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Rice WMD doubts renew pressure on Blair
By Tom Happold and Matthew Tempest
Jan. 30 — Tony Blair’s former foreign minister has
called on the prime minister to accept that there are no weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq.
His challenge follows Condoleezza Rice’s admission that no Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction may ever be found.
Reacting to Rice’s comments, Doug Henderson, a former defense and
foreign minister under Tony Blair, said Downing Street now owed it to
the country to “clarify its position.”
His call was echoed by former foreign secretary Robin Cook, who said
“the game is up” for the prime minister and he should now
admit the government’s intelligence was “wildly wrong.”
Rice, President George W. Bush’s national security adviser, last
night said the US may never learn the whole truth about Iraq’s
weapons capabilities because of looting.
Rice said on NBC television’s Today show: “No one will want
to know more than the president the comparison between what we found
when we got there and what we thought was there going in.”
She added: “I think that what we have is evidence that there are
differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground.”
Coming on the heels of former Iraq Survey Group (ISG) chief David Kay’s
acceptance that there probably were no WMD in Iraq prior to the war,
the spotlight has now fallen back on the British government.
Ann Taylor, the chairwoman of the intelligence and security committee,
was unavailable for comment, but a source from the committee said that
it would not be giving a “running commentary on its work.”
It is believed, however, that the ISG is planning to question Sir Richard
Dearlove, the head of the British Intelligence Agency MI6, and John
Scarlett, chairman of the joint intelligence select committee.
At this morning’s lobby briefing Blair’s official spokesman
brushed aside calls for another inquiry, saying: “We believe that
the Iraq Survey Group should be allowed to complete its work and that’s
the situation.
“The prime minister has said that he did believe the intelligence
was right and he did believe there would be an explanation.
“What Condoleezza Rice actually said was we should wait for the
facts. The process hasn’t yet been completed. The ISG is still
pursuing its work and we should wait for that.
“The ISG’s timetable is a matter for the ISG.”
Although Lord Falconer today repeated the stance of the prime minister
-- that the full ISG report should be waited for -- Henderson’s
comments add to the pressure over the case for war in Iraq.
He said: “Speculation will continue in this country about this
issue unless the government clarifies its position.
“Parliament should be told if Britain shared intelligence before
the war with the United States and, if so, to what extent; if Britain
accepted that its intelligence information contained the same errors
as the US; and does Britain now accept, as the US government now see
to believe, that weapons of mass destruction will not be found?”
Cook went further, saying the government’s clean bill of health
from the Hutton report made this the perfect time for Blair to admit
that the intelligence was faulty.
Cook said today: “Now that even the White House has admitted they
may have got it wrong, it’s getting embarrassing to watch our government
still trying to deny reality.
“The game is up.
“Now that Lord Hutton has cleared Tony Blair of lying, he is in
a strong position. He will never have a better opportunity to say that
he believed in all good faith the intelligence he was given and he gave
to parliament, but that it has turned out to be wildly wrong.
“If government refuses to learn the lessons from what went wrong,
there will always be the risk that they will make the same mistake again.”
These calls were echoed by the shadow foreign secretary Michael Ancram,
who joined calls for Blair to explain why he still believed the WMD
intelligence.
He said: “Condoleezza Rice’s comments show once again that
a full independent inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the lead-up
to the Iraq war and its aftermath is absolutely essential.
“Her remarks echo those made by David Kay, Colin Powell, President
Bush and the new head of the ISG, Charles Duelfer.
“ Tony Blair is the only person still certain that weapons of mass
destruction will definitely be found. He must explain why he is the
odd man out and produce the evidence as to why.
“David Kay has rightly called for an independent inquiry. It is
essential that one is held in the United Kingdom or doubt will forever
remain.”
The calls for an inquiry were backed by the former chairman of the Parliamentary
intelligence and security committee (ISC), Lord King of Bridgewater.
“There is a fair comment to make about the Iraq Survey Group but
that can’t be used as a permanent delaying tactic. That has to
come to a conclusion,” he told BBC Radio 4’s World at One
program.
“The real issue is did we go to war on false intelligence. Then
the question is how did that happen. But in the end ministers do have
to take responsibility. The intelligence services answer to them.”
He said that he believed that the ISC would be a good body to carry
out such an inquiry and that it should even consider breaking with its
normal practice of taking evidence behind closed doors and sit in public.
Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell said:
“When Colin Powell and now Condoleezza Rice express reservations
about the likelihood of finding WMD, even #10 Downing Street should
pause and consider whether its continuing confidence is justified.
“What is certain is that the skepticism of so many major players
simply adds to the justified clamor for a wider investigation into the
question of whether the British government took us to war on a flawed
prospectus.”
Source: Guardian (UK)
Anti-racists protest in Belfast
Compiled by Oread Daily
Jan. 29— Hundreds of people took to the streets of central
Belfast Jan. 29 to show their opposition to a series of racist attacks
against ethnic minorities in Northern Ireland. The rally, which was
organized by the Anti-Racism Network in conjunction with local trade
unions, coincided with the commemoration of the fourth annual UK Holocaust
Memorial Day. The event was organized following a series of attacks
against the Chinese, Pakistani and Filipino communities in south Belfast.
Anna Lo, from the Chinese Welfare Association, said that she feared
Belfast’s growing reputation as a racist city was deserved. She
said a lot of racist incidents went unreported and many Chinese people
suffered racial abuse on a daily basis. Kieran Sharma, who moved from
India to Ireland in 1968, was among those in the crowd. He said: “It
is important that people know what is happening. I have been living
here since 1968 and it has never been as bad as this before. My son
was attacked with a broken bottle by a loyalist. This kind of thing
has to stop.”
Belfast Lord Mayor Martin Morgan, Irish Congress of Trade Unions officials,
representatives of Sinn Fein, and even some Loyalist standing under
a banner which read “Loyalists Against Racism,” attended.
The Anti-racism Network said the rally was called, “… a visual
and collective stand against the continued brutal attacks on the minority
ethnic community. Arson attacks on homes, attacks on heavily pregnant
women and yet more attacks on children and on men.” Anti-Racism
Network spokesman Davy Carlin says, “Belfast is fast acquiring
a name for itself as the racist capital of Europe… What we want
to see is a cross-community collective voice against racism in the tradition
of the anti-sectarian rallies in the City.” Earlier this month
a Six foot wooden plank was pushed through a double glazed window of
a house in the loyalist Village area of south Belfast where a Pakistani
man and an eight month pregnant sister-in- law had just moved. Pipe
bombs were also thrown into the homes of black families last summer
in the Village area and last month Chinese and Ugandan homes were attacked.
A local real estate agent also recorded that he had been ordered not
to rent property to ethnic minorities.
Carlin said while the focus had been on recent attacks in south Belfast,
it was important to remember people were encountering racial bigotry
and harassment throughout Northern Ireland. “This is not confined
to one area or one class,” he said. “There is also evidence
of institutional racism and it cuts across all backgrounds. It is right
that as we remember the Holocaust, that we also recognize that prejudice
and intolerance faced by minorities in the past is still alive in the
21st century. To say nothing is not an option and the rally will allow
everyone who opposes racism to speak out with one voice.”
In a related action, the Alliance Party said the attacks on ethnic minorities
should be included in the International Monitoring Commission’s
first report. The Commission was set up to report on the state of paramilitary
ceasefires and whether the governments and parties live up to their
obligations under the Good Friday Agreement. Alliance made the call
after loyalists were linked to a number of racist incidents, including
an attack on the home of a Pakistani family in south Belfast.
Loyalist leaders have claimed the attacks were not approved by the main
paramilitary organizations.
Sources: 4NI, Belfast Telegraph, Anti-Racism
Network, The Blanket, icDerry
Murder of Indian activists raises demand
for arrest
By Rahul Verma
New Delhi, India, Jan 29 — Defenders of human rights in
India are launching a campaign to press for the arrest of the killers
of two social activists who were shot dead, allegedly for taking on
members of a powerful land mafia, in the eastern Indian state of Bihar
last week.
Several leading nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are launching a
series of programs in the south Asian country to condemn the fatal attacks
on the two workers, Sarita and Mahesh Kant, in a village in Bihar’s
Gaya district.
“The murders were depressing as well as disgusting,” says
activist Shabnam Hashmi of a New Delhi-based group, Act Now for Harmony
and Democracy (Anhad). “The murder was an act of absolute totalitarianism
that has to be condemned strongly,” stresses Sandeep Chachra of
global NGO, Action Aid.
On Feb. 12, hundreds of activists plan to collect for a march in the
Bihar capital of Patna.
The NGOs will hold a meeting in Patna Thursday, followed by a meeting
in New Delhi Saturday, to chalk out the campaign.
The participants include NGOs like Action Aid, Anhad, the National Alliance
of People’s Movements, the Socialist Front, and Jan Abhiyan.
“We are trying to reach out to people from different walks of life,”
says S Vivek of the Right to Food Campaign, one of the groups organizing
the meetings. “A petition is also being signed calling for the
rule of law and justice in the Sarita and Mahesh murder case,”
he says.
Sarita and Mahesh, described by the NGOs as “two of Bihar’s
finest activists,” were gunned down on Jan. 24 while they were
on their way back from a village meeting.
“With them died idealism, unalloyed and untainted; with them died
their dreams of a fairer, kinder world; with them died courage, youth,
love, and hope,” says a statement issued by a group of NGOs.
The activists — who were with a Bihar NGO called the Institute
of Research and Action — had been working on issues such as land
and water in the state’s rural areas for several years.
According to news reports, Sarita and Mahesh were fighting to reclaim
a plot of land that had been allotted to a Dalit family, belonging to
what was formerly known as the untouchable caste.
“The two young social activists had to die because they had taken
on the land mafia and [those with] vested interests,” newspapers
quoted Gaya police officer Pius Amrit Kumar Beck as saying.
The NGOs have called for an end to attacks on social activists in violence-prone
Bihar.
“Halting the spiral of violence in rural Bihar has to begin with
the restoration of democratic rights and the rule of the law,”
emphasizes the statement issued by the NGOs. “This calls for swift
legal action against those responsible for this shameless murder,”
it says.
Social activists have often been the target of powerful mafia groups
or militants in India. In November last year, Satyendra Dubey, an engineer
who had complained about corruption in a highway project, was killed
by a group of unknown assailants in Bihar.
In March 1997, a social and political activist, Chandrashekhar Prasad,
was killed, allegedly by goons of the ruling party in Bihar, the Rashtriya
Janata Dal, while addressing a public meeting in a Bihar town.
“But these attacks are not just happening in Bihar. Activists are
being targeted in different parts of the country,” says Hashmi.
“The attacks are mostly political and against those seeking to
change a social structure,” she says.
Sanjay Ghose, an environmental activist working in the eastern state
of Assam, was abducted and killed by members of the outlawed militant
group, the United Liberation Front of Assam, in 1997.
In 1996, the body of Jalil Andrabi, a human rights activist of Kashmir,
was found in the Jhelum river in the Kashmir capital, Srinagar. Andrabi,
the chairman of the Kashmir Commission of Jurists, was not seen alive
after he was detained by the Indian army on March 6.
The killing of the social activists has raised demands from members
of India’s vocal voluntary sector for protecting the lives of workers
of NGOs whose campaigns for social change often entail battling powerful
political or criminal forces.
“Basic security measures have to be provided to people working
in the sector,” stresses Chachra.
Source: OneWorld.net
Shell chief faces Nigerian challenge
By Michael Harrison
Feb. 2 — Shell failed to inform shareholders and US regulators
directly that it was receiving incentive payments from the Nigerian
Government in return for booking oil and gas reserves in the country.
The admission comes as the Anglo-Dutch oil giant enters a crucial week,
with its embattled chairman Sir Philip Watts set to face the wrath of
investors on Thursday when he presents Shell’s annual results.
He is under pressure to resign following Shell’s shock announcement
last month that its proven reserves had been cut by 20 percent after
it discovered that massive over-booking of oil and gas finds had taken
place between 1996 and 2002.
Half of the 3.9 billion barrel reduction in reserves concerns fields
in Australia and Nigeria, where Shell has controversially had a presence
for more than 20 years.
Under Nigeria’s reserves addition bonus scheme, Shell and other
overseas oil majors received incentives in the form of tax credits for
each barrel of oil booked. Nigeria also benefited from the arrangement
by being able to demand a bigger output quota from Opec and higher prices
from international oil companies when it auctioned off exploration acreage.
The bonus scheme ran for nine years from 1991. It was scrapped in 2000
by the new Nigerian Government of President Olusegun Obasanjo, which
is now seeking to recover $600 million from Shell and other international
oil companies.
Watts ran Shell’s Nigerian operations in the early 1990s and he
was also head of worldwide exploration and production for much of the
period when reserves were being overbooked in the late 1990s.
A Shell spokesman said the booking of reserves in Nigeria was made under
Nigeria’s national standards for reserves booking. These were a
matter of public record which investors and other regulatory authorities
were free to inspect.
The spokesman at first said: “The public record may not give details
of the amounts paid but it did go into the fact that these payments
were made, as I understand it.”
He later said: “I do not know whether it was a matter of public
record that these incentive payments were being made in return for booking
reserves.”
He said that under the Nigerian system, a wider range of reserves was
reported to the government than was required by the US Securities and
Exchange Commission.
An oil industry source said: “During the 1990s there was real competition
for reserves booking and perhaps there was less vigilance attached to
the Nigerian operation than there should have been. Everyone got carried
away in the gold rush. Some of these reserves were not only not provable
but not realizable.”
Shell has declined to say what proportion of the over-booked reserves
relate to Nigeria. But it is certain to come under pressure to give
a clear account of what went on when it presents its results.
Watts admitted he had “outraged” some shareholders by failing
to attend the conference call at which the reserves bombshell was first
dropped. He will front the results but the detailed explanation of its
reserves downgrade will be left to the company’s current head of
exploration and production, Walter van de Vijver.
Watts is not due to step down as chairman until June next year and has
told staff that he intends to serve out his time. Shell is expected
to attempt to appease investors by modernizing its corporate governance
arrangements but it will stop short of abandoning its dual-board structure.
Source: Independent (UK)
Fireworks erupt over US role
at genocide conference
By Ritt Goldstein
Stockholm, Jan. 30 (IPS) — Just as everyone was discussing
ways to prevent genocide, it was revealed that the United States was
lobbying against the International Criminal Court — there to counter
genocide.
The first intergovernmental conference on genocide to be held since
1948 ended this week in Stockholm with political fireworks within the
conference hall marking its finish.
Before representatives from 55 nations, former Australian foreign minister
Gareth Evans said US officials had been using the conference to lobby
against the International Criminal Court (ICC), the very body created
to try crimes against humanity like genocide. The United States has
withdrawn from the Rome Treaty of 1998 that created the ICC.
“I’m distressed to hear that the same old squeeze has been
put on the national delegations all over again at this conference,”
Evans said. “And in the otherwise admirable declaration we have
emerging from it there is no mention of the International Criminal Court
... this is just indefensible.”
Evans continued to berate the Bush administration for blocking global
efforts to create such accountability structures. His remarks were greeted
with thunderous ovation.
The dramatic intervention highlighted the challenge before the Stockholm
International Forum 2004, as the conference was called. The meeting,
held on Jan. 26- 28, drew political leaders, officials, academics and
members of non- governmental organizations. The Swedish government hosted
the conference.
On the one hand United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan drew support
for his proposal to set up a committee on the prevention of genocide.
On the other, delegates saw just what could be preventing the prevention
of genocide.
Annan pointed to tragedies spawned by a lack of political will. He said
there had been deliberate efforts to mislabel genocide, and that some
states “even refused to call it by its name, to avoid fulfilling
their obligations.”
Annan said a special rapporteur should be created along with the committee
on the prevention of genocide, the rapporteur reporting “directly
to the Security Council.”
Genocide is a threat that must be addressed with “strong and united
political action and, in extreme cases, by military action,” he
said. But cutting to the crux of the issue, Annan asked: “The question
is, do we have the will?”
Secretary- General of the International Committee of the Red Cross Jakob
Kellenberger also saw a “lack of will to act.” The US-based
Human Rights Watch (HRW) endorsed Annan’s proposal. It said a key
facet of the initiative is that no one “would be able to say they
didn’t know.”
Describing the slaughter of between 800,000 and a million people in
Rwanda in 1994, Annan said “a lack of resources and a lack of will
to take on the commitment which would have been necessary” created
conditions for the disaster.
“Instead of reinforcing our troops, we withdraw them,” Annan
said. “The gravest mistakes were made by member states, particularly
in the way decisions were taken in the Security Council.”
While Annan and others spoke of the “responsibility” of humanitarian
intervention, a current of concern ran through this. Annan emphasized
the imperative for “clear ground rules to distinguish between genuine
threats of genocide, which require a military solution, and other situations
where force would not be legitimate.”
In the light of such concerns, the conference debated whether terrorism
and weapons of mass destruction were ‘genocidal’ threats,
casting the shadow of the war on terror over discussions.
‘Genocide; a background paper’ commissioned by the Swedish
Government from Sweden’s Lund University raised further questions.
The paper asked if “the very structure of modern bureaucratic society
is the root cause of the genocidal impulse.” The paper paralleled
questions examined by US political scientist and philosopher Hannah
Arendt in her book ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality
of Evil’ (Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi colonel executed for transporting
countless Jews to extermination camps).
The authors of the Lund university paper, professors of history Kristian
Gerner and Klas-Göran Karlsson, examined how a “pliant bureaucracy”
equipped with administrative and weapons technology can come to “solve
what were seen as acute political and social problems by murdering human
beings on a mass scale.”
Gerner and Karlsson noted such developments in Rwanda. They also pointed
out that after Vietnam invaded Cambodia, ending the 1975-1979 genocide
which claimed more than 1.6 million lives, the “United Nations,
the United States and China continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge (which
was responsible for the genocide) as Cambodia’s legitimate government.”
The US delegation raised the issue of action against “recurring
atrocities” in southern Sudan and the eastern and Ituri regions
of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Both the Congolese regions
and southern Sudan are rich in oil, casting a less than altruistic light
on the Bush Administration motives.
In the closing minutes of the conference, Swedish Prime Minister Göran
Persson emphasized the need for UN revision and renewal to safeguard
multilateralism and the rights of the weak. “If we fail, then we
will see the multilateral UN becoming weaker and weaker, and I fear
such a situation,” he said.
Costa Rican activists pledge to fight
against CAFTA
By José Eduardo Mora
San Jose, Costa Rica, Jan. 26 (IPS) — Trade unions and
civil society groups say they will continue to fight the free trade
agreement between Costa Rica and the United States, which calls for
liberalization of Costa Rica’s state-run telecommunications and
insurance monopolies.
Fabio Chaves, leader of a union of employees of the Costa Rican Electricity
Institute (ICE), the state telecommunications enterprise, said the agreement
signed Sunday by the two countries was “pure theatre,” because
“it was being cooked up since December.”
On Dec. 16, Costa Rica pulled out of negotiations of CAFTA (Central
American Free Trade Agreement), a deal involving the United States and
four other countries from the region, and officially postponed further
talks until January.
Albino Vargas, secretary-general of the National Association of Public
Employees (ANEP), said it was predictable that the bilateral negotiations
would produce a treaty that benefits the United States more than Costa
Rica.
“The signing of the treaty is no surprise. We knew the politicians
were going to hand over the ICE and the National Insurance Institute,
but we are declaring a frontal offensive to prevent the agreement from
being ratified by Congress,” Chaves told IPS.
Costa Rica’s trade minister, Alberto Trejos, said in Washington,
where the treaty was signed, that his country had achieved “an
excellent agreement.”
The official said that the treaty is an answer to the hopes of the Costa
Rican people for increased trade with the United States, which he said
will promote “economic growth, investment and new sources of employment.”
Roberto Zoellick, US trade representative, told a Washington press conference
he was pleased that Costa Rica had joined other Central American countries
by signing an agreement designed to “expand free trade between
neighbors and friends.”
El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua finalized negotiations
with the United States on Dec. 17, a day after Costa Rica backed out
after having participated in the talks, citing differences related to
farm trade and the telecoms and insurance liberalization demands.
According to the new treaty, Costa Rica commits to opening its markets
in private network services and Internet services by January 2006, and
its cellular phone market by 2007, as well as passing a law this year
for “modernizing” the ICE.
For the insurance market, liberalization is to be complete by 2011,
but in January 2005, when the treaty is slated to take effect, the purchase
of insurance abroad will be legalized.
In 2008, Costa Rica is to allow in companies that offer voluntary insurance,
and in 2010 competition will be open for obligatory types of insurance.
Representatives of the ICE employees’ union, ANEP and other groups
have already sat down to define immediate actions of protest at the
treaty.
The activists say that, under the circumstances, “the next scenario
of confrontation will be the streets,” as occurred in April 1999
when thousands of Costa Ricans came out in protest against nearly the
same thing: the liberalization of the telecoms market in ICE’s
hands, promoted by then-president Miguel Angel Rodríguez (1998-2002).
The Rodríguez administration withdrew the bill from Congress,
where it had already been approved in the first instance.
“The opening of telecommunications is immediate, which is an offence
against national interests. In Europe, for example, liberalization was
agreed, but with a timeline of 12 years. The market is being opened
due to pressures from the Costa Rican political right,” said Chaves.
Liberalizing the telecoms market would only benefit the big transnational
companies in Latin America, to the detriment of consumers, he said.
“Big interests bring big risks, which is why those of us opposed
to the free trade treaty are ready to convene a nationwide sit-down
strike to prevent the agreement from being ratified,” said the
unionist.
Protest is inevitable, given the negative impacts that the treaty with
Washington will bring, said ANEP leader Vargas.
He said that the purchase of generic medications by the Costa Rican
social security agency will be banned in five to 10 years as a result
of the agreement and will put the government institution in jeopardy.
“The intellectual property issue worries us, because in limiting
access to medications, it will have a very strong social impact,”
said the public employees’ union leader.
Says Rodrigo Carazo, former president of Costa Rica (1978-1982) and
current head of the Comité de Defensa de la Institucionalidad,
the treaty is a “mystery and a threat,” because as yet the
terms of the negotiations have not been made public.
Minister Trejos said Monday that the text of the treaty would be available
for the review of the Costa Rican people beginning next week.
The free trade negotiating process between the Central American countries
and Washington began in January 2003, and throughout the process activists
and even lawmakers demanded —with no luck — that the text
under discussion be made public.
Costa Rica’s onion and potato growers were able to keep their products
out of the negotiations. However, the talks did include chickens, pigs,
dairy products, vegetable oils and rice. The country’s rice growers
are worried about competition from massive imports from the United States.
The Costa Rican Chamber of Exporters is pleased with the treaty. Its
vice-president, Sergio Navas, called on members to take advantage of
the opportunities of greater access to the giant US market.
Among the disappointed in Costa Rica, however, were the textile manufacturers,
who did not obtain the US market access they sought. Their counterparts
in the United States fiercely opposed the inclusion of textiles in the
treaty, fearing the competition of cheap labor in Costa Rica.
Opposition to treaty ratification on the US side is coming from the
AFL-CIO, the country’s largest union, and from lawmakers of the
opposition Democratic Party.
Also speaking out are religious organizations, human rights groups such
as the US affiliate of Oxfam, and think tanks like the Washington Office
on Latin America.
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