Iraq: fighting rocks Sadr City, Najaf, Kut

Compiled by Shane Perlowin

Aug. 18 (AGR)— On Aug. 11, at least four Iraqis were killed and 10 more were injured when a bomb was detonated at a market in a village north of Baghdad. Officials said it was caused by a makeshift bomb, detonated at the side of a road leading to Baquba.

Renewed violence across Iraq has included fighters from both Sunni and Shia Muslim factions.

Elsewhere in Iraq, two US Marines were killed and three were injured when a CH-53 helicopter crashed late in the day on Aug. 11 in volatile Anbar province.

Also that night, gunmen in Mosul killed two police officers and two bystanders, according to Iraqi police.

US forces and insurgents fought a pitched battle Thursday, Aug. 12, in a central neighborhood of Baghdad, where at least nine Bradley Fighting Vehicles poured cannon fire into a downtown apartment building that had been seized by guerrillas.

The fight was one of several clashes in Baghdad, which is taking on the pall of a besieged city despite assurances by government officials that their forces remain in control. Long lines of automobiles waited for fuel at the few gas stations still open for business. Mosques closed, markets were empty, businesses shut down early. Women and children stayed indoors, and men did not venture out far.

Baghdad’s Sadr City, a Shiite Muslim slum of about 2 million, remained virtually encircled by US troops and Iraqi forces. The area remained largely under the control of the Mahdi army, the Shiite militia loyal to Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

The heaviest fighting in Baghdad erupted early in the day in the downtown area of Haifa Street. US forces took the lead, while the lightly armed Iraqi police stayed in the rear.

Bradley Fighting Vehicles roared into the battle, guns and cannons blazing, and F-15 jets dropped flares and flew low. Attack helicopters buzzed about an apartment building, while armored vehicles fired toward it from the other side of Haifa Street. A crackle of automatic weapons fire answered.

As the fighting subsided, billows of black smoke rose to smudge the bleached sky just as the call to afternoon prayers floated out from a nearby mosque. The area was unusually quiet that evening. A resident of Sadr City said by telephone that members of the Mahdi Army were in front of television sets.

“Now everyone in Sadr City is busy watching the soccer game,” said the resident, who would not give his name. “Everybody is celebrating that the Iraqi team won.” Playing in the Olympic Games in Greece, Iraq upset Portugal, 4-2.

US jet fighters bombed the turbulent city of Fallujah on Aug. 11, killing four people and injuring four others, hospital officials said.

Several houses were damaged in the blasts, including one that was completely burnt, said emergency worker Ahmed Maher.

US forces have persistently fought with militants holed up in the city, a well-known Sunni stronghold, for months.

On Aug. 12, heavy US bombardment of Kut killed at least 72 people and wounded at least 148.

US planes started bombing the al-Shakia district in southern Kut after 3am.

Many of the dead and wounded were women and children according to Kut hospital director Khadir Fadal Arar.

The bombardment followed a day of fierce clashes between Iraqi police and fighters of the Mahdi army, in which at least two national guardsmen and three policemen were wounded.

On Aug. 14, authorities halted oil export flows from the main pipeline in southern Iraq after intelligence showed a rebel militia could strike infrastructure.

The shutdown kept loadings at southern oil terminals at half their normal level, undermining the government’s effort to raise revenue as oil prices hit record highs, partly in response to the instability in Iraq.

The Mahdi Army has vowed to attack oil facilities in response to the US offensive on the Muslim Shi’ite city of Najaf.

A conference of more than 1,100 Iraqis chosen to take the country a crucial step further toward constitutional democracy convened in Baghdad on Sunday, Aug. 15, under siege-like conditions, only to be thrown into disorder by delegates staging angry protests against the American-led military operation in Najaf.

After an opening speech by Iraq’s interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, delegates leapt out of their seats demanding the conference be suspended. One Shiite delegate stormed the stage before being forced back, shouting, “We demand that military operations in Najaf stop immediately!”

Shortly afterward, two mortar shells fired at the area where the meeting was being held landed in a bus and truck terminal nearby, killing 2 people and wounding at least 17.

The mortar strike on the Green Zone came despite massive security, curfews around the zone, and checkpoints.

The three-day conference, called to elect a 100-member commission that is to organize elections in January and hold veto powers over decrees passed by the Allawi government, was not halted.

Meanwhile, US marines and Shia militiamen clashed in the alleys around the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf.

US forces are using Apache helicopters, warplanes and tank shells in response to mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and machine-gun fire by the insurgents.

US tanks came within a few hundred yards of the mosque. Nearly 3,000 Shia civilians have gathered inside, acting as human shields.

In the deserted streets of the old town and in Najaf’s vast cemetery, Mahdi army fighters launched hit-and-run raids on US marine positions.

“They just come up, open fire and disappear,” said a marine tank gunner. “There are a lot of foxholes and warrens here so it makes engagement difficult.”

The Iraqi interior minister ordered foreign reporters out of Najaf. Allawi’s government is moving to impose an authoritarian media clampdown before any full-scale assault on the holy sites which insurgents have made their base.

In Baghdad there was heavier fighting in Sadr City, where Mahdi army militiamen detonated a bomb under a US tank and set it on fire. The crew was slightly hurt.

Meanwhile, Basra’s deputy governor for administrative affairs, Hajj Salam Awdeh al-Maliky, warned that he may openly join al-Sadr’s fight if his offer to send 1,000 Iraqi police, special security and national guardsmen to Najaf is refused by the government.

Some national guardsmen in Basra had even said they would not hesitate to join al-Sadr’s militia if al-Maliky’s offer was rejected.

Al-Maliky had warned that Basra would turn into a battlefield if US occupation forces stormed the inner sanctum of Najaf. “Basra will become another Najaf,” he said.

Also, al-Maliki has said he is to announce the separation of some Iraqi southern governorates from the central Baghdad government.

Al-Maliki said the breakaway province would include Basra, Misan and Dhi Qar governorates.

He also wants to shut Basra’s port and in effect stop oil exports.

Al-Maliki said the decision was taken because the Iraqi interim government was “responsible for the Najaf clashes.”

In other news, a series of official protest resignations have occurred in response to the Najaf and Kut offensives. These include: Major-General Marid Abd al-Hasan, the director of tribal affairs at the Iraqi Interior Ministry; Jawdat Kadam Najim al-Kuraishi, the deputy governor of Najaf; and sixteen of Najaf’s 30-member provincial council.

As of press time it has been reported that al-Sadr had accepted conditions proposed by an Iraqi delegation to end the fierce fighting in Najaf, including the withdrawal of his militia from the mosque of Imam Ali. Spokesmen for Sadr could not be immediately reached for comment.

Sources: Telegraph (UK), Independent (UK), BBC NEWS, New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, Aljazeera, Agence France Presse

Chavez victory a ‘home run hit’ into the White House

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Aug. 18 (AGR)— In a marathon electoral recall referendum marked by high voter turnout, the people of Venezuela voted overwhelmingly on Aug. 15 to keep their president, Hugo Chavez, in office to serve out the remainder of his six-year term. Had he lost, fresh presidential elections would have been called in 30 days.

To the consternation of stunned foes who fought for years to oust him, Chavez won 58 percent of the historic vote, not only surviving the effort but converting one of the biggest challenges of his presidency into an even broader mandate to carry on his “revolution for the poor” in his second term which ends in January 2007.

Venezuela’s first president from an indigenous heritage hailed the referendum win as a victory of participatory democracy over neoliberalism and imperialist projects. Chávez is the first democratically elected president in Latin America to submit to such a test.

Fireworks exploded across the capital Caracas before dawn. There were wild scenes outside the presidential palace, where Chavez serenaded thousands of cheering supporters from a balcony.

Wiping tears from his face, Chávez told the gathered masses: “Starting today Venezuela enters a new phase. Venezuela has changed forever. There is no going back.” Chavez called the result “an alternative to capitalism and false democracy.”

The referendum had been activated after the president’s opposition collected signatures from 20% of the population — a recall mechanism inserted into the Venezuelan constitution by Chavez himself in 1999.

In the end, Chavez drew nearly 5 million votes, while the opposition collected fewer than 3.6 million. It is the eighth time Chavez has won public approval of his rule and his policies, after two presidential elections and six referendums.

The vote in the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter was closely watched. Venezuela, the only Latin American member of OPEC, supplies more crude to the United States than does Saudi Arabia.

His victory eased world oil prices, which had been buffeted by concerns that a successful recall, and the ensuing violence that some expected, could disrupt production at the state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela.

The rejection of the recall is a setback for Venezuela’s opposition, which had been campaigning for Chavez’s recall for more than a year after failing to force him from office in an April 2002 coup.

It is also a blow for the US government, which had endorsed the coup and helped finance opposition groups that campaigned for the recall through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), funded by the US Congress. Through the NED, the opposition had received about $2 million.

Chavez had portrayed the referendum as a battle between the Venezuelan people and what he sees as “imperialist” intentions of the United States.

“The ball has landed in the center of the White House,” he said in his victory speech on Aug. 16, in a reference to a metaphor he had used in the campaign, when he said the result would be like a baseball being hit all the way to Washington. “Hopefully, from this day on, Washington will respect the government and the people of Venezuela.”

“The NED says its goal is to build democracy, but it [gave] money to people who were key players in the coup and who [tried] to oust a democratically elected president,” said Deborah James of the Washington-based Venezuela Information Office.

One grant of $42,000 went to a group called Leadership and Vision to train Caracas police “in democratic rights and responsibilities, and the peaceful resolution of conflict.”

Oscar Garcia Mendoza, who signed Leadership and Vision’s grant agreement with the NED, also signed a newspaper advertisement two days after Chavez’s brief ouster that declared “unconditional support” for the coup government.

Some grant recipients, such as the avidly anti-Chavez political party Justice First, make no pretense of being nonpartisan. Several prominent members of the party supported the coup leaders. One of them, Leopoldo Martinez, was finance minister in the coup government.

The NED also gave money to a conservative think tank known as CEDICE to help it draft “a viable [opposition] agenda.” Rocío Guijarro, the group’s general manager, signed the coup decree that briefly abolished Venezuela’s Constitution, Supreme Court and National Assembly. Several members of CEDICE’s project advisory committee attended the swearing-in as president of coup leader Pedro Carmona.

“In principle, NED is an independent tool to promote democracy, but in practice it has been a weapon for regime change against governments the US deems as undesirable,” said Peter Kornbluh, a Latin America policy specialist at the National Security Archives, a nonprofit research group in Washington. “Its actions are particularly controversial in Venezuela, where the regime is democratically elected.”

The White House initially endorsed the 2002 coup, but it backed off after 19 Latin American countries condemned it.

A US State Department inspector general report subsequently found that the NED and other US assistance programs “provided training, institution building, and other support to individuals and organizations understood to be actively involved in the brief ouster of the Chavez government.”

On Aug. 16, although the opposition complained of fraud, the international election observer missions monitoring the recall referendum in Venezuela agreed that Chávez had won, and said they found no signs of wrongdoing.

Nobel Peace laureate and former US President Jimmy Carter and Organization of American States (OAS) Secretary-General César Gaviria said in a joint news briefing in Caracas that Chávez had won.

“The [National Election Commission’s] results are compatible with our figures, and we have not found any elements of fraud,” said Gaviria. “The opposition should review their results.”

“It is everyone’s responsibility to abide by the results,” Carter said.

Chávez, meanwhile, said his victory set a “world record” in terms of “participatory democracy.”

From the early hours of Aug. 15, the longest lines ever seen in elections in this South American country formed outside the voting stations. Carter said that in the more than 50 elections monitored by his organization, he had never seen such a turnout. Voters waited in line for up to 10 hours in some cases.

Chavez was relatively conciliatory toward the opposition. “This is a victory for the opposition,” he said. “They defeated violence, coup-mongering and fascism. I hope they accept this as a victory and not as a defeat.”

Chávez added that his social revolution would now be deepened. The president announced that Venezuela would move forward with determination towards overcoming the economic and social injustices inherited from neoliberal free-market policies of the past.

An outspoken critic of the policies prescribed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, Chavez’s five-year presidency has been marked by an ambitious effort to remake Venezuela’s corrupt political system and reduce inequalities between rich and poor. This year, Chavez’s government embarked on a $1.7 billion social spending program that included everything from an adult literacy drive, microcredits for the urban and rural poor, scholarships to enable low-income students to continue studying, a plan that brought health care and dental coverage to the country’s slums, land and property titling schemes, job training programs, a chain of shops that sell subsidized food products, and neighborhood soup kitchens.

Sources: Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, BBC, Guardian (UK), Independent (UK), Inter Press Service, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Venezuelanalysis.com

DHS sweeps: Bush’s war on Latino workers

By Joel Wendland

Aug. 10— It must be their imagination because we aren’t doing anything, say Bush administration officials about reports from across the country of increased immigration sweeps over the last two years. Various reports from local media and human rights activists show that immigration sweeps have occurred in Latino communities from Maine, to Chicago, Washington State, the Southwest, and Southern California. The upsurge in sweeps in Latino communities comes in the larger context of raids and surveillance aimed at immigrant Asian and African communities suspected of harboring terrorists.

The Bush admin-istration’s action is spreading panic and fear in the Latino community. In response, Latino communities have organized numerous protests demanding an end to secret sweeps and immigration raids.

Last October, federal agents under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) raided 60 Wal-Mart stores in different parts of the country rounding up about 250 people who work the night shift cleaning crew. While human rights organizations described the round ups as both a political event to justify enormous spending in the DHS as well as a measure to keep citizens frightened about terrorism, a DHS spokesperson admitted to Roberta Wood of the People’s Weekly World [November 1, 2003]that the raids had nothing to do with homeland security.

All of the workers were immigrants and none could be linked to terrorism. None could even be linked to countries that we have been told are the origins of terrorism. Most of the detainees await deportation hearings for lacking proper work documentation.

In early December of 2002 a highly coordinated series of raids, which were part of a long term Justice Department effort known as “Operation Tarmac,” were conducted at Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway Airports and at the homes of dozens of airport workers. Several hundred workers were caught up in this dragnet, and over 500 of them have since lost their security clearances and jobs at airports. According to one report [January 11, 2003], “The U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald, boasted that these people were arrested ‘as a lesson’ to others” who might try to find work in the US without required documentation. According to Justice Department documents, “Operation Tarmac” was implemented nationally after Sept. 11 “to promote heightened security” at airports. But, as social policy analyst Paul Street writes, of the 800 workers caught in Ashcroft’s airport raids, almost all have been Latino immigrants, and of the 600 people charged since early 2002, none has ever been linked to terrorism.

Another major immigration operation accompanied by anti-immigrant newspaper stories shook Portland, Maine just weeks after George W. Bush announced his plan for immigration reform in January of 2004. US Border Patrol agents raided the city’s low-income, minority community searching for undocumented residents. In the process they ransacked the homes of citizens and non-citizens in their search. Human rights activists reported that Portland’s immigrant community emerged from the experience afraid to send their children to school, to go to the market, work or to seek medical aid. Immigrant rights activists linked the sweeps to an upswing in anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation being pushed by congressional Republicans.

Three thousand miles away in the Yakima Valley in central Washington, an agriculturally rich region dependent on migrant farm workers -– many of whom are Latin American immigrants and often undocumented -– the Latino community protested immigration sweeps this past July. While federal officials denied increased anti-immigrant activities, Washington Growers’ League Executive Director Mike Gempler was reported by the Bremerton on Sunday [July 13, 2004] as expressing “surprise over the more concentrated effort [to detain undocumented workers] that has occurred the past couple of weeks.”

The largest scale of anti-immigrant sweeps by federal agencies took place throughout the spring into early June in Southern and Central California. In the Northern San Joaquin Valley area of California near Modesto, California, Latino community members reported a series of raids on workplaces and neighborhoods. Federal immigration officials, according to the Modesto Bee (June 30, 2004) denied the raid as “rumors” but then contradictorily stated that anyone caught up in the raid would be deported as a result of felony charges related to drug smuggling. As reported in the North County Times [May 11, 2004)] a Border Patrol operation called “Trans Check” began as early as April in the San Diego area and saw federal officials randomly demanding identity and immigration papers on the area’s public transportation system on a wide scale.

Immigrant workers in Central California were undoubtedly concerned not only by the activities of federal officials in the San Joaquin Valley, but also by widespread immigration sweeps in several cities in Southern California earlier in the month. In the first week of June between 400 and 500 immigrant workers were rounded up by immigration officials in or near several cities in Southern California, including Los Angeles, Ontario, Coronado, Temecula, San Juan Capistrano and other cities. According to a story posted to Pacific News Service, Spanish-language newspapers reported testimony by local activists in San Diego of as many as 45 raids where “federal immigration agents were combing residential neighborhoods for undocumented migrants and also were boarding public transportation to ask people for their papers.” According to Gabriel Lerner, editor of La Opinion, despite denials from authorities, “[f]ear is the source of rumors that the detentions have expanded to Norwalk, Long Beach, Pasadena, San Fernando, San Bernardino, Santa Ana, Huntington Park, [and] Santa Barbara.”

A new period of sweeps, according to Lerner, signals the Bush administration’s complete break with past policies of decreasing interior sweeps in favor of a highly militarized border patrol ordered by the Clinton administration. Both seem to be priorities for the current administration. And, while community protests against sweeps in the past could “embarrass” federal agencies into being more open and working more closely with community members and ending interior sweeps, numerous large protests have been met with denials and vague responses. The Bush administration has made no gestures to the Latino community except to deny an increase in operations and to insist that the panic and fear in those targeted communities is simply in the imagination of people living there.

Immigration sweeps have created a widespread panic in other immigrant communities as well. Commenting on more recent sweeps in Southern California Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC) Director Stewart Kwoh remarked, “The sweeps have created a climate of fear and distrust that affect not just the undocumented, but virtually everyone, including employees and employers.” Kwoh continued, “We’re concerned that employers may respond by unfairly discriminating against immigrants and others.” Though APALC spokesperson Mark Yoshida could not cite new discrimination cases directed to APALC related to recent immigration sweeps, he said in a phone interview that this may be because people simply may not understand their rights. “People might be scared to file complaints,” he added, as a result of the federal government’s operations. Yoshida also could not cite a case of an employer, manager or corporate executive being targeted or investigated for illegally hiring undocumented workers. Yoshida further pointed out the effect of the sweeps on immigrants of Asian descent. Asian and Pacific Islander communities haven’t been the main target for immigration sweeps, but, as Yoshida says, “health clinic appointments are down” because of a “general worry” and a “concern and frustration” with the federal government’s policies.

Sweeps, however, are only part of the conflict between immigrant communities and the federal government. Latino communities along the Southwestern border with Mexico also report growing violence. Derechos Humanos, a Tucson, Arizona-based immigrant rights group, stated last February that in “the last few months, there have been events reported regarding Border Patrol agents’ involvement in incidents of alleged corruption, physical abuse, sexual assault, and fatal shootings.” Further, since DHS has taken oversight of immigration enforcement, its “policies and plans has created fear, xenophobia, and division in communities.”

While sweeps, violence, and mass deportations have provoked fear and protest in immigrant communities, the consequences of Bush anti-immigrant policies have more far-reaching effects. Workers threatened with federal action may be less likely to demand rights they are owed in the workplace: fair wages, the right to join unions, freedom from discrimination and harassment, safe and healthy conditions and so on. In the last three years, the organized sector of the worker class has taken a pro-active stand against the mistreatment of immigrants and support legislative action that will protect their right to unionize and to become legal citizens if they choose and remain free of discrimination if they don’t. The United Food and Commercial Workers union, a union that organizes retail workers, many of whom are from immigrant communities, adopted a position that challenges the role of the federal authorities in using the immigration issue to try to break organizing campaigns. “Too often, it appears to workers,” says the union’s position statement, “that INS [now the Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is a partner, intentionally or not, with employers in the exploitation of immigrant labor and the suppression of worker rights. INS seems to show up more often during an organizing campaign or a strike situation.”

Source: Alternative Press Review