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Activists’, organizers’ paths diverge within European Social Forum

By Stefania Milan

London, England, Oct. 25 (IPS) — The third European Social Forum appears to mark the end of the “love story” between grassroots social movements and the international gatherings that are now in vogue. In any case, discontent in both camps — the activists and the official organizers — will leave a mark on future events.

For the first time since its inaugural edition in November 2001, the European Social Forum (ESF) was openly criticized by grassroots activists.

Anarchist groups and media-activist networks like Indymedia decided to gather autonomously in self-organized spaces. The anarchists prepared events under the banner “Beyond the ESF;” Indymedia set up a center in Central London, and other groups held events at the “squatted” (peacefully occupied) social center “RampArt.”

“There have been autonomous spaces before, but they have always been requested from the official process. In this case, people didn’t want to ask to be given a space to be autonomous in: they wanted to demonstrate their ideas of self-organization by organizing themselves,” activist Dave, from Indymedia UK, told IPS.

The main themes being debated in the autonomous spaces were the precariousness and flexibility of labor, migration and migrants’ rights, communication issues, and the move-ment’s next steps — including protests at the meeting of the G8 (group of eight most industrialized countries) in Scotland in July 2005.

Several thousands of people attended the autonomous meetings daily.

Participants at the “main” ESF attended more than 500 meetings and listened to more than 250 speakers.

Although some of the same items, such as G8 protests, were on the agenda, those at Beyond the ESF opposed their approach to discussions.

“The debate here is more responsive to our needs. The fact that only the ‘leading activists’ can speak in the official Forum is extraneous to our way of action,” said an Italian activist.

Also for the first time, the Forum was targeted by protests. Around 300 activists from Beyond the ESF entered Alexandra Palace to interrupt a panel that London Major Ken Livingston was supposed to attend, disappointing the organizers.

“We criticize the authoritarian control over the Forum process of a small number of groups: the Social Workers’ Party, Socialist Action and Livingston’s London Great Authority,” said Dave. “Local authorities and political parties were dictating the [rules of the] Forum through the control of budget.”

“The process in the UK reflected everything we are fighting against — the manipulation and the construction of the movement in someone’s political interest,” Julie B. from the Forum volunteer translators’ group, Babels, told IPS. “Political parties should not be there anyway.”

The Forum charter of principles adopted in 2001 by the Brazilian Organization Committee states, “neither party representations nor military organizations shall participate in the Forum.” It adds, the Forum is a “plural, diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental, and non-party context.”

The next meeting must be organized with a more participatory and horizontal process, say activists.

“Some people view the Forum as a political conference to be organized like a conference; all about selling tickets and booking big-name speakers. But we see the Forum as a process, and within the organizing process people can build new networks and strengthen solidarities. If this method of organizing continues, the Social Forum will become politically bankrupt,” said Dave.

Karen Banks from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) organized, with Indymedia, the Forum on Communication Rights. According to her, “Most of the preparatory meetings seemed to be conducted in a very alien and exclusive way. This is one of the reasons we organized the counter-activities.”

Such reactions to the official Forum are seen as a turning point in some movements’ strategies towards the large gatherings, which are offspring of the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Italian activist networks GlobalProject, Invisibili and Ya Basta published an open letter on their website to discuss the “London contradictory days,” and called for reflection on the future of social forums.

In London, the grassroots networks “produced a common agenda which can go beyond the closed and sclerotizing ESF — a European event on precariousness and migration in Berlin next January and the European day of conflict against the migrants’ detention camps, on Apr. 2,” they announced.

The next ESF is scheduled for 2006.

“Many people who are critical of the Social Forum want to take the opportunity to use the time in between to re-evaluate what the social forums are about and to re-examine the basis on which they are organized,” said Dave.

“If ‘another world is possible’ (the motto of the forums), the biggest question is: ‘how do we arrive at another world?’ If social forums continue as in London, there will be increasing voices of dissent and increasingly calls for a boycott of the forums,” he added.

What do the organizers say? IPS tried to contact the director of the organizing body ‘ESF Company,’ Kate Hudson, several times, by phone and by e-mail, but she did not reply.

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Child soldiers, sex slaves, and cannibalism at gunpoint: the horrors of Uganda’s north

By Tim Judah

Kitgum, Uganda, Oct. 23 — War, cannibalism, sex slavery and massacres were supposed to have been consigned to Uganda’s past. The country has been touted as one of Africa’s success stories, combating AIDS and bringing relative prosperity to Kampala. But away from the capital, a horrific civil war is claiming the lives of tens of thousands of children, the United Nations warned Oct. 22.

“Northern Uganda [is] the biggest neglected humanitarian crisis in the world,” said Jan Egelund, the UN’s under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The situation is a moral outrage.”

Few people outside Uganda know that in the north the government is fighting a fanatical and murderous cult — the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) -- whose fighting force is made up in large part of abducted children. Up to 95 per cent of the population in these areas have been forced from their homes by the war. Nearly two million Ugandans, out of a population of 24.7 million, now live in refugee camps for fear of being attacked and killed in their villages.

Children have told how they had been forced by the rebels at gunpoint to abduct and murder other children and to drink their blood. A former commander of the rebel group explained that he had forced villagers to chop up, cook and eat their neighbors before he killed them, too.

The LRA is led by the self-proclaimed prophet Joseph Kony, who says he wants Uganda to live by the laws of the Ten Commandments. He and most of his fighters are from northern Uganda’s Acholi tribe, as are most of their victims. Kony says he is guided by spirits who tell him what to do and whom to kill. The UN says he may have abducted more than 20,000 children, 90 percent of LRA fighters.

In the camps, virtually everyone has a story to tell. Pamela Aber, 18, was abducted by the rebels in February and kept prisoner for five months before she escaped. Her job was to cook and gather firewood, while acting as a sex slave to the commander. This is the fate of most of the young women and girls abducted by the rebels, many of whom have children by their captors. Soon after being kidnapped, she had had to take part in the murder of a 14-year-old girl called Adok, who had been caught trying to escape. The other new captives in the group, 10 of them, were told “to bite that girl to death.”

“We started biting her but she did not die. When we were biting her she was pleading to the rebels saying they should forgive her and that she would not escape again. She was bleeding all over but still she did not die. Then we were told to pinch her and she did not die. Later we were all told to beat her with a log, one after the other, until she died.”

When asked what she felt when she was doing this, she said: “I was frightened, but we were told that if we did not kill they would kill us. So you had to pretend to be brave.”

Richard Abonga, 12, had spent his time with them carrying heavy loads of stolen food. When another boy, aged 11, complained that he was tired, the rebels told him to put down his load and the other children were told to gather around him: “They started chopping off his feet with a hoe. One rebel, one foot each, and then his hands and then his eyelids were cut off with razor blades and then his arms tied behind his back. He was still conscious. Then they hung him up on a tree, hanging head down and we were told to box his head until he was dead.”

Captain Vincent Okello Pakorom was 16 when he was captured by the LRA in 1991. He rose to become one of Kony’s bodyguards and described the leader as an “ordinary human being” but one who “had the power”: the ability to foresee the future.

The cult leader seems friendly, he said, until the spirits begin to talk through him. When they speak, somebody in his entourage writes down what he says. “The most cruel spirit,” Pakorom said, “is “Who Are You” — the Congolese spirit who “commands killings and massacres.”

Ever since Uganda gained independence in 1962, its politics have been brutal. In more than 40 years, there has never been a peaceful transfer of power. During 1971 and 1979 it was ruled by the former British colonial sergeant Idi Amin who slaughtered tens of thousands.

Why has the rebellion gone on so long? Many Acholi believe that President Museveni underestimated the rebels. Others claim he is not unhappy to have a continuing low-level insurgency, because it keeps the Acholi occupied, hence they are not able to meddle in Kampala politics.

On condition of anonymity, many people gave a different explanation for the war. Aid workers said that too many people had too great a financial stake in the war to want it over quickly. The conflict is also tied to the crisis in Darfur across the border in Sudan. Khartoum has supported the LRA for its own reasons as Uganda has for years been backing the rebel SPLA in southern Sudan. The Sudanese government has armed the LRA, using it to fight the SPLA.

Dr Lawrence Ojom has been the director of St Joseph’s Hospital in Kitgum for 15 years and insists there is no end in sight. “This is the worst. It has never been this bad.” Every evening St Joseph’s Hospital gives shelter to “night commuters,” some of the 45,000 children who, because of their fear of abduction, stream into Gulu, Kitgum, and other towns every evening to sleep in the safety of the hospitals. Many agree that not only is military action required, so are the food and medicine that would save lives. For 2004, the UN has appealed for $112 million in aid, mostly for the World Food Program for Northern Uganda.

Source: Independent (UK)

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Must Haiti’s ‘important history of violence’ repeat?

By Jane Regan

Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Oct. 22 (IPS) — “The ‘steamroller’ swept across Port-au-Prince ... All night and into the morning furious battles took place throughout the lower city. Finally, as the army gained the upper hand, trucks began picking up littered corpses.”

Those lines could have come from a newswire story on any given day here over the past three weeks. The capital has seen headless bodies, handcuffed corpses, rotting piles of cadavers at the morgue, battles with automatic weapons and generalized terror. More than 55 people, among them nine police officers, have been killed here since Sept. 30.

But the words are a half-century old. They come from a book called Written in Blood, by Robert Debs Heinl, Nancy Gordon Heinl and Michael Heinl and describe a day in 1957 when the outraged masses (the “steamroller”) of the capital’s Bel-Aire neighborhood rampaged after hearing a rumor that their hero, the recently deposed populist president Daniel Fignolé, had been assassinated.

Five decades later, Bel-Aire is once again the scene of violence tied to loyalists to another deposed president. But today, instead of a steamroller, a much smaller gang of mostly gun-toting thugs terrorizes downtown Port-au-Prince.

The violence erupted Sep. 30, the 13th anniversary of the military-led coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (during his first interrupted term in office). When several hundred people demonstrated to demand his return, police clashed with marchers. When it was over, three or four policemen and perhaps an equal number of demonstrators were dead.

While nobody can be sure who fired first, the rancor behind the carnage was clear. The headless bodies of three policemen were later found and men claiming allegiance to Aristide announced that “Operation Baghdad” (after the beheadings and other violent murders committed by insurgents in the US-occupied nation) would continue until the president returned to the National Palace.

Aristide left on Feb. 29, after months of civil protest and as an armed force of former Haitian army soldiers and disgruntled police officers approached the capital. The former priest says he was forced from power by Washington and other foreign powers in a “modern coup d’état.”

While Haiti has had some 33 coups and violent changes of power, Aristide is the only president to be thrown out of office twice.

Eight months after his departure, many things here do not appear to have changed for the better.

While diplomats, politicians and United Nations peacekeepers and their administrators discuss plans for more patrols or electronic voting machines or irrigation projects in their air-conditioned offices on the hills overlooking the harbor, down the slope the sporadic rattle of automatic gunfire has echoed across the dirty downtown almost daily this month.

On Oct. 15, grey smoke rose from burning tire barricades. Schools, businesses and banks in and around Bel-Aire were shuttered for the 15th day in a row. Black-hooded, black-helmeted policemen scurried down rock-strewn streets that looked like those of a country in a state of civil war.

“What is going on is literally insane,” human rights activist Jean-Claude Bajeux told IPS on Oct. 16. “It is what we call in philosophy a ‘death march.’ If we can’t stop this, we are looking at the destruction of the Haitian nation. If we continue like this, we will not only miss the democratic transition, we are also putting in jeopardy our very existence.”

Bajeux was not talking about the flooding that left some 3,000 dead when rain rushed down treeless slopes in and around the northern city of Gonaives in September; nor of the more than 1,500 Haitians killed in May flooding.

He meant the political violence that has dominated this nation that shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic since ex-slaves won their 13-year revolution against Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops in 1804.

Almost from the beginning, class, color, clan and greed split Haitians, as interim Prime Minister Gérard Latortue acknowledged after laying a wreath at the tomb of revolutionary hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines on Oct. 17.

“Today is a very sad anniversary for all of us Haitians,” Latortue told reporters. “Remember, it is division that led to the assassination of the founder of the nation. Unfortunately, since then Haitians have not learned that it is not division that will help the republic.”

Dessalines, crowned emperor within a year of Haiti’s declaration of independence, was hacked and shot to death by his own soldiers only two years later, his mutilated body left to rot in the tropical sun. He was just the first of many Haitian leaders whose reign ended abruptly.

Latortue’s government, which has shut out members of Aristide’s Lavalas movement from its ranks, does not appear to be tottering on the edge just yet.

But while he spoke to the phalanx of foreign reporters who flocked into the country to cover what they thought might be another ‘fin de regime,’ a few miles away a platoon of armed men dressed in camouflage exercised, brandishing arms ranging from M-14s to Uzis to semi-automatic Israeli Galils.

Haiti has no army — the Armed Forces were disbanded by Aristide in 1995 following the coup — but these men are demanding it be reconstituted.

Ex-Captain Remissainthe Ravix controls the ex-soldiers, who are believed to number 1,000 - 2,000 men and to be stationed in a number of cities around the country. Despite their obvious unconstitutionality, they carry weapons and patrol, police and even arrest people. And they are growing restless.

Early this month Ravix brought some 50 men into the capital to set up a base in an apartment building, hoping their presence would pressure the government.

“For the past three or four weeks we have been ready, waiting for the government to call on us to bring order to the disorder,” Ravix told IPS on Oct. 19. “But it seems like the government doesn’t want us ... We are the ones who got rid of the dictator, and this is the thanks we get.”

Haitian police and UN peacekeepers have struggled to bring order to the streets but they give the ex-soldiers a wide berth. Fearing further violence, Canada and the United States recently advised their citizens not to visit Haiti, and Washington also moved all “non-essential” embassy personnel out of the country.

Latortue blames the violence directly on Haiti’s ex-president.

“His capacity is only to destroy,” the interim leader told reporters at the Oct. 17 ceremony. “He knows how to kill, how to put fire, how to put violence, how to arm 12-, 13-, 14-year-old young people. He is the symbol of violence. He believes in that.”

During Aristide’s last two years in power, groups of sometimes-armed young men nicknamed “chimère” (“monster”) who got “zombie” cheques from government offices regularly threatened and attacked anti-government marchers, journalists and even government officials not deemed loyal enough.

Aristide never clearly condemned them, nor has he damned this latest flare-up. Instead, he simply denied Latortue’s accusations.

“Latortue, stop the lying, stop the killings,” Aristide said in an Oct. 20 statement he issued from South Africa, where he lives. The ex-priest also called for “dialogue.”

Some Aristide supporters, like a man who said his name was Hot Pepper, say they are being unfairly targeted.

“The police come in here and shoot at just anybody. Why?” said the 22-year-old, whose shirt did not quite hide the handgun on his hip. “Just because we believe in Aristide? They can’t shoot me for that.”

But police have shot, although they say only after being fired upon. Officers have also arrested hundreds, including two ex-parliamentarians and an outspoken Aristide supporter, Father Gérard Jean-Juste.

Officials say parliamentarians were the “intellectual authors” of the violence and have hinted Jean-Juste used his church compound to hide “Operation Baghdad” gunmen. But human rights group Amnesty International (AI) has protested the priest’s arrest, as has his lawyer, and so far no hard evidence has been presented to the public.

“This pastor joins a growing number of political prisoners in Haiti,” US law professor Bill Quigley said in an Oct. 16 statement.

The interim government is facing tough dilemmas: penniless and desperate chimères, an ill-equipped and poorly trained police force, an inadequate and corrupt justice system, frustrated and hungry ex-soldiers and a UN peacekeeping force whose mandate appears to stop far short of engagement. And that is just the beginning of the list.

One “helping” hand has been extended from Washington, where the Bush administration this week agreed to consider requests for weapons sales from the Latortue government on a case-by-case basis, effectively ending a 13-year arms blockade.

The United Nations has come under criticism from all sides for not stopping the violence. But UN Spokesman Damien Onses-Cardona said the situation is not as bad as local and international media make out.

“It’s not really that there is a systematic threat to the security of the country,” he told IPS on Oct. 13. “There are people creating a state of chaos, I think, and I think this is intended.

“I would like to note that violence in Haiti is not something completely new, that just started two weeks ago, all of a sudden,” added Onses-Cardona. “It is a country that has a very, very important history of violence and political violence.”

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Rights groups back Chile’s tribal ‘terrorists’

By Jen Ross

Temuco, Chile, Oct. 21 — There is not a handcuff in sight during breaks in legal proceedings when the men accused of being Chile’s most dangerous terrorists joke and play their traditional trutruca horns outside the courtroom.

To Chile’s big landowners, the Mapuche Indian separatists now entering their second week on trial caused a reign of terror in the countryside that forced the government to invoke Pinochet-era terrorism laws to bring them to justice.

But human rights groups say the Mapuche are guilty of nothing more than defending their way of life, without a single casualty. Jorge Haiquín, one of only eight Mapuche who actually appeared at the hearings, said it was clear they were not terrorists. “You wouldn’t see this anywhere else in the world,” he said. “I mean, if we are supposedly terrorists, we shouldn’t be out here like this.”

Sixteen of the tribal leaders of the separatist Mapuche group, Coodinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM), have been charged with offences concerning attacks on farms and forestry companies in 2001, and could face prison terms of more than 10 years if found guilty. Their efforts to burn plantations and equipment, and reclaim land, have hurt commercial interests and put intense pressure on Chile’s Socialist government to get tough.

A southern agricultural consortium estimated that in the past five years, farmers and forestry companies have suffered more than 600 Mapuche attacks. They are estimated to have resulted in damage costing more than $18 million. International human rights groups disagree with the application of an anti-terrorist law for attacks that have never killed or seriously injured anybody.

“These are crimes against property rather than crimes against people,” Sebastian Brett, a Human Rights Watch researcher said. “And while there’s no universal definition of terrorism, most international conventions agree terrorism involves a threat to life.” The only life taken so far was that of Mapuche Alex Lemún, allegedly shot by police as he attacked a pine tree plantation.

Juan Agustín Figueroa, a former agriculture minister and local landowner, had told the court of death threats and repeated fire attacks on his pine and eucalyptus plantations over the past three years.

“It has caused fear and a lot of anxiety for us and the others who’ve suffered such threats,” Figueroa said. “And it has brought damage from an economic point of view. Who wants to insure you after so many attacks?”

The specific charges in the trial concern the burning of six homesteads and 10 forestry plantations, trespassing, property damage and illegal weapons possession. Most of the attacks have been in the indigenous heartland of the Biobío and Araucanía regions, close to Temuco.

The Mapuche say they were tricked out of their ancestral lands by false titles more than a century ago. They say large-scale agriculture and forestry has been damaging the environment and threatening their traditional way of life. The charges are the result of a year-long criminal investigation. This week, the court was shown a dozen police surveillance tapes of public speeches, media interviews, or the accused going in and out of the home of the CAM’s leader.

The trial could last up to three months, with more than 250 witnesses and experts testifying. Already six witnesses have done so with their identities shielded. The use of “faceless” witnesses is also being attacked by human rights advocates. “Under international norms of due process, the defense and prosecution must have equal right to cross-examination,” Brett said.

Source: Independent (UK)

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Church group that documents abuses told ‘Watch what you write’

By Constanza Vieira

Bogota, Colombia, Oct. 18 (IPS) — The Intercongregational Justice and Peace Commission in Colombia was recently told “watch what you write,” in a message threatening that “something terrible” could happen.

The anonymous message threatened a “major attack” that would destroy the group’s network, which produces news bulletins on human rights abuses. “So many denunciations can be harmful,” said the threat received by the organization earlier this month.

Justice and Peace sends out its news bulletins from towns with names like Chucurí, Cacarica, Jiguamiandó, Curbaradó, Ariari, or Trujillo, located deep in conflict zones.

The bulletins documenting human rights abuses against civilians committed by all of the warring factions are written up by priests, nuns and lay Catholics, as well as ministers and the faithful from Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Baptist churches.

Along with members of Peace Brigades International — young people from Europe and North America who accompany human rights advocates, as “human shields” — the church workers assist rural “peace communities” that live under constant threat because they have declared themselves neutral in the four-decade-old armed conflict.

The members of these neutral communities are frequently harassed and threatened by interests that want to gain control of their land or natural resources.

An estimated three million people in this country of 43 million have been displaced from rural areas by the violence since 1985, according to the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement.

The “urgent action” bulletins sent out to hundreds of organizations and governments around the world describe each incident in detail.

“Justice and Peace does not let a single case of abuse go by without denouncing it, and without taking legal action in defense of the campesinos (peasant farmers),” one of the organization’s leaders, whose name will not be mentioned for safety reasons, told IPS.

The group also accompanies local residents “in their plan to be neutral peace communities seeking their own model of development, rather than serving as mere laborers for logging, charcoal, or palm oil companies,” the source, who is a priest, added.

“Nor do they want to be informants or dependent on one of the armed groups that try to dominate them. They want to be autonomous,” he explained.

Under the regulations that govern the peace communities, each member promises to refrain from participating, “either directly or indirectly,” in the war, while pledging to not carry firearms, he said.

Nor can those who assume the commitment “provide tactical, logistical or strategic assistance” or information “to any of the factions involved in the conflict.” They must also be committed to supporting a negotiated solution to the armed conflict.

According to the priest, right-wing President Alvaro Uribe’s “democratic security” policy, which includes setting up a network of as many as five million civilian informants to support the armed forces in their war against the insurgents, is characteristic of a country “where no neutrality or autonomy is tolerated, and where all communities, whether urban neighborhoods or rural communities, must be controlled.”

The two largest rebel groups — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) — have a combined total of at least 30,000 combatants.

The paramilitary militias, meanwhile, made up of around 13,000 armed fighters, frequently act in support of the army, according to United Nations and Organization of American States (OAS) human rights bodies.

The UN reports that the paramilitaries are responsible for 80 percent of the atrocities committed in Colombia’s armed conflict. And in the past two years, which coincides with the time Uribe has been in office, the number of paramilitaries has grown geometrically, say human rights activists.

“Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, it seems as if their goal were to totally eliminate all social movements that get out of their hands, by attacking them, accusing them of being terrorists, breaking them up by throwing their leaders into jail or killing them, and gaining complete control over all territories,” said the priest.

The government is currently holding negotiations with the paramilitaries, which would agree to demobilize in exchange for an amnesty-like agreement under which they would avoid prosecution for their crimes by making reparations to the victims’ families and survivors.

One of Justice and Peace’s latest bulletins commemorated a few of the thousands of violent deaths that occur every year in Colombia.

The 18th edition of the bulletin, Sin Olvido (Never Forget), recalled that on Oct. 13, 1996, activist Josué Giraldo “was shot to death by a member of a paramilitary group in front of his house in the city of Villavicencio (the capital of the department or province of Meta, south of Bogotá), while playing with his daughters, Sara and Natalia.”

The gunman fled on his motorcycle “along the road that leads to the town of Acacías, where the seventh army brigade is based. That brigade has been repeatedly denounced for supporting paramilitary groups in the region of Meta,” adds the bulletin.

Giraldo worked in Justice and Peace and was president of the Meta Civic Human Rights Committee.

Sin Olvido pointed out that General Rodolfo Herrera, who was then commander of the seventh army brigade, “said in a Sept. 5, 1996 speech in the town of Mesetas (in Meta), that ‘human rights defenders are like messengers for the guerrillas.’ ”

In Colombia, such an accusation is tantamount to a death sentence.

The Sin Olvido bulletin quotes speeches and writings by Giraldo in which he said he dedicated himself to defending human rights after hearing “the heartrending cries of children who witness the murders of their parents or attend their funerals; of the mothers in mourning who cry out to God, asking why their children were killed; or of the widows who suddenly find themselves on their own, condemned to ostracism from their land and to loneliness.”

From 1992 to April 1995, six members of the Meta Civic Committee were killed, three became the victims of forced disappearance, and two fled into exile.

But for Giraldo, abandoning everything because he had received death threats would be akin to “allowing the criminal to be like a god who can decide on your life and death. I don’t accept that. Giving up seems to me more terrible than death itself.”

“Every night Giraldo had to sleep in a different place,” the priest told IPS.

Giraldo fled to Bogotá, where “he worked for a month and a half in a small project helping” people who have been displaced by the war.

But one weekend, he travelled to Villavicencio to visit his wife and daughters, where he was killed on a Sunday “in the presence of the two girls,” notes Sin Olvido.