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More Hawaiian land for the military than for Hawaiians

Terror alert resounds in Muslim communities

ACLU to provide legal aid to victims of new FBI ‘dragnet’

 

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More Hawaiian land for the military than for Hawaiians

By Winona LaDuke

July 27 — It’s summer in Hawaii, the state is considering another generous land donation to the military and has made homelessness a crime. Under the cover of the term “Military Transformation” and with the blanket of 9/11, the military is taking a wide berth in land stealing. And, recently enacted Act 50 makes criminals out of people who have been displaced by the military itself, many of them Native Hawaiian.  

“They bombed the houses in the l940s and took over the entire valley,” explained Sparky Rodrigues, one of many Makua residents still waiting to move home. “The government moved all of the residents out and said after the war, you can move back -- and then they used the houses for target practice.“ The families tell stories that the military came with guns and said, “Here’s $300, thank you,” and “You’ve got to move.” Those people remain without their houses, and for years, many lived on the beaches in beautiful Makua Valley, watching the bombing of their land.

“Tomorrow morning they’re going to detonate a 1,000 pounder, a 500 pounder and a 100 pound bomb,” Rodrigues mused. Such detonations are part of the military cleanup of the site before, apparently, any new maneuvers. “We’ve gone in and observed them detonate those bombs,” said Rodrigues. More than once, live ammunition has washed up on the beaches at Makua.

Malu Aina, a military watchdog group from Hawaii reported:

“Live military ordnance in large quantities has been found off Hapuna Beach and in Hilo Bay. Additional ordnance, including grenades, artillery shells, rockets, mortars, armor piercing ordnance, bazooka rounds, napalm bombs, and hedgehog missiles have been found at Hilo airport in Waimea town, Waikoloa Village, in North and South Kohala at Puako and Mahukona, in Kea’au and Maku’u farm lots in Puna, at South Point in Ka’u, and on residential and school grounds. At least nine people have been killed or injured by exploding ordnance. Some unexploded ordnance can be set off even by cell phones.”

Since the end of World War II, Hawaii has been the center of the United States military’s Pacific Command (PACOM), from which all US forces in the region are directed. Hawaii serves as an outpost for Pacific expansionism, along with Guam, the Marshall Islands, Samoa and the Philippines. PACOM is the center of US military activities over more than half the earth, from the west coast of the US to Africa’s east coast, from the Arctic to Antarctica, covering 70 percent of the world’s oceans.  

The US military controls 200,000 acres of Hawaii, more than in any other state, with over 100 military installations and at least 150,000 personnel. Among the largest sites is the Pohakuloa Training Area (PTA), a 108,793-acre bombing range between the sacred mountains of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa in the center of the big island, Hawaii. At least seven million rounds of ammunition are fired annually at that base alone. The military proposes to expand the base by 23,000-acres under the “Military Transformation Proposal” and hopes for up to 79,000 additional acres in new land acquisition. Pohakuloa has the “highest concentration of endangered species of any Army installation in the world,” according to its former commander Lt. Col. Dennis Owen, with over 250 ancient Hawaiian archeological sites.

Hawaiian military bucks and the homeless

The $l.5 billion proposal would include more than 400 Stryker vehicles (eight-wheeled, 19-ton, armored infantry carriers), new C-l7 transport planes and additional arsenal expansions.

Sen. Daniel Inouye, who is the ranking member of the Defense Appropriations Committee has been a strong advocate for more military in Hawaii. And, in his vice chairmanship of the Indian Affairs Committee, he has been a stronger advocate for diminishing Native Hawaiian sovereignty, rights and land title. The so-called Akaka Bill would strip Hawaiians of long-term access to land, and, like the infamous Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act, bar future recourse for justice.

In the meantime, the 2 million acres of land originally earmarked for Native Hawaiians (under Hawaii’s statehood act) are being transferred to private interests and to the military. Some 22,000 Native Hawaiians remain on waiting lists for their homestead awards; an estimated 30,000 have died waiting.

“We can barely pay house rent, and they build apartments,” said one Hawaiian from the Wai’anae coast. “With inflation now, its hard to buy tomatoes, carrots... You cannot eat ’em, those buildings.”

Hawaii has now adopted one of the nation’s severest penalties to discourage individuals from living on public property. Act 50, a recently passed law, bans individuals for an entire year from the public areas where they are given a citation. The act stipulates that people found illegally occupying public property such as beaches and parks are subject to ejection, and if they return within a year they face arrest, a possible $1,000 fine and/or 30 days in jail. Many Hawaiian families live on the beaches and in public parks.

The Beltran family, among others, has lived on the beach at Mokule’ia for 12 years, claiming the right to live there as ancestral, but each week they must get a permit to camp. “We have a right to be here, because our ancestors were from here,” Beltran explained to a reporter. “I cannot go to the mainland and say that’s my home. I cannot go to Japan and call that my home. This is my home, right here. I will never give this place up.”

The proposal will exacerbate the already desperate situation of many Hawaiians, who comprise a good portion of those without permanent housing and at least half of the present prison population.

“All of the Hawaiian poor come to Waianaie, all of the homeless come to Waianae,” said Sparky Rodrigues. “If the military comes in here with their cost of living allowance with the Strykers’ new expansion, then rent will go up, and they’ll bring in 30,000 people. Property values will go up. More Hawaiians will be forced onto the beach as homeless, and they are going to be criminalized… Child Protection Services is looking at homelessness as child abuse. So they’re not going to build schools, and there is an oppressive environment, they can’t get jobs, can’t pay for the house.”

Rodrigues and his wife, Leandra Wai Rodrigues, were arrested in l996 on Father’s Day at Makua. Their family and others were all evicted. “Everything that was left behind was bulldozed and destroyed. Actually they took all our good stuff, and gave it to other people,” Leandra lamented.  

“It was a huge community of homeless, about 60 families and we ended up creating our own self governance,” explained Rodrigues. “The welfare office was sending families that couldn’t afford rent to Makua because it was a safe place. Our goal was to look for long-term solutions to homelessness. Our goal was to go there, and then go back into society. They [social service agencies] aren’t interested in a long term solution, their solution is to pass laws and arrest people.” He added, “calling the folks on the beach ‘squatters’ changes the whole way of looking at it. If they are traditional practitioners or want to live a traditional lifestyle, they are Hawaiians. The use of the word ‘squatters’ makes it okay for the government to bring in the bulldozers and arrest them.”

Clean-up and the Range Readiness Proposal

Clean-up is not the military’s strongest suit. Of the whopping federal defense budget of $265 billion, only a fraction will be spent on cleaning up exploded ordnance at test sites, let alone sites in the process of decommissioning, like Wisconsin’s Badger Munitions Plant, in which the Ho-Chunk Nation seeks some part in its recovery. An Associated Press news story of Jan. 16 stated that according to congressional auditors “removing unexploded munitions and hazardous waste found so far on 15 million acres of shutdown US military ranges could take more than 300 years.” The clean up cost is now estimated at $35 billion and climbing rapidly from an estimate of $20 billion a year ago.

In the present environment and with leadership like Senator Inouye, it looks like the reverse: Build up, not clean up, is on the horizon. Under a bill called the “Readiness and Range Preservation Initiative”, the Department of Defense is pushing Congress to give more waivers to the military for clean up. Last year, the Defense Department succeeded in gaining exemptions for the US military to the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammals Protection Act. The Defense Department now wants exemptions from the Clean Air Act, Superfund Laws and others, all under the premise of national security.

At hearings this spring on the Range Readiness proposals, US Representative Edward Markey, D-Mass., said, “There is no reason to incur ‘collateral damage’ to our public health while meeting our military needs,” referring to the present problems with military contamination.

All told, the Department of Defense is the nation’s largest toxic polluter with over 11,000 toxic “hot spots” on 1,855 military facilities nationwide.

Source: www.indiancountry.com

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Terror alert resounds in Muslim communities

By Haider Rizvi

New York, New York, Aug. 6 (IPS)— Sitting on a sofa in the corner of his living room, Robert Hall turns on the television to watch the evening news on a major network station. He tries to focus on the program, but cannot. He turns to another station and then another. With a remote control in his right hand, he flips channels for a few minutes and then turns off the TV.

“I have terror alert fatigue,” says a furious Hall, 54, a long-time resident of New York. “I am tired of various government agencies telling me to be suspicious of my environment and my friends.”

Hall, an American of European ancestry, says he feels that obsessive TV coverage of the “terror alerts” coming from the US Department of Homeland Security could compromise the safety and security of his friends and fellow New Yorkers who have roots in the Middle East and South Asia.

“Some of my friends were abused and physically attacked after [the terrorist attacks of] Sept. 11, 2001, just because they were Muslims or looked Middle Eastern,” he says.

Last Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge not only issued an official warning of possible terror attacks on major financial institutions in New York, neighboring New Jersey and Washington, he also made a series of conference calls to television anchors and newspaper editors about the threat.

Hall’s concerns about the negative effects of the much-publicized alerts are widely shared by immigrant right groups and Muslim and Arab civil liberties organizations in New York and throughout the country.

“It is creating a lot of paranoia in the Muslim community,” says Rabia Ahmed, a spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a prominent Washington-based rights and advocacy group. “It also encourages hate crimes, which are already happening,” she added, in an interview.

CAIR estimates that in 2003 incidents of violence, discrimination and harassment against Muslims in the United States increased by 70 percent. The group identifies the war in Iraq and a lingering atmosphere of fear from the Sept. 11 attacks as principle factors in the sharp rise.

Other reasons, the group says, included an increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric by some individuals in government and the media, enforcement of the USA PATRIOT Act and increased reporting and documentation by members of the Muslim community.

“The disturbing jump in reports of anti-Muslim incidents is a wake-up call to those commentators who use their public positions to spread anti-Muslim hate,” said Mohamed Nimar, who authored CAIR’s report on anti-Muslim bias.

It found more than 1,000 reports of anti-Islamic acts in the United States in 2003, ranging from business and housing discrimination to violent threats, biased law enforcement and hate crimes. Businessmen from Muslim countries, for instance, complained that they face huge economic losses due to long delays from US customs authorities in releasing their goods at airports.

“It is destroying consumer confidence,” says Nadeem Mirza, a Pakistani businessman in Boston who has been importing antique rugs for several years. “This whole psychology of security and terror has ruined the rug business in the past three years,” Mirza told IPS.

Minority rights activists say that in the aftermath of Sept. 11, many non-Muslim and non-Arab immigrants have also been targeted for hate crimes, simply because they fit the stereotyped image of “terrorists.”

In July for instance, Rajindar Singh Khalsa, a 54-year-old Sikh, was brutally beaten by a gang of young white men in New York who assumed he was a Muslim.

“All peaceful people, including Muslims, South Asians, and Arabs, are totally against any terrorism, and any new threats fake or real put them under a lot of stress and anxiety,” says Partha Banerjee, a community organizer at New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), a cross-cultural rights advocacy group based in New York.

“They fear about being picked up by law enforcement. They fear bias crimes,” added Banerjee.

Others expressed similar concerns about the possible arrests of immigrants on questionable charges of being linked to terrorism. As the terror alert was in full swing this week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said it arrested two Muslim men in New York State who tried to help an undercover agent posing as a terrorist who wanted to buy a rocket-launcher.

Published reports say the agent is a Pakistani who had violated immigration laws, but was promised a lenient sentence after he agreed to work for the FBI.

Authorities claim the two men, one from Iraq, the other from Bangladesh, agreed to launder money from the sale of the missile, meant to kill a Pakistani diplomat in New York. Family members of the accused have rejected the FBI story and right groups, such as CAIR, are skeptical about authorities’ claims.

“The government’s allegations against the two men are deeply troubling,” said a CAIR statement.”All too often, these types of cases are used by those with political and religious agendas to smear Muslims and demonize Islam. We should stick to the facts of the case and avoid generalization and stereotypes.”

The arrests were widely reported by national and local media, along with news of the ongoing terror alert.

While activists view such raids with skepticism, many ordinary US citizens, like Hall, believe they are tactics used by the administration to create a general atmosphere of fear, for political ends. President George W. Bush is in a tough battle to retain his job in November’s presidential election.

“This is disgusting,” says Hall. “I wonder where we are going with all this?”

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