Nationwide Iraqi uprising lashes
back at occupation

Compiled by Bud Howell

Apr. 7 (AGR)-- Grafitti covered the streets of Iraq calling for holy war, as the bombing of a mosque by a US military helicopter sent Iraqi men and women to protest in the streets. Iraqi civilians clashed with US-led coalition forces this week, resulting in the deaths of over 30 Americans and more than 200 Iraqis since Sunday, Apr. 4. While the Bush administration was quick to blame the latest atrocities in Iraq on foreign terrorists and loyalists of Saddam Hussein, recent atrocities indicate a popular and indigenous resistance to the American occupation.

This follows the Mar. 31 public slaying and mutilation of four Americans in Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad now besieged by US Marines. The Americans, all employed by a private security contractor for the US government, were dragged from their vehicles upon being ambushed by gunmen in what appeared to be a premeditated attack.

According to Ahmed Obayid, a 38 year-old Iraqi truck driver, the gunmen seized the area by detonating an explosive device that cleared the area of people without causing damage. Obayid said one American survived the initial round of gunfire but was pulled from his vehicle by a gathering mob. “The people killed him by throwing bricks on him and jumping on him until they killed him. They cut off his arm and his leg and his head, and they were cheering and dancing.” Obayid said the attackers soon departed as townspeople went on a rampage.

For hours, area residents roamed the streets proclaiming resistance to the US-led occupation. On the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera, widely watched in Iraq, political analyst Thafer al Ani said the Fallujah mob did not necessarily consist of Hussein supporters: “It is simply people who are resisting the illegal occupation.”

Though US commanders have pledged to conduct house-to-house searches to find and punish the killers, it appears that the entire city has come under collective punishment.

US outsourcing war chores to private contractors

The contracted security agents worked for Blackwater Security Consulting of Moyock, NC. Blackwater Security Consulting is a division of Blackwater USA, a private company that provides training and support to military, government and law enforcement operations around the world. The company’s presence in Iraq may stem from a $35.7 million contract to train over 10,000 soldiers from several states in the US.

Other private military companies supply bodyguards for the president of Afghanistan, construct detention camps to hold suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, and pilot armed reconnaissance planes and helicopter gunships to eradicate coca crops in Colombia. For-profit military companies currently enjoy an estimated $100 billion in business worldwide each year, with much of the money going to Fortune 500 firms like Halliburton, DynCorp, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon.

The latest incident involving another such “mercenary for hire” company occurred in Haiti. There the Steele Foundation, a private security firm based in California, was protecting the palace when Jean-Bertrand Aristide was kidnapped by US Marines and rushed to the airport at Port-au-Prince and onto a plane that took off with no listed destination. Aristide later surfaced in the Central African Republic.

Multiple cities marked by resident rebellions and Shiite resistance fighters

While Fallujah grabbed most of the week’s Iraq headlines, attacks throughout the country in other key cities showed signs of a popular resistance. A car bomb at a market in Ramadi killed six Iraqi civilians. In recent weeks, violence has hit the southern city of Basra, and a spate of fatal attacks has occurred in the northern city of Mosul.

Many violent exchanges between Iraqis and US-led occupation forces involved a nationwide assault by US-led occupation forces on well-known cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who is leading a national movement against collaborators of the US-led occupation. Al-Sadr, whose father was a religious leader gunned down by suspected agents of Saddam Hussein in 1999, is demanding that the US transfer its power to Iraqis who are not connected with the US-led occupation authority. “I call upon the American people to stand beside their brethren, the Iraqi people, who are suffering an injustice by your rulers and the occupying army, to help them in the transfer of power to honest Iraqis,” he said in a statement.

Al-Sadr and his militia are said to be unpopular among most of Iraq’s Shiite majority. British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently said al-Sadr “does not represent the vast majority of Iraqi Shias.”

But portraits of al-Sadr and graffiti praising his “valiant uprising” appeared on mosque and government building walls in the Sunni city of Ramadi this week, and peaceful demonstrations in support of al-Sadr occurred in the northern cities of Mosul and Rashad. And on Mar. 31 in Baghdad, al-Sadr gunmen went to a mainly Sunni neighborhood to join with fighters there in firing on US military vehicles -- a rare instance of Sunni and Shiite militants joining forces.

Intense fighting raged across Iraq Mar. 6, as at least 20 US soldiers were killed in attacks on the American-led occupation that reached a level of violence not seen since the end of the effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Yesterday, a US helicopter went down killing 12 Americans west of Baghdad. The day before, 66 Iraqis, 13 Americans and one Ukrainian soldier joined the growing list of war casualties in Iraq. Sixteen children and eight women were reported killed when warplanes struck four houses late Mar. 6, said Hatem Samir, a Fallujah Hospital official. In Nasiriyah on the same day, supporters of al-Sadr clashed with Italian soldiers, leaving 15 Iraqis dead and 35 wounded, an Italian news agency reported. A dozen Italian soldiers reportedly were wounded. In Amarah, where British troops are responsible for security, fighting overnight killed 15 Iraqis and wounded eight others. In Kut, a Ukrainian soldier was killed and six others were wounded. Ukraine has about 1,650 troops in Iraq, the third-largest contingent among countries that did not take part in last year’s major combat operations. At least a dozen US Marines were killed in the town of Ramadi near the Sunni hotbed of Fallujah, a US official said, when their position near the governor’s palace in the city was attacked by dozens of Iraqis. The official said a “significant number” of Iraqis were also killed. Five Marines were also reported killed in fighting in an operation to get Americans into Fallujah itself.

US rockets hit mosque, killing 40

A US helicopter hit the Abdul-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque with three missiles in Fallujah yesterday, killing about 40 people as worshippers gathered for afternoon prayers, witnesses said. US officials said the incident began when a grenade fired from the mosque hit a US military vehicle. An AP journalist reported seeing cars ferrying the dead and wounded from the site. Temporary hospitals were set up in private homes to treat the wounded and prepare the dead for burial. Reports of the fighting said that marine combat patrols, supported by helicopter gunships, were launching reconnaissance missions in the city but coming under attack from armed resisters. US forces have pounded suspected militant sites in the city’s densely populated neighborhoods.

Iraqi casualties are unknown from those clashes because ambulances are not being allowed to enter the town. A further three US soldiers were killed in Baghdad. The latest confirmation of American deaths means more than 30 US troops have been killed since conflicts erupted in three key Iraqi cities on Mar. 4, and well over 600 since the war officially began last year.

US administrator Paul Bremer told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that despite the latest Iraqi uprisings, “Iraq is on track to realize the kind of Iraq that Iraqis want and Americans want, which is a democratic Iraq.” However, a US official in Washington said this week on condition of anonymity that all US officials in Iraq, including those working for the provisional authority, had been told to remain inside their compounds since Mar. 5 because of security worries. A senior officer in Washington said US military commanders had begun studying ways they might raise the troop level in Iraq should violence spread much more widely.

Blix says Iraq worse off after war

The costs of the war in Iraq have outweighed the benefits of removing Saddam Hussein, former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix told a Danish newspaper. Blix, who retired from the UN last June and has since questioned the Bush administration’s reasons for declaring war in Iraq, said: “It’s positive that Saddam and his bloody regime is gone, but when one weighs the costs, it’s clearly the negative aspects that dominate.” Blix said the war had contributed to a destabilization of the Middle East and a move away from democracy in the region, adding that the US-led war on terrorism and its control in Iraq has “laid the foundation for even more terror.”

Referring to the planned June 30 transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis, White House press secretary Scott McClellan blamed the insurgent violence in Iraq on terrorists. “There are some remnants of the former regime that are enemies of freedom and enemies of democracy, but democracy is taking root and we are making important progress,” he said. Before the attack on American contractors, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the American deputy director of military operations in Iraq, said the US Marines in Fallujah were encountering fewer security problems and were “quite pleased with how they are moving progressively forward.”

Contrary to the assertions of Kimmitt and other officials, most US units have reported no “foreign fighters” in their areas of occupation and the US military largely believes the growing number of attacks in Iraq are being carried out by home-grown guerrilla organizations. It’s the same problem the Americans have faced from the start: explaining why Iraqis whom they allegedly came to “liberate” should want to kill them. Another occupation official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said counterinsurgency specialists in Iraq believe popular anger extends far beyond a small minority — in Fallujah, he said, “the whole city” sympathizes with the insurgents — and are crafting strategies to deal with it. And recently, spokespeople for the US-led occupation have acknowledged that all those responsible for insurgent violence cannot be placed into rigid categories such as Ba’athist or Islamist.

Sources: Associated Press, Aljazeera.net, BBC, Boston Globe, Independent (UK), Mother Jones, Reuters

Fear as thousands of killers come home

By Declan Walsh

Gikongoto, Rwanda, Apr. 4— It is a hill like any other in Rwanda. Curvy-horned cattle ramble along the dirt road. Lush banana groves cling to the slope, nestled between rows of simple, mud-walled dwellings. Some house the survivors of the genocide that blazed across these hills a decade ago. Others hold the killers that carried it out.

Virginie Mujawayezo, a 25-year-old Tutsi, lost her entire family to machete-wielding Hutus. Now the militiamen are her neighbors again. Two “genocidaires” live further up the hill. They were released from prison after pleading guilty and claiming repentance. Virginie does not believe them. “It’s impossible to forgive,” she said in her front room, her infant baby suckling at her breast. “It has been 10 years now. They should have asked for forgiveness a long time ago.”

Fear and frustration tinge the immense sadness of the genocide commemorations, which took place Apr. 4. Diplomats and a handful of heads of state joined Rwandans for a solemn reflection on the orgy of murder that swept across the tiny central African country, and the West’s failure to stop it.

The Tutsi-dominated government preaches ethnic reconciliation. On the surface, the message seems to be taking root. Rwanda has become one of Africa’s safest countries, and ethnicity is something of a taboo subject, at least in public. But on hilltops like this one, in the southern province of Gikongoro, the wounds remain raw. “Everything looks good but it’s a pretense. There is still a lot of anger and fear. Rwandans are very good at hiding things,” said Father Nicky Hennity, an Irish missionary in the area.

Gikongoro was the scene of some of the genocide’s earliest and most brutal massacres. Town officials, soldiers, and simple farmers conspired to butcher tens of thousands of Tutsis. Today the victims’ remains are on public display, stacked on shelves in the deserted classrooms of Murambi school in a grim memorial to the slaughter. Across the valley more than 3,000 suspected perpetrators are crammed into the local prison, awaiting trials that may never take place in the swamped judicial system.

Last year the government released 28,000 prisoners to relieve the pressure. Among them was Vincent Seruvumba, 54, who returned to his hilltop house above Virginie Mujawayezo. The farmer denied killing anyone. “I saw a baby being killed at a roadblock. They used a hoe. But I didn’t take part,” he said, eyes darting back and forth as he spoke. And these days his Tutsi neighbors had nothing to be afraid of, he added. “Things are much better. There are no more problems. We can even drink together in the bars.”

The survivors are unconvinced. Down the slope Florien Mukarubuga said she feared men like Vincent and their hoes. A decade ago a Hutu gang cut her husband and three children to pieces. She knows the killers used hoes because when the police forced them to exhume the bodies, they re-enacted the murder, blow by blow.

Many Tutsi survivors feel let down since 1994. Promised compensation has failed to materialize. An estimated 250,000 women were raped, many of whom are struggling to bring up children born through the violence. Seven in 10 are infected with HIV, according to Amnesty International. Some say the millions of dollars the government is spending on genocide commemoration, or on Kigali’s new Intercontinental Hotel, could have been used for anti-retroviral drugs.

Justice is painfully slow. Another 30,000 of the 90,000 genocide suspects are due to be released in June. Theoretically they will stand trial in Gacaca, a traditional justice system. But Gacaca has started in just 10 per cent of villages, so most perpetrators will simply return to their homes.

Hutus are burdened with guilt but are also resentful towards the government’s authoritarian tendencies. In last year’s presidential elections, the main opposition candidate, a Hutu, was harassed, his supporters were intimidated and ballot-rigging was rife. Paul Kagame took 95 percent of the vote, which he claimed was a reflection of his popularity. Critics were concerned it could signal a slide towards autocracy. Also, President Kagame refuses to acknowledge Tutsi reprisals against Hutus -- estimated to account for 450,000 deaths in Rwanda and Congo -- and has stopped Tutsi officers being called before the war crimes tribunal in Tanzania.

Critical voices are stifled. Last week Robert Sebufirira, editor of one the few independent newspapers, fled Rwanda. He told Western human rights researchers that state security agents had taken him to a forest, tied him to a tree and told him he would die there. Sebufirira is seeking political asylum in Tanzania.

Western donors such as the UK, which prop up the Rwandan economy, usually turn a blind eye to such abuses. They say Kagame is stewarding the country through a necessarily difficult transition to democracy. But some say the stern measures are hindering an open discussion of the past. “People are keeping a lot of anger inside. If it is not managed positively, it could explode in a very destructive way,” said Fr. Hennity.

The Catholic Church has also been slow to lead, he says. Priests were perpetrators and victims of the genocide. Hennity’s predecessor was murdered in 1994, but other clerics have been imprisoned. One priest, who denies any guilt, used to carry an AK-47 gun and a belt of grenades. The commemoration will also be a time of guilty reflection for the West. Arriving this weekend is Lt. Gen Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian United Nations commander who sent frantic cables to New York begging for help in April 1994 -- assistance that never came. Instead the UN mission was reduced from 2,500 troops to 270.

But on the rural hillsides, the historical arguments count for little. What matters now is piercing the sour veil of silence surrounding the slaughter, in the hope it will never happen again. At Murambi school, a genocide survivor, Emmanuel Murangira, keeps watch over the macabre memorial. “It’s very difficult to talk about [the past],” he said. “But now we have to get on with living.”

Source: Independent (UK)

 

US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide

By Rory Carroll

Johannesburg, South Africa, Mar. 31 — President Bill Clinton’s administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in Apr. 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time.

Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.

Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president had been told of a planned “final solution to eliminate all Tutsis” before the slaughter reached its peak.

It took Hutu death squads three months from Apr. 6 to murder an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus and at each stage accurate, detailed reports were reaching Washington’s top policymakers.

The documents undermine claims by Clinton and his senior officials that they did not fully appreciate the scale and speed of the killings.

The National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute based in Washington, DC, went to court to obtain the material.

It discovered that the CIA’s national intelligence daily, a secret briefing circulated to Clinton, then Vice President Al Gore, and hundreds of senior officials, included almost daily reports on Rwanda. One, dated Apr. 23, said rebels would continue fighting to “stop the genocide, which ... is spreading south.”

Three days later the state department’s intelligence briefing for former Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other officials noted “genocide and partition” and reported declarations of a “final solution to eliminate all Tutsis.”

However, the administration did not publicly use the word genocide until May 25 and even then diluted its impact by saying “acts of genocide.”

On a visit to the Rwandan capital, Kigali, in 1998 Clinton apologized for not acting quickly enough or immediately calling the crimes genocide.

In what was widely seen as an attempt to diminish his responsibility, he said: “It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”

Source: Guardian (UK)

GlaxoSmithKline allegedly used children
as ‘laboratory animals’

By Antony Barnett

New York, New York, Apr. 4 — Orphans and babies as young as three months old have been used as guinea pigs in potentially dangerous medical experiments sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, an investigation has revealed.

British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline is embroiled in the scandal. The firm sponsored experiments on the children from Incarnation Children’s Center, a New York care home that specializes in treating children with HIV/AIDS and which is run by Catholic charities.

The children had either been infected with HIV or born to HIV-positive mothers. Their parents are dead, untraceable, or deemed unfit to look after them.

According to documents obtained by British newspaper, The Observer, Glaxo has sponsored at least four medical trials since 1995 using Hispanic and African-American children at Incarnation. The documents give details of all clinical trials in the US and reveal the experiments sponsored by Glaxo were designed to test the “safety and tolerance” of AIDS medications, some of which have potentially dangerous side effects. Glaxo manufactures a number of drugs designed to treat HIV, including AZT.

Normally trials on children would require parental consent but, as the infants are wards of the state, New York’s authorities hold that role.

The city health department has launched an investigation into claims that more than 100 children at Incarnation were used in 36 experiments -- at least four co-sponsored by Glaxo. Some of these trials were designed to test the “toxicity” of AIDS medications. One involved giving children as young as four a high-dosage cocktail of seven drugs at one time. Another looked at the reaction in six-month-old babies to a double dose of measles vaccine.

Most experiments were funded by federal agencies like the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Until now Glaxo’s role had not emerged.

In 1997 an experiment co-sponsored by Glaxo used children from Incarnation to “obtain tolerance, safety, and pharmacokinetic” data for Herpes drugs. In a more recent experiment, the children were used to test AZT. A third experiment sponsored by Glaxo and US drug firm Pfizer investigated the “long-term safety” of anti-bacterial drugs on three-month-old babies.

The medical establishment has defended the trials arguing they enabled these children to obtain state-of-the-art therapy they would otherwise not have received for potentially fatal illnesses.

However, health campaigners argue there is a difference between providing the latest drugs and experimentation. They claim many of the experiments were “phase one trials” -- among the most risky -- and that HIV tests for babies were not a reliable indicator of actual infection and therefore toxic drugs could have been given to healthy infants. HIV drugs are similar to those used in chemotherapy and can have serious side-effects.

Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, said the children had been treated like “laboratory animals.”

“These are some of the most vulnerable individuals in the country and there appears to be a policy of giving drug firms access to them,” she said. “Throughout the history of medical research we have seen prisoners abused, the mentally ill abused, and now poor kids in a care home.”

Sharav has urged the US Food and Drug Administration to investigate and has demanded full disclosure of all adverse effects suffered by the children, including deaths. Brooklyn Democrat councilor Bill de Blasio is also demanding that New York’s Administration for Children’s Services, which approved the trials, reveal who gave consent and on what grounds.

Glaxo has confirmed it provided funds for some of the experiments but denied any improper action. A spokeswoman said: “These studies were implemented by the US Aids Clinical Trial Group, a clinical research network paid for by the National Institutes of Health. Glaxo’s involvement in such studies would have been to provide study drugs or funding but we would have no interactions with the patients.

“Generally speaking, clinical research is carefully regulated in the US and it would be the responsibility of the appropriate authorities to ensure all subjects in a clinical trial provided appropriate, informed consent to conform with all local laws and regulations regarding legal authority in the case of minors.”

The Incarnation trials were run by Columbia University Medical Center doctors. Columbia spokeswoman Annie Bayne said there had been no clinical trials at Incarnation since 2000 and that consent for the children was provided by the Administration for Children’s Services, which uses a panel of doctors and lawyers to determine whether the benefits of a trial for each child outweighs the risks. “There are many safeguards in the system. HIV is eventually a fatal disease, but drug therapy has lengthened life significantly,” said Bayne.

A spokesman for Incarnation said: “The purpose of the trials was to test the efficacy of HIV medication ... These trials were based on scientific evidence of their potential value in the treatment of HIV-infected children.”

Source: Observer (UK)