South Koreans demand that US troops leave

By Jae-Suk Yoo

Maehyang-Ri, South Korea, June 19-- Hundreds of villagers, students and labor activists demanding that US troops leave South Korea clashed with baton-wielding riot police Saturday, leaving at least 20 people injured.

“This is our land. Let’s drive out US troops!’’ chanted 1,000 demonstrators, pumping their fists into the air amid protest songs blared from loudspeakers.

Protesters hurled rocks and dirt and wielded bamboo sticks when police locked their plastic shields and batons to block them from marching on a nearby US Air Force bombing range to demand its closure.

Riot police beat them back with batons and shields. They traded rocks, kicks and punches with 100 union workers from the nearby Kia Motors Co. who tried to join the protest.

An initial group of 100 protesters increased to 1,000 later when police temporarily opened their blockades to let workers and students join the villagers. Sporadic clashes continued for hours.

Ambulances rushed to the remote fishing village to carry off 20 Kia workers and students, all bleeding from their heads or arms. One Kia worker’s face was covered with blood. Blood flowing down his head, a Roman Catholic priest shouted for the withdrawal of US troops.

Some workers climbing pine-covered hills to go around the police blockade were chased by officers.

The protesters gathered in this west coast village, 50 miles southwest of Seoul, demanding closure of the Koon-Ni Range, which they consider a source of noise and injuries.

They waved banners that said: “Yankee go home!’’ or “Close the Koon-Ni Range!’’ Students and leftist labor activists seized the occasion to mount anti-US protests, demanding the withdrawal of the 37,000 US troops in South Korea.

Villagers have long demanded the relocation of the range, and anti-US protests have increased since early May, when a US fighter jet with engine trouble dropped six bombs on the range.

Villagers claimed that six people were slightly injured and walls were cracked and windows shattered by the impact. But US and Korean military investigators said the bombs caused no injuries or property damage.

South Korea’s Defense Ministry has ruled out moving the base and instead intends to relocate 236 homes close to the range to avoid friction —a plan opposed by villagers.

The US Air Force has suspended exercises at the range since mid-May. It said it will resume operation Monday, saying further delays would hurt its readiness to deter military threats from North Korea.

President Kim Dae-jung has said he supports a continued US military presence even after North Korean military threats cease. He said the US presence in Korea was necessary for stability in the region.

The bombing exercises have been a constant source of friction with villagers. Villagers said at least nine people have died in accidents linked to the range, including a pregnant woman killed when shrapnel hit her in 1967.

Source: Grassroots Media Network

Zapatistas issue communiqué on ambush of police in Chiapas

Editor’s note: In the rural village of El Bosque, seven police were ambushed and shot Monday, June 12, by gunmen whose faces were covered in mud and who carried high-powered weapons -- typical of the guerrillas, according to the Chiapas state prosecutor, Eduardo Montoya. The following is a communique from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN).

Brothers and Sisters:

Regarding the incident which took place in the municipality of El Bosque, Chiapas, in which 7 Public Security police officers died, the EZLN declares:

First. --According to the information, the attack was carried out using the tactics of drug traffickers, paramilitaries or soldiers. The use of the “coup de grace” is frequent among these armed groups. The attack took place in an area that is full of government troops (army and police), where it is very difficult for an armed group to be mobilized without being detected and without the complicity of the authorities. The group of assailants had privileged information concerning the movements and number of the ambushed persons. This information could only have been obtained by government persons or by those close to them.

Second. --The EZLN is investigating, in order to clarify the identity and motives of the group of assailants. Everything points to those persons who carried out the attack having been from the government (or under the auspices of the government), since they would thus have a pretext for increasing militarization in Chiapas, and for justifying an attack against zapatista communities or against the EZLN. It should be noted that this incident will increase the climate of instability which the official candidate has threatened will prevail if he does not win.

Third. --Clear provocation or not, this violent incident is still an argument for increasing the military presence throughout the state, even in areas which are very far from the scene of the attack. Over the last few hours, government barracks have been more heavily reinforced in Guadalupe Tepeyac in Las Margaritas, Cuxulja’ in Ocosingo, Cate’ in El Bosque, the municipal seats of Simojovel and El Bosque. Similarly, the number of artillery aircraft, and their low overflights in Los Altos, Selva and Northern areas, have also increased.

Fourth. --The EZLN denies any responsibility for this act, and calls on the public to not allow themselves to be deceived. As we have more information, we will release it publicly.

Democracy! Liberty! Justice!

From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast. By the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee --General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos.

Source: Chiapas95 newslists: chiapas@eco.utexas.edu

Demonstrators and police clash in Italy

By Jennifer Clark

Bologna, Italy, June 14— Police mounting a big security operation at an OECD conference in Bologna clashed on Wednesday with demonstrators protesting against what they see as harmful effects of global capitalism.

Three demonstrators were injured on the second day of the conference in the northern Italian city when police in riot gear charged a group trying to get through a barricade that had blocked off the city center, witnesses said.

Police later allowed the demonstrators, who were protesting against globalization and genetically modified foods, access near the conference site in Bologna’s historic city center, where they waved banners and hurled eggs.

Fourteen people were arrested on charges of carrying weapons on Tuesday by police guarding the conference, the third international gathering in just over a month to be hit by such demonstrations.

Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, who delivered the keynote address at the conference on the impact of globalization on smaller businesses, insisted that the OECD wanted to reduce inequalities in society.

“We share the demonstrators’ concerns that new technology be used to reduce the gap between the wealthy and the poor,” he told reporters who asked him to comment on the protests.

A prominent leader of Bologna’s student protests stripped naked in the central square on Tuesday while other demonstrators handed out free tortellini pasta and wine in front of McDonalds food outlets to protest against genetically modified food.

The three-day ministerial conference is the first of its kind dedicated to developing policies for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to face the challenges of deregulated markets, technological innovation and free cross-border currency flows.

It will close on Thursday with the approval of a document calling for governments to reduce financial barriers to SMEs by instituting tax incentives and making it easier for them to tap equity markets, according to an unofficial version of the preliminary document on Wednesday.

“It’s the first time SMEs have ever been discussed at a ministerial level, which shows the growing importance of SMEs in the world economy,” said Aida Alvarez, Administrator of the US Small Business Administration. “We believe the conference is a first step towards individual countries changing laws and enacting policies to favor small businesses.”

Source: Reuters

Ecuador: strike against dollarization

Quito, Ecuador, June 19— On June 15 and 16 Ecuadoran president Gustavo Noboa Bejarano confronted his first general strike since taking office in January. The strike was called by the Patriotic Front (FP), a coalition of unions and grassroots organizations, to protest neoliberal economic policies promoted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The strike demands included: no dollarization (a plan to replace the currency with the US dollar); a price freeze and the elimination of all structural adjustments; no payment of the external debt; and an end to plans for privatization of state-owned companies in strategic sectors. Protests led by many of the same forces around the same issues led to a brief coup attempt and the removal of then-president Jamil Mahuad Witt on Jan. 22; Noboa had been Mahuad’s vice president.

The June 15-16 strike was at best partially successful. In Quito, union and student demonstrators were met with tear gas when they tried to approach the Government Palace in the morning of June 15; later in the day, activists blocked trolley buses in the Plaza de Santo Domingo. One passerby received a bullet wound during a demonstration in the El Ejido park. In Guayaquil, the country’s main commercial center, police threw tear gas grenades at hundreds of demonstrators attempting to march to the Governance offices on June 15. A bomb exploded at a Citibank branch at about 11am; no injuries were reported. In the countryside, groups of indigenous blocked some highways in the southern part of Chimborazo province, but circulation was normal on the Panamerican Highway in the northern part.

The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) —probably the country’s most important social force, and the leading factor in the January events— did not back the strike. Although it supported the demands, CONAIE left it up to each indigenous community to decide whether to join the strike. At the same time, the general strike coincided with other strikes. The National Educators Union (UNE) had already been on strike for five weeks, while health care workers started selective job actions at hospitals on June 12. Workers in the Ministry of Government and Police went out on strike on June 15 over wage demands, so that Government Minister Antonio Andretta Arízaga had to work out of the president’s offices while he directed police operations against the general strike.

On June 17 FP president Luis Villacís Maldonado announced at a press conference that the June 15-16 actions had been “very important” but not a “success.” He told the Spanish wire service EFE that the FP was “preparing a general uprising” for June 21. “On the 21st there will be a great taking of Quito,” he said. “No less than 20,000 teachers, parents, indigenous people and campesinos will participate.”

Source:www.americas.org

Tribunal charges NATO with war crimes

By Katherine Stapp

New York, New York, June 13 (IPS)— A “people’s court” has found North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) leaders guilty of serious war crimes for last spring’s 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

The 16-member tribunal, organized by anti-war activists of the New York-based International Action Center, examined evidence of 19 violations of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and associated protocols of 1977, the United Nations Charter and other international agreements.

Deirdre Sinnot of the Action Center said they formed their own tribunals because official venues like the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY) were biased in NATO’s favor.

Indeed, earlier this month, Carla del Ponte, the ICTFY’s lead prosecutor, denied that NATO hit civilian targets and said the charges of war crimes “do not merit further investigation.”

In the last year, the International Action Center has held people’s courts in 24 cities in 14 countries, gaining the support of prominent figures like former Canadian foreign minister James Bisset, president of the African Association of Writers Charles Pascal Tolno, and former first lady of Greece Margarite Papandreau.

Judges at the Jun. 10 session in New York included former Haitian ambassador to the UN Ben Dupuy, Spanish member of parliament Angeles Maestro Martin, and Michael Ratner, an attorney with the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

“They (NATO) weren’t hitting military targets,” said Ramsey Clark, a former United States attorney-general and leader of the tribunal’s prosecution team. “They were trying to break the country down ...to break the population’s spirit.”

The charges heard by the tribunals included the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure, the use of depleted uranium ordnance and cluster bombs, widespread damage to the environment, the imposition of crippling economic sanctions, and the use of NATO to destabilize the Balkans and further US and European Union expansionism.

“Nineteen counts, 19 ways of killing —each one deadly in its own design,” Clark told the judges and audience of some 500 people, who heard nine hours of testimony from scientists, journalists, legal and military experts, and peace activists from over a dozen countries, many with first-hand experience on the effects of the war.

Dr. Janet Eaton, a Canadian biologist, described an “ecological catastrophe” stemming from the NATO bombing of chemical, petrochemical and pharmaceutical factories throughout Yugoslavia, and the use of depleted uranium shells.

Dr. Eaton showed slides of the obliterated Pancevo Petrochemical complex, which was hit on Apr. 18, 1999, sending “black clouds across the Balkans,” contaminating groundwater and forcing mass evacuations. The rates of birth defects and cancers like leukemia have risen sharply in the region since the war, Dr. Eaton said.

Other witnesses included Elmar Schmaehling of Germany, a former NATO admiral turned peace activist; Christopher Black, a Canadian attorney who had filed charges of war crimes against NATO with the ICTFY; and Milos Raickovich, a Serb-American composer and activist who testified on the ongoing destruction of cultural and religious sites in Yugoslavia.

Raickovich presented an array of compelling before-and-after photos of churches and monasteries that have been razed —some 100 in all. “In the first year of NATO occupation, more Serbian Orthodox churches were destroyed than under 500 years of Ottoman occupation,” he said.

The event was held three days after the London-based Amnesty International issued a report charging that “NATO forces violated the laws of war, leading to cases of unlawful killing of civilians.”

Among other incidents, the report cited the Apr. 23 bombing of a Serbian television station in which 16 media workers were killed, the targeting of bridges in Grdelica, Lunane and Varvarin despite the presence of civilian refugee convoys, and the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

Additionally, “the requirement that NATO aircraft fly above 15,000 feet to provide maximum protection for aircraft and pilots made full adherence to international humanitarian law virtually impossible,” Amnesty said.

Amnesty was not associated with Saturday’s tribunal, and “takes no position on the legal or moral basis for NATO’s military intervention against the FRY (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia).” However, it has called on NATO member states to investigate these “serious violations under international humanitarian law.”

Bolivians march for education, land, wages, electricity

La Paz, Bolivia, June 19— Some 100,000 residents of the city of El Alto marched through the neighboring city of La Paz, Bolivia’s capital, to demand the creation of an autonomous university in El Alto. Local residents are also demanding $50 million in local development funds promised to El Alto two years ago by President Hugo Banzer Suárez. The march was part of a civic strike organized by a coalition led by the Regional Workers Central (COR) labor federation and the Federation of Community Boards (FEJUVE).

A law to create and finance the public university in El Alto was approved by the Senate on June 14, and by the Chamber of Deputies the next day. On June 15, after its approval, government and university officials and representatives of the protest movement reached an agreement on the creation of the Public and Autonomous University of El Alto. A commission is now charged with resolving the details of the plan, especially concerning funding, before the project can gain final approval. The government has threatened to cut the budget of the Major University of San Andrés (UMSA) in La Paz to pay for the El Alto university. UMSA students reacted immediately with protests; they insist that they will defend their university’s budget in the streets.

Some 2,000 landless campesinos marching from the Chaco region in the eastern plains of Tarija department were expected to arrive in the city of Tarija on the afternoon of June 16. The march was started by about 200 campesinos, but they were joined by hundreds of others along the way.

Some 4,000 demonstrators marched in Oruro on June 13 to protest the fact that members of the Municipal Council earn high salaries —more than $2,000 a month. At the end of the march, protest leaders from the Civic Committee used chains and locks to block access to the Municipal Council building. Another demonstration against the council members’ high wages was staged in Oruro two days later, and five leaders of the Departmental Labor Federation (COD) began a hunger strike to press the issue.

Workers of ENTEL, the national telephone company, staged a 24-hour work stoppage on June 13, accompanied by a hunger strike, to press salary demands.

On June 11, residents of the Bolivian town of Villazón, on the border with Argentina, lifted a roadblock which they had maintained for 11 days on the highway leading to the Argentine town of La Quiaca, to demand electrical power be restored to their town. The decision to lift the blockade was made by an assembly of more than 5,000 local residents after authorities reconnected the town to the national electricity grid.

Source: www.americas.org

NEWS BRIEFS

¨ Homeless demo turns into police battle in Canada

Toronto, Canada, June 15— A demonstration by about 1,000 homeless people in the Canadian city of Toronto on Thursday turned into a battle between demonstrators and police. At least 21 people were injured when police prevented the demonstrators from storming the provincial parliament building. The police were also hit hard with fifteen officers wounded. The demonstrators threw stones at police barricades and set fire to cars.

The conservative government of the province of Ontario has been under fire since it announced drastic cuts in it’s anti-poverty programs. The demonstrators claimed that this policy has cost the lives of at least 22 homeless in recent months. Toronto, Canada’s largest city with 2 million inhabitants, has the highest mortality rate among homeless in North America.

The demonstration marked the high point of a week of protests against the government’s policies. The prime minister of Ontario, Mike Harris, said he would continue with his policy despite the protests.

Source: Direct Action Media Network: damn@tao.ca

Indonesian NGOs oppose resumption of military ties with US

Jakarta, Indonesia, June 12— Six prominent Indonesian NGOs have stated their opposition to any resumption of US-Indonesian military ties in a letter to members of the US Congress. The groups called US military assistance to the Indonesian military (TNI) “indefensible” and warned that any “positive effect the US suspension [of military ties in September 1999] has had is now in danger of being squandered.”

“We are perplexed by the alacrity with which the Pentagon is resuming normal relations with the TNI since none of the conditions which the Congress stipulated last November in the Foreign Operations Appropriation law have been met,” the NGOs wrote key members of the US Congress appropriations committees.

On September 9, President Clinton suspended all US ties with the military as Indonesian troops and their militia allies set about to systematically destroying East Timor following its pro-independence vote. The FY 2000 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act stipulates conditions which must be met before normal military ties can be restored. These include the return of refugees to East Timor and prosecution of military and militia members responsible for human rights atrocities in East Timor and Indonesia. They also require Indonesia to actively prevent militia incursions into East Timor and to cooperate fully with the UN administration in East Timor.

“Given that the Indonesian military makes no distinction between national defense and domestic policing (it is all ‘national security’), the US government must admit that any training and aid provided to the military can just as easily be used against Indonesian citizens as external enemies.... Until the TNI renounces its ‘dual function’ doctrine which justifies its interventions into domestic politics, US military aid to it is indefensible,” the Indonesian NGOs added.

The NGOs are especially “disturbed by indications that the US Pentagon is trying to push forward a participatory exercise known as Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) this summer. We know of previous CARAT exercises and are keenly aware of their use to train Indonesian officers in assault tactics, despite their being described by some as ‘humanitarian operations.’ In fact, last year, military personnel trained in CARAT left right from that training to join the military’s criminal actions in East Timor after its vote for independence.”

Source: IGC: www.igc.org