people basic needs for food, clean water and sanitation,
among other services.
But consumption also has serious downsides, especially for the natural
resources that also contribute to sustaining human life.
“Rising consumption has helped meet basic needs and create jobs,”
said Worldwatch President Christopher Flavin. “But as we enter
a new century, this unprecedented consumer appetite is undermining the
natural systems we all depend on, and making it even harder for the
world’s poor to meet their basic needs,” he added in a statement.
“Higher levels of obesity and personal debt, chronic time shortages,
and a degraded environment are all signs that excessive consumption
is diminishing the quality of life for many people,” according
to Flavin.
“The challenge now is to mobilize governments, businesses, and
citizens to shift their focus away from unrestrained accumulation of
goods and toward finding ways to ensure a better life for all.”
Indeed, one of the more remarkable findings of the new report suggests
that consumption might not be increasing general levels of personal
happiness or social health.
Not only do the poor eating habits that result from the growth in fast
food consumption contribute to obesity and its accompanying ailments,
but, insofar as the United States is concerned, the sharp rise in consumption
over the past 30 years has been accompanied by increases in poverty,
teenage suicide, lack of health-insurance coverage, and a steadily growing
gap between rich and poor.
About one-third of US citizens today say they are “very happy;”
the same share as in 1957, when average incomes were one-half what they
are now, the report says.
Private household spending on non-essential goods and services has increased
fourfold since 1960 and now tops 20 trillion dollars annually, it adds.
Of this, 60 percent is spent by people living in North America and Western
Europe—who make up only 12 percent of the global population.
By contrast, the roughly 33 percent of the world’s people living
in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa account for only 3.2 percent of
total spending.
Consumption is rising most quickly in the developing world, as globalization
has introduced millions of people to consumer goods, while providing
the technology and capital to produce and distribute them.
“Nearly half of all global consumers now live in the developing
world,” said Lisa Mastny, who co-directed the project that produced
the latest “State of the World.”
“While the average Chinese or Indian consumes much less than the
average North America or European, China and India alone now boast a
combined consumer class larger than that in all of Western Europe.”
Indeed China, with roughly four times the US population, will soon overtake
the United States in the size of its consumer class.
The United States now counts about 243 million people, or around 85
percent of its total population, in the consumer class. The countries
of Western Europe, where 89 percent of the people fall into this class,
account for almost 350 million consumers. But on a per capita basis,
the United States is far ahead of the rest of the world, and shows few
signs of slowing down, adds the report.
This country has more private vehicles on the road than people licensed
to drive them; indeed, about one-quarter of the world’s cars are
found on US roads. New houses in the United States were 38 percent bigger
in 2000 than in 1975, despite fewer people in each average household.
Such consumption patterns help explain why, with only 4.5 percent of
the world’s population, the United States accounts for some 25
percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that are believed to contribute
to global warming.
The average US citizen currently consumes five times more energy than
the average global citizen, 10 times more than the average Chinese,
and 20 times more than the average Indian, according to the report.
US consumers spend about 30 billion dollars a year on toys, and US children
now receive on average some 69 toys a year. The number of clothing items
bought by US consumers increased 73 percent between 1996 and 2001, with
the average consumer buying 48 new pieces of apparel a year.
Annual consumption of soda — a staple at fast-food restaurants
that have introduced ever-larger soda containers in the past decade
— doubled to 185 liters between 1970 and 2001, and the US has become
the world’s largest consumer of shrimp and caviar.
Nearly two-thirds of US adults are either overweight or obese.
Moreover, consumption levels have not translated into more leisure and
less work. On the contrary, the need to work longer hours to afford
“greater” consumer lifestyles has meant that US workers, on
average, put in 350 more hours on the job than their European counterparts.
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