- - - Servicio Informativo "Alai-amlatina" - - -
Bolivia: en medio de las tensiones ¿nueva oposición?
José Pinto
ALAI AMLATINA, 07/02/2007, La Paz.- Entre diciembre del año pasado y lo que va de febrero de 2007, el gobierno de Evo Morales atraviesa por el perÃodo más difÃcil de su gestión, caracterizado por una intensificación de demandas y movilizaciones que lo vienen obligando a retroceder y readecuar algunas decisiones vinculadas, por ejemplo, con la refundación de Yacimientos PetrolÃferos Fiscales Bolivianos YPFB y con el incremento impositivo a las actividades mineras.
Los partidos tradicionales, por lo menos en forma directa, no han tenido protagonismo en los últimos sucesos y se mantienen atrincherados en sus consignas relacionadas con las autonomÃas, el sistema de votación en la Asamblea Constituyente y la movilización mediática por la presencia de un asesor extranjero en la presidencia de la República.
Claramente se aprecian dos escenarios paralelos en la oposición al gobierno. El primero proviene de la oposición oficial a cargo de los partidos tradicionales, acompañados por algunas prefecturas y comités cÃvicos. El segundo se concentra en otros actores como el Comité CÃvico de Camiri y organizaciones de carácter económico corporativo como la Federación de Cooperativas Mineras.
¿Nueva oposición?
El caso de Camiri en particular estarÃa representando a una oposición de izquierda radical que busca enrostrar al gobierno un carácter “no revolucionario” planteando exigencias de expropiación que, ciertamente no figuran en el diseño de la nacionalización impulsada por el Movimiento al Socialismo -MAS-. “No hay nacionalización mientras no se expropia, que el Gobierno no se equivoque al intentar convencer a la población de algo que no tiene el nombre de nacionalización” afirmó el vicepresidente del Comité de Huelga camireño.
Lo expuesto no resulta nuevo en los procesos sociales que ha vivido Latinoamérica y, guardando las distancias, tiene semejanzas con lo que ocurrió en Bolivia misma durante el gobierno de la UDP y en el Perú -casi cuarenta años atrás-, cuando el gobierno de Velasco Alvarado enfrentaba la tenaz oposición de la oligarquÃa, mientras la mayorÃa de las organizaciones de izquierda radical lo calificaban como reformista burgués.
Ciertamente el gobierno boliviano tuvo que negociar con la dirigencia radical de Camiri, respaldada por el pueblo, y conceder las principales demandas contenidas en su pliego de reclamos. La situación de bloqueo de la vÃa troncal de Santa Cruz hacia Argentina y la toma de las instalaciones de una transnacional, asà lo exigÃa. Consecuentemente el nuevo actor social se ha empoderado y, es pertinente manejar como hipótesis, la existencia de una voluntad que la lleve a tratar de superar su horizonte local y convertirse en fuerza polÃtica.
Claro que resulta difÃcil prever las proyecciones de la hipótesis enunciada, empero lo que habrÃan sido iniciativas de personalidades que se integraron y aportaron contenido polÃtico a las reivindicaciones económicas, podrÃan significar un polo de atracción a otros sectores radicales para el ensayo de iniciativas similares.
En dicho camino, la Federación de Cooperativistas Mineros se encargó de plantearle otro gran desafÃo al gobierno del MAS. Las cooperativas mineras surgieron como resultado de la polÃtica de ajuste estructural que provocó el cierre de la minerÃa estatal boliviana y la desocupación de decenas de miles de trabajadores que hasta entonces laboraban en la COMIBOL. El abandono de las minas motivo el inicio de actividades artesanales de explotación y la posterior formación de cooperativas que, con el paso de los años y el incremento del precio internacional de los minerales, se han convertido en la mayorÃa de los casos en empresas rentables que a la vez cuentan con una amplia masa de asalariados.
Los cooperativistas mineros apoyaron al MAS y fueron uno de sus baluartes en la campaña electoral, pero hace unos meses se distanciaron cuando Evo Morales cambió al Ministro de MinerÃa que provenÃa de sus canteras, a raÃz de un intento de toma de una mina con un saldo lamentable de fallecidos.
Pero ahora, cuando el gobierno busca ampliar sus ingresos colocando un impuesto complementario a la minerÃa, los cooperativistas han vuelto a tomar el centro de la ciudad de La Paz. No hay acuerdo respecto a la cantidad de movilizados, todo indica que son más de diez mil que, premunidos de cartuchos de dinamita, han obligado al gobierno a negociar.
En un ambiente extremadamente tenso, la negociación -al momento de redactar esta nota- está en curso, encabezada por el Presidente de la República. Los amagos de enfrentamiento con la policÃa se mantienen y lo más probable y deseable es que se llegue a un acuerdo; pero, cualquiera sea su resultado, las implicancias para la gestión gubernamental serán de un costo muy sensible y lo obligarán a rediseñar sus estrategias de relacionamiento social y polÃtico.
Cabe la posibilidad futura de un “encuentro” polÃtico entre cooperativistas mineros, cÃvicos camireños y otros sectores radicales, pero -por el momento- esto no pasa de una especulación.
Desde el balcón
Los partidos tradicionales, luego de haber desembarcado al MAS de la presidencia de la Cámara de Senadores, observan -con placer disimulado y forzada seriedad- los aprietos del gobierno. Algunos voceros no han vacilado en afirmar que “todo esto es problema del MAS” y que “ahora los movimientos sociales le están pasando la factura”, olvidando -a decir de voceros del gobierno y observadores independientes- que fueron sus organizaciones polÃticas las que impulsaron las medidas de destrucción de la minerÃa.
En la Asamblea Constituyente el acuerdo está a punto de surgir y es notorio que la oposición no constituye un grupo sólido, inclusive se menciona un “desmarque” de algunos integrantes de la agrupación PODEMOS.
Es de esperar que una vez superado el conflicto con los cooperativistas, esta oposición intente recuperar su protagonismo, pero será muy difÃcil que logre impulsar movilizaciones como las que se han evidenciado en las últimas semanas. Lo más probable es que continúe restringida a sus escenarios regionales.
Algunos rasgos para comprender las estrategias en curso
a) La oportunidad: eventos internacionales como la Cumbre de Presidentes en Cochabamba y la coincidencia del aniversario del gobierno del MAS, pretendieron ser utilizados por las fuerzas impulsoras de las demandas para dotarlas de mayor resonancia.
b) La focalización: aunque la lectura internacional suele presentar los conflictos como impactando a toda Bolivia, la realidad sigue demostrando que todavÃa no alcanzan una dimensión nacional. Salvo la inconclusa determinación del reglamento de la Asamblea Constituyente, la totalidad de las tensiones continúan involucrando territorialmente a actores locales o regionales, como en el caso de Cochabamba, Camiri y los cooperativistas mineros o funcionalmente como sucedió con las fuerzas polÃticas de oposición, para las elecciones de la directiva del Senado.
c) La rearticulación de la oposición: el mayor logro fue alcanzado en la Cámara de Senadores en la cual un acuerdo entre Poder Democrático Social, Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario y Unidad Nacional, permitió que el único senador de esta fuerza polÃtica ocupara la presidencia desplazando al candidato del MAS.
d) La movilización social directa contra la oposición: Cochabamba con éxito relativo y El Alto, con limitaciones lindantes en el fracaso, fueron los contextos en los cuales los movimientos sociales decidieron enfrentar abiertamente a los prefectos alineados en la corriente autonomista liderada por el Comité CÃvico de Santa Cruz.
e) El surgimiento de la oposición de izquierda radical: los sectores radicales de izquierda que hasta el momento habÃan permanecido en una situación casi marginal han logrado, por primera vez, un protagonismo activo liderando polÃticamente las demandas del pueblo de Camiri que -luego de ocho dÃas de paralización y bloqueo de la vÃa troncal que une Santa Cruz con Argentina- han sido aceptadas en lo fundamental por el gobierno.
f) El reiterado efecto mediático. La mayorÃa de los medios de comunicación continúan ejerciendo su influencia que los convierte en voceros exitosos de la oposición.
URL: http://alainet.org
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
An Open Letter to America's Soldiers from the Ranks - The Looming Shadow of Nuremberg
By TONY SWINDELL
Crimes Listed by the Nuremberg Standard of 1947: a war of aggression, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for its accomplishment; murder or ill-treatment of civilian populations in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war; plunder of public or private property; wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity; crimes against humanity such as murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war.
Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Fallujah, the rape of Lebanon, the concentration camps in the West Bank and Gaza, clandestine prisons, the Iraq embargo of the 1990s, Halliburton, and Black Water. There are more, but these will suffice to compare against the Nuremberg Standard. It will not be a difficult task. For example, start with Halliburton and the plunder of public (American taxpayers') property.
How many of you recognize the name of Army Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr.?
I do because he and I stood on and flew over the same ground nearly 40 years ago. Like him, I left a little blood and a lot of sweat in a Godforsaken place halfway around the world, earning four battle stars in 11 months. Plus some cheap tin and ribbon medals made even cheaper by the good friends who never came home with me. Thompson did, too.
Hugh was a helicopter pilot who aimed his guns at American soldiers--members of my brigade -- to keep them from slaughtering civilians in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai 4. Spotting massacred civilians around My Lai, Thompson and his two-man crew landed beside wounded civilians to give medical help as the infantry company commander and others present kept shooting the wounded. Thompson ordered his crew to open fire if the slaughter continued. No more civilians were shot.
Thompson's story is critical because the march to a nuclear war against Iran has begun, and YOU will the ones carrying it out. There is no way to effectively "confront" Iran except with tactical nuclear weapons. Tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children will die outright or suffer lingering deaths from horrible radiation sicknesses. It will be murder, pure and simple. Look at the suffering around you and multiply it by hundreds.
No doubt you know that back home, 80 per cent of the American people voted in the last election to end the Iraq debacle, but no one in Washington listened. Our two-faced media watchdogs are a gaggle of neocon propaganda peddlers, corporate whores and New World Order shills who helped orchestrate and cheerlead the slaughter, and they sneer at your patriotism behind your backs.
Everything you've been told about Iraq is a pack of lies, and the powers that be seem to think we're all stupid enough to be conned again. We can't trust our elected representatives to carry out the will of the people. They're been bought and sold, and have just proven it. For all practical purposes, a coup d'etat has taken place.
Meanwhile, soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have problems of their own just staying alive. After four years, why doesn't everyone have the equipment and armored vehicles needed? The most cynical thing our government can do is to send its soldiers into combat with defective weapons or lacking critical equipment. To me, actions speak a lot louder than words. Just ask the folks who lost everything to Hurricane Katrina down along the Gulf Coast.
Keep in mind that defense contractors like Halliburton are raking in billions, and the 100-grand-per-year hired guns and their employers certainly aren't lacking anything they need. Take a close look at their equipment. Whether you realize it or not, these hired guns are making your job a lot harder by terrorizing and humiliating the Iraqi population, accountable to no one. I've seen it all before, only with more humidity and less sand.
Let me tell you a little secret about the plan to parcel you out in small groups and isolate you in Iraqi units. This was tried in Vietnam with disastrous results, with adjectives like suicidal. And that was before we had really gotten serious about killing people over there. How can you tell who the enemy is? Do you speak the Iraqi language and understand the culture? That friendly Iraqi kid or little girl in a burka may be taking reams of mental notes about your unit strength, equipment, and movement patterns to relay to their big brothers with the IEDs, RPGs and AKs. They may even be humping bags of ammo or ordnance and running commo for insurgents.
Count your fingers for the number of new insurgents every dead civilian creates. Rape a girl and murder her family to cover it up, and you'll need a computer. Don't forget to factor in the damage from 50,000 armed-to-the-teeth mercenaries, many of whom not only don't speak Iraqi, they don't even speak English. Always remember that none of these people invited you there to blow their country apart. Imagine how you'd feel if some friendly invaders and a bunch of their salaried thugs had wasted New York City and killed the entire population.
I can tell you from experience that it's impossible to win any kind of guerilla war without the support of the population and while soldiering from a defensive position. Have your missions turned from search and clear to search and avoid like ours did? Do you have a mentality of "the day is yours, the night is theirs"? If that's true, the situation has disintegrated into a war of attrition and you've lost.
Put aside from the moral conundrum of nuking a non-nuke country that has signed the non-proliferation treaty to keep that country from maybe getting nukes of its own, and all on behalf of another country that already has hundreds of nukes and refuses to sign any such treaties. An attack on Iran means you will be trapped between a rock and a hard place. Make no mistake: the real reason for the "surge" into Bagdad is to reinforce security around the laptop warriors and bureaucrats in the Green Zone. You'll find yourselves in the curious position of playing bodyguard for the hired guns. How ironic will that be?
Think about your families and loved ones. A large number of you are serving multiple tours, with many involuntarily extended. For the latter, your country has violated the contract it signed with you, but just try breaking your end of it. Meanwhile, military families suffer at home, a significant number of you will not have jobs to return to, and unbelievably, your government is doing its best to slash or delay veteran's benefits. For those of you who come home wounded, it will take years to get a VA disability claim processed if you succeed at all.
Are your families are living near the poverty level? Look at how many payday loan shark operations hover like vultures around stateside military posts. The bottom line is that you and your loved ones are suffering all the blood and material sacrifices while White House and Congressional cronies get unspeakably rich. And, you're being asked to do it over and over again by people who are willing to spill every drop of your blood while making sure their own children avoid wearing a uniform.
To say that combat veterans--or anyone -- who oppose these wars are against you is an outright lie. We would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you to defend our country and protect our Constitution. We want Osama bin Laden and his cohorts dead as much as you do. Our hearts break when another coffin comes home, or a young man or woman returns physically or psychologically crippled. We have personally seen and felt this pain for 30 years or more. We are outraged that it's happening all over again, and for what?
Our anger is directed at the people who have cynically exploited your patriotism and love of America, people who seem to owe their allegiance to another country, people who have been using our Constitution as toilet paper. Turn your bullshit detectors up to full volume like we have. Open your eyes and discover what true courage is. It's not just facing another man in combat, it's also standing up for what's right.
Be forewarned and forearmed: the dogs of war never confront a man's intellectual or moral compass, but only his body and his emotions. They count on your blind obedience to authority. These people are not armed with superior knowledge or competence. They have nothing but a monopoly on violence and coercion, and a talent for exploiting our ignorance and timidity. All of us were born free men and women, and it's time to once again begin living like we are. It's time to show the government where real strength of the American people lies.
The bottom line is, if you don't think an ordinary soldier like yourself can do anything about the situation, you're dead wrong. Remember the story of Hugh Thompson. When the same dogs of war start barking, you start biting like he did. You do it with two simple questions to each officer and NCO, and ask it repeatedly: "With all due respect, sir, why are we still here and when are we going home?"
You don't give up your Constitutional rights when you put on the uniform, because the defense of the Constitution is at the core of your solemn oath to serve. Anyone who orders you to give up your morality and humanity should be hung. My fervent prayer is that a brigade of Hugh Thompsons like you will rise up to put a halt to this coming atrocity.
Tony Swindell can be reached at: phoenixtexoma@550access.com
Crimes Listed by the Nuremberg Standard of 1947: a war of aggression, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for its accomplishment; murder or ill-treatment of civilian populations in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war; plunder of public or private property; wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity; crimes against humanity such as murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war.
Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Fallujah, the rape of Lebanon, the concentration camps in the West Bank and Gaza, clandestine prisons, the Iraq embargo of the 1990s, Halliburton, and Black Water. There are more, but these will suffice to compare against the Nuremberg Standard. It will not be a difficult task. For example, start with Halliburton and the plunder of public (American taxpayers') property.
How many of you recognize the name of Army Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr.?
I do because he and I stood on and flew over the same ground nearly 40 years ago. Like him, I left a little blood and a lot of sweat in a Godforsaken place halfway around the world, earning four battle stars in 11 months. Plus some cheap tin and ribbon medals made even cheaper by the good friends who never came home with me. Thompson did, too.
Hugh was a helicopter pilot who aimed his guns at American soldiers--members of my brigade -- to keep them from slaughtering civilians in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai 4. Spotting massacred civilians around My Lai, Thompson and his two-man crew landed beside wounded civilians to give medical help as the infantry company commander and others present kept shooting the wounded. Thompson ordered his crew to open fire if the slaughter continued. No more civilians were shot.
Thompson's story is critical because the march to a nuclear war against Iran has begun, and YOU will the ones carrying it out. There is no way to effectively "confront" Iran except with tactical nuclear weapons. Tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children will die outright or suffer lingering deaths from horrible radiation sicknesses. It will be murder, pure and simple. Look at the suffering around you and multiply it by hundreds.
No doubt you know that back home, 80 per cent of the American people voted in the last election to end the Iraq debacle, but no one in Washington listened. Our two-faced media watchdogs are a gaggle of neocon propaganda peddlers, corporate whores and New World Order shills who helped orchestrate and cheerlead the slaughter, and they sneer at your patriotism behind your backs.
Everything you've been told about Iraq is a pack of lies, and the powers that be seem to think we're all stupid enough to be conned again. We can't trust our elected representatives to carry out the will of the people. They're been bought and sold, and have just proven it. For all practical purposes, a coup d'etat has taken place.
Meanwhile, soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have problems of their own just staying alive. After four years, why doesn't everyone have the equipment and armored vehicles needed? The most cynical thing our government can do is to send its soldiers into combat with defective weapons or lacking critical equipment. To me, actions speak a lot louder than words. Just ask the folks who lost everything to Hurricane Katrina down along the Gulf Coast.
Keep in mind that defense contractors like Halliburton are raking in billions, and the 100-grand-per-year hired guns and their employers certainly aren't lacking anything they need. Take a close look at their equipment. Whether you realize it or not, these hired guns are making your job a lot harder by terrorizing and humiliating the Iraqi population, accountable to no one. I've seen it all before, only with more humidity and less sand.
Let me tell you a little secret about the plan to parcel you out in small groups and isolate you in Iraqi units. This was tried in Vietnam with disastrous results, with adjectives like suicidal. And that was before we had really gotten serious about killing people over there. How can you tell who the enemy is? Do you speak the Iraqi language and understand the culture? That friendly Iraqi kid or little girl in a burka may be taking reams of mental notes about your unit strength, equipment, and movement patterns to relay to their big brothers with the IEDs, RPGs and AKs. They may even be humping bags of ammo or ordnance and running commo for insurgents.
Count your fingers for the number of new insurgents every dead civilian creates. Rape a girl and murder her family to cover it up, and you'll need a computer. Don't forget to factor in the damage from 50,000 armed-to-the-teeth mercenaries, many of whom not only don't speak Iraqi, they don't even speak English. Always remember that none of these people invited you there to blow their country apart. Imagine how you'd feel if some friendly invaders and a bunch of their salaried thugs had wasted New York City and killed the entire population.
I can tell you from experience that it's impossible to win any kind of guerilla war without the support of the population and while soldiering from a defensive position. Have your missions turned from search and clear to search and avoid like ours did? Do you have a mentality of "the day is yours, the night is theirs"? If that's true, the situation has disintegrated into a war of attrition and you've lost.
Put aside from the moral conundrum of nuking a non-nuke country that has signed the non-proliferation treaty to keep that country from maybe getting nukes of its own, and all on behalf of another country that already has hundreds of nukes and refuses to sign any such treaties. An attack on Iran means you will be trapped between a rock and a hard place. Make no mistake: the real reason for the "surge" into Bagdad is to reinforce security around the laptop warriors and bureaucrats in the Green Zone. You'll find yourselves in the curious position of playing bodyguard for the hired guns. How ironic will that be?
Think about your families and loved ones. A large number of you are serving multiple tours, with many involuntarily extended. For the latter, your country has violated the contract it signed with you, but just try breaking your end of it. Meanwhile, military families suffer at home, a significant number of you will not have jobs to return to, and unbelievably, your government is doing its best to slash or delay veteran's benefits. For those of you who come home wounded, it will take years to get a VA disability claim processed if you succeed at all.
Are your families are living near the poverty level? Look at how many payday loan shark operations hover like vultures around stateside military posts. The bottom line is that you and your loved ones are suffering all the blood and material sacrifices while White House and Congressional cronies get unspeakably rich. And, you're being asked to do it over and over again by people who are willing to spill every drop of your blood while making sure their own children avoid wearing a uniform.
To say that combat veterans--or anyone -- who oppose these wars are against you is an outright lie. We would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you to defend our country and protect our Constitution. We want Osama bin Laden and his cohorts dead as much as you do. Our hearts break when another coffin comes home, or a young man or woman returns physically or psychologically crippled. We have personally seen and felt this pain for 30 years or more. We are outraged that it's happening all over again, and for what?
Our anger is directed at the people who have cynically exploited your patriotism and love of America, people who seem to owe their allegiance to another country, people who have been using our Constitution as toilet paper. Turn your bullshit detectors up to full volume like we have. Open your eyes and discover what true courage is. It's not just facing another man in combat, it's also standing up for what's right.
Be forewarned and forearmed: the dogs of war never confront a man's intellectual or moral compass, but only his body and his emotions. They count on your blind obedience to authority. These people are not armed with superior knowledge or competence. They have nothing but a monopoly on violence and coercion, and a talent for exploiting our ignorance and timidity. All of us were born free men and women, and it's time to once again begin living like we are. It's time to show the government where real strength of the American people lies.
The bottom line is, if you don't think an ordinary soldier like yourself can do anything about the situation, you're dead wrong. Remember the story of Hugh Thompson. When the same dogs of war start barking, you start biting like he did. You do it with two simple questions to each officer and NCO, and ask it repeatedly: "With all due respect, sir, why are we still here and when are we going home?"
You don't give up your Constitutional rights when you put on the uniform, because the defense of the Constitution is at the core of your solemn oath to serve. Anyone who orders you to give up your morality and humanity should be hung. My fervent prayer is that a brigade of Hugh Thompsons like you will rise up to put a halt to this coming atrocity.
Tony Swindell can be reached at: phoenixtexoma@550access.com
Freddy Lugo admits that Posada Carriles recruited him to place bomb on Cubana airliner that killed 73 people in 1976
• One of the two perpetrators of the mid-flight bombing of a Cubana airliner that killed 73 people in 1976 talks about the crime to The New York Times and claims he was just a pawn in the schemes of Cuban exiles
BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD — Special for Granma International —
FREDDY Lugo, one of the two individuals hired by Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch to destroy a Cubana Aviation airliner in mid-flight on October 6, 1976, and claims that he was just a pawn in the machinations of Cuban exiles, according to an article published on February 3 in The New York Times.
The article, signed by Simon Romero, the paper’s correspondent in Caracas, notes that 65-year-old Lugo has freely walked the streets of the Venezuelan capital since 1993, after serving 17 years of a 20-year prison sentence, and works as a taxi driver.
Posada is "an adventurer, capable of anything," Lugo affirmed, commenting that if he had never met one of Posada’s employees — Hernán Ricardo Lozano — a few days before the crime, he would have had a normal life.
"My life would have taken a completely different path," he said, adding that it was Lozano who recruited him for the conspiracy hatched up by Posada and Bosch.
At the time, Ricardo was working for a detective agency created by Posada under CIA direction, and carried out surveillance and photography work. That was how he met Lugo, who was a news photographer for local publications.
Ricardo was paid $16,000 to place a bomb on Cubana Aviation Flight 455, while Lugo was paid $8,000. The C-4 was hidden in a tube of Colgate toothpaste and was carried, along with the other components of the device, in a camera bag to be left on the plane, according to the Times article, which goes over several of the well-known aspects of what is known as the Barbados Crime, which killed 73 people.
Lugo said he did not know where Ricardo was, but believes he left Venezuela.
The article says that Lugo drives a beige sedan as a taxi, "his only source of income" and that he lives with his wife in an "elegant if decaying building on a quiet, tree-lined street… He says he avoids any involvement in politics."
The article continues: "Asked if he felt remorse over the deaths of 73 people, including many teenagers on the Cuban fencing team, Mr. Lugo said he did not. He explained somewhat cryptically that he considered himself manipulated in an act beyond his control. ‘I am a normal man,’ he said. ‘I am innocent.’"
A book recently published in Caracas by journalists Alexis Rosas and Ernesto Villegas about Posada, titled El Terrorista de los Bush (The Bush Family’s Terrorist), has brought to the public eye the demands by Cuba and Venezuela regarding the Barbados Crime, the article notes.
For some months, a U.S. grand jury has been investigating the ties between Luis Posada Carriles and the string of bombings in Havana in 1997. Meeting in Newark, New Jersey, the grand jury has summoned various members of the Cuban-American mafia who participated in financing the conspiracy to carry out those bombings.
However, it has not occurred to the FBI to ask a grand jury for a detailed investigation of the circumstances surrounding the Barbados Crime; even though Posada is in U.S. custody, his accomplice Orlando Bosch freely walks the streets of Miami, and individuals like Freddy Lugo continue to talk about that horrible attack.
Could it be that nobody in the United States is interested in the truth about that massacre, carried out while George Bush Sr., the great patron of the Cuban-American mafia, was head of the CIA?
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD — Special for Granma International —
FREDDY Lugo, one of the two individuals hired by Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch to destroy a Cubana Aviation airliner in mid-flight on October 6, 1976, and claims that he was just a pawn in the machinations of Cuban exiles, according to an article published on February 3 in The New York Times.
The article, signed by Simon Romero, the paper’s correspondent in Caracas, notes that 65-year-old Lugo has freely walked the streets of the Venezuelan capital since 1993, after serving 17 years of a 20-year prison sentence, and works as a taxi driver.
Posada is "an adventurer, capable of anything," Lugo affirmed, commenting that if he had never met one of Posada’s employees — Hernán Ricardo Lozano — a few days before the crime, he would have had a normal life.
"My life would have taken a completely different path," he said, adding that it was Lozano who recruited him for the conspiracy hatched up by Posada and Bosch.
At the time, Ricardo was working for a detective agency created by Posada under CIA direction, and carried out surveillance and photography work. That was how he met Lugo, who was a news photographer for local publications.
Ricardo was paid $16,000 to place a bomb on Cubana Aviation Flight 455, while Lugo was paid $8,000. The C-4 was hidden in a tube of Colgate toothpaste and was carried, along with the other components of the device, in a camera bag to be left on the plane, according to the Times article, which goes over several of the well-known aspects of what is known as the Barbados Crime, which killed 73 people.
Lugo said he did not know where Ricardo was, but believes he left Venezuela.
The article says that Lugo drives a beige sedan as a taxi, "his only source of income" and that he lives with his wife in an "elegant if decaying building on a quiet, tree-lined street… He says he avoids any involvement in politics."
The article continues: "Asked if he felt remorse over the deaths of 73 people, including many teenagers on the Cuban fencing team, Mr. Lugo said he did not. He explained somewhat cryptically that he considered himself manipulated in an act beyond his control. ‘I am a normal man,’ he said. ‘I am innocent.’"
A book recently published in Caracas by journalists Alexis Rosas and Ernesto Villegas about Posada, titled El Terrorista de los Bush (The Bush Family’s Terrorist), has brought to the public eye the demands by Cuba and Venezuela regarding the Barbados Crime, the article notes.
For some months, a U.S. grand jury has been investigating the ties between Luis Posada Carriles and the string of bombings in Havana in 1997. Meeting in Newark, New Jersey, the grand jury has summoned various members of the Cuban-American mafia who participated in financing the conspiracy to carry out those bombings.
However, it has not occurred to the FBI to ask a grand jury for a detailed investigation of the circumstances surrounding the Barbados Crime; even though Posada is in U.S. custody, his accomplice Orlando Bosch freely walks the streets of Miami, and individuals like Freddy Lugo continue to talk about that horrible attack.
Could it be that nobody in the United States is interested in the truth about that massacre, carried out while George Bush Sr., the great patron of the Cuban-American mafia, was head of the CIA?
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
IS Kuwaiti Love Affair with US Over? - Shams - Ahlan Ezayak
Shams, a singer from Kuwait, has released a video that has become rather popular in the Middle East. The song is called "Ahlan Ezzayak-featuring George Bush"(Ahlan Ezzayak is Egyptian dialect meaning "welcome, how are you doing"). The video itself is pretty funny. Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and Cheney all get some coverage in it, as well as Shams chasing after American soldiers, who flee to avoid being hit with her shoe.
A few of things here. First, the video has gotten a lot of play in the Middle East. The singer is Kuwaiti, and the Kuwaitis, for a few decades, have been the people in the Middle East most supportive of America and American actions. The fact that this video comes from a Kuwaitia says something. Third, the recording company Rotana, how now dropped Shams. It is owned by Saudi Prince Waleed bin Talal and it is felt by some that the singer's anti-American feelings might have been behind it. Odd then, that she is later signed by a company with American backing.
Also important from the video is her blatant linking of the war in Iraq and the Palestinian struggle. Notice her walking into the sunset with a well known symbol of Palestinian resistance, the cartoon character Handalah created by Naji al-Ali. As she walks into the sunset hand in hand with Handalah she is wearing a wedding dress, clearly wedding the concept of Iraqi and Palestinian resistance to American, and hence Israeli, aggression.
The video is funny, so take a look.
Shams, a singer from Kuwait, has released a video that has become rather popular in the Middle East. The song is called "Ahlan Ezzayak-featuring George Bush"(Ahlan Ezzayak is Egyptian dialect meaning "welcome, how are you doing"). The video itself is pretty funny. Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and Cheney all get some coverage in it, as well as Shams chasing after American soldiers, who flee to avoid being hit with her shoe.
A few of things here. First, the video has gotten a lot of play in the Middle East. The singer is Kuwaiti, and the Kuwaitis, for a few decades, have been the people in the Middle East most supportive of America and American actions. The fact that this video comes from a Kuwaitia says something. Third, the recording company Rotana, how now dropped Shams. It is owned by Saudi Prince Waleed bin Talal and it is felt by some that the singer's anti-American feelings might have been behind it. Odd then, that she is later signed by a company with American backing.
Also important from the video is her blatant linking of the war in Iraq and the Palestinian struggle. Notice her walking into the sunset with a well known symbol of Palestinian resistance, the cartoon character Handalah created by Naji al-Ali. As she walks into the sunset hand in hand with Handalah she is wearing a wedding dress, clearly wedding the concept of Iraqi and Palestinian resistance to American, and hence Israeli, aggression.
The video is funny, so take a look.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
New Fort Detrick BioDefense Laboratory May Reflect a Bush Germ Warfare Effort
By Sherwood Ross
Global Research, February 5, 2007
afterdowningstreet.org/node
Although no foreign power has threatened a bioterror attack against America, since 9/11 the Bush administration has allocated a stunning $43-billion to "defend" against one. Critics are now saying, however, Bush's newest "biodefense" initiative is both offensive and illegal.
The latest development, according to the Associated Press, is that the U.S. Army is replacing its Military Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., "with a new laboratory that would be a component of a biodefense campus operated by several agencies." The Army told AP the laboratory is intended to continue research that is only meant for defense against biological threats.
But University of Illinois international law professor Francis Boyle charged the Fort Detrick work will include "acquiring, growing, modifying, storing, packaging and dispersing classical, emerging and genetically engineered pathogens." Those activities, as well as planned study of the properties of pathogens when weaponized, "are unmistakable hallmarks of an offensive weapons program."
Boyle made his comments to Fort Detrick as part of its environmental impact assessment of the new facility. Boyle pointed out in his letter that he authored the 1989 U.S. law enacted by Congress that criminalized BWC violations.
The Fort Detrick expansion is but one phase of a multi-billion biotech buildup going forward in 11 agencies sparked by the unsolved, Oct., 2001, anthrax attacks on Congress that claimed five lives and sickened 17.
The attacks, and ensuing panic, led to passage of the BioShield Act of 2004. There is strong evidence, though, the attacks were not perpetrated by any foreign government or terrorist band but originated at Fort Detrick, the huge, supposedly super-safe biotechnology research center. Despite an intensive FBI investigation, no one has been charged with a crime.
Referring to the work undertaken at Fort Detrick, Mark Wheelis, Senior Lecturer in the Section of Microbiology of the University of California, Davis, told the Global Security Newswire(GNS) as far back as June 30, 2004, "This is absolutely without any question what one would do to develop an offensive biological weapons capability."
"We're going to develop new pathogens for various purposes. We're going to develop new ways of packaging them, new ways of disseminating them. We're going to harden them to environmental degradation. We'll be prepared to go offensive at the drop of a hat if we so desire," he told GNS.
Alan Pearson, director of the chemical and bioweapons control program at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation Studies in Washington, told the Baltimore Sun government scientists must tread carefully lest they wind up "in essence creating new threats that we're going to have to defend ourselves against."
Richard Novick, a New York University microbiology professor has stated, "I cannot envision any imaginable justification for changing the antigenicity of anthrax as a defensive measure." (That is, to create a new strain for which there is no known vaccine.)
Milton Leitenberg, a University of Maryland arms control advocate, told The Washington Post last July 30th, "If we saw others doing this kind of research (Fort Detrick), we would view it as an infringement of the bioweapons treaty. You can't go around the world yelling about Iranian and North Korean programs, about which we know very little, when we've got all this going on."
One alarming example of such Federally-funded research reported in the October, 2003, issue of "New Scientist," is the creation of "an extremely deadly form of mousepox, a relative of the smallpox virus, through genetic engineering."
The publication warned such research "brings closer the prospect of pox viruses that cause only mild infections in humans being turned into diseases lethal even to people who have been vaccinated."
Edward Hammond, director of The Sunshine Project of Austin, Tex., a non-profit working for transparency in biological research, said the recreation of the deadly 1918 "Spanish flu" germ that killed an estimated 40-million world-wide, means "the possibility of man-made disaster, either accidental or deliberate, has risen for the entire world."
Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University chemist who tracks arms control issues, told The Baltimore Sun the government's tenfold expansion of Biosafety Level-4 laboratories, such as those at Fort Detrick, raises the risk of accidents or the diversion of dangerous organisms. "If a worker in one of these facilities removes a single viral particle or a single cell, which cannot be detected or prevented, that single particle or cell can form the basis of an outbreak," he said.
The current expansion at Fort Detrick flows from a paper penned by President Bush. His Homeland Security Presidential Directive, HSPD-10, written April 28, 2004, states, "Among our many initiatives we are continuing to develop more forward-looking analyses, to include Red Teaming efforts, to understand new scientific trends that may be exploited by our adversaries to develop biological weapons and to help position intelligence collectors ahead of the problem."
Boyle said the Bush paper is "a smoking gun" fired at the BWC. "Red Teaming means that we actually have people out there on a Red Team plotting, planning, scheming and conspiring how to use biowarfare."
Boyle traces advocacy for aggressive biowarfare back to the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century(PNAC), whose members, including Paul Wolfowitz, later influenced President Geoge Bush's military and foreign policy. Before assuming his current post as World Bank head, Wolfowitz served Bush as deputy secretary of defense.
Before the anthrax attacks on Congress, PNAC advocated "advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool," Boyle wrote in "Biowarfare and Terrorism," (Clarity Press).
Biological warfare inolves the use of living organisms for military purposes. Such weapons can be viral, bacterial, and fungal, among other forms, and can be spread over a large geographic terrain by wind, water, insect, animal, or human transmission, according to Jeremy Rifkin, author of "The Biotech Century"(Penguin).
Rifkin has written "it is widely acknowledged that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between defensive and offensive research in the field." And Jackie Cabasso, of Western States Legal Foundation of Oakland, Calif., noted, "With biological weapons, the line between offense and defense is exceedingly difficult to draw. In the end, secrecy is the greatest enemy of safety."
She added, "The U.S. is now massively expanding its biodefense program, mostly in secretive facilities. Other countries are going to be suspicious. This bodes badly for the future of biological weapons control."
Critics following the biowarfare trail at Fort Detrick, are wondering if President Bush --- who scrapped the nuclear proliferation treaty and then had the Pentagon design new nuclear weapons --- isn't also ignoring the BWC in order to create new germ warfare pathogens.
(Sherwood Ross is an American reporter and columnist. He worked for the Chicago Daily News and has written for wire services and national magazines. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com)
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
To become a Member of Global Research
The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com
www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.
For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com
© Copyright Sherwood Ross, afterdowningstreet.org/node, 2007
The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=4688
© Copyright 2005 GlobalResearch.ca
Web site engine by Polygraphx Multimedia © Copyright 2005
Global Research, February 5, 2007
afterdowningstreet.org/node
Although no foreign power has threatened a bioterror attack against America, since 9/11 the Bush administration has allocated a stunning $43-billion to "defend" against one. Critics are now saying, however, Bush's newest "biodefense" initiative is both offensive and illegal.
The latest development, according to the Associated Press, is that the U.S. Army is replacing its Military Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., "with a new laboratory that would be a component of a biodefense campus operated by several agencies." The Army told AP the laboratory is intended to continue research that is only meant for defense against biological threats.
But University of Illinois international law professor Francis Boyle charged the Fort Detrick work will include "acquiring, growing, modifying, storing, packaging and dispersing classical, emerging and genetically engineered pathogens." Those activities, as well as planned study of the properties of pathogens when weaponized, "are unmistakable hallmarks of an offensive weapons program."
Boyle made his comments to Fort Detrick as part of its environmental impact assessment of the new facility. Boyle pointed out in his letter that he authored the 1989 U.S. law enacted by Congress that criminalized BWC violations.
The Fort Detrick expansion is but one phase of a multi-billion biotech buildup going forward in 11 agencies sparked by the unsolved, Oct., 2001, anthrax attacks on Congress that claimed five lives and sickened 17.
The attacks, and ensuing panic, led to passage of the BioShield Act of 2004. There is strong evidence, though, the attacks were not perpetrated by any foreign government or terrorist band but originated at Fort Detrick, the huge, supposedly super-safe biotechnology research center. Despite an intensive FBI investigation, no one has been charged with a crime.
Referring to the work undertaken at Fort Detrick, Mark Wheelis, Senior Lecturer in the Section of Microbiology of the University of California, Davis, told the Global Security Newswire(GNS) as far back as June 30, 2004, "This is absolutely without any question what one would do to develop an offensive biological weapons capability."
"We're going to develop new pathogens for various purposes. We're going to develop new ways of packaging them, new ways of disseminating them. We're going to harden them to environmental degradation. We'll be prepared to go offensive at the drop of a hat if we so desire," he told GNS.
Alan Pearson, director of the chemical and bioweapons control program at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation Studies in Washington, told the Baltimore Sun government scientists must tread carefully lest they wind up "in essence creating new threats that we're going to have to defend ourselves against."
Richard Novick, a New York University microbiology professor has stated, "I cannot envision any imaginable justification for changing the antigenicity of anthrax as a defensive measure." (That is, to create a new strain for which there is no known vaccine.)
Milton Leitenberg, a University of Maryland arms control advocate, told The Washington Post last July 30th, "If we saw others doing this kind of research (Fort Detrick), we would view it as an infringement of the bioweapons treaty. You can't go around the world yelling about Iranian and North Korean programs, about which we know very little, when we've got all this going on."
One alarming example of such Federally-funded research reported in the October, 2003, issue of "New Scientist," is the creation of "an extremely deadly form of mousepox, a relative of the smallpox virus, through genetic engineering."
The publication warned such research "brings closer the prospect of pox viruses that cause only mild infections in humans being turned into diseases lethal even to people who have been vaccinated."
Edward Hammond, director of The Sunshine Project of Austin, Tex., a non-profit working for transparency in biological research, said the recreation of the deadly 1918 "Spanish flu" germ that killed an estimated 40-million world-wide, means "the possibility of man-made disaster, either accidental or deliberate, has risen for the entire world."
Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University chemist who tracks arms control issues, told The Baltimore Sun the government's tenfold expansion of Biosafety Level-4 laboratories, such as those at Fort Detrick, raises the risk of accidents or the diversion of dangerous organisms. "If a worker in one of these facilities removes a single viral particle or a single cell, which cannot be detected or prevented, that single particle or cell can form the basis of an outbreak," he said.
The current expansion at Fort Detrick flows from a paper penned by President Bush. His Homeland Security Presidential Directive, HSPD-10, written April 28, 2004, states, "Among our many initiatives we are continuing to develop more forward-looking analyses, to include Red Teaming efforts, to understand new scientific trends that may be exploited by our adversaries to develop biological weapons and to help position intelligence collectors ahead of the problem."
Boyle said the Bush paper is "a smoking gun" fired at the BWC. "Red Teaming means that we actually have people out there on a Red Team plotting, planning, scheming and conspiring how to use biowarfare."
Boyle traces advocacy for aggressive biowarfare back to the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century(PNAC), whose members, including Paul Wolfowitz, later influenced President Geoge Bush's military and foreign policy. Before assuming his current post as World Bank head, Wolfowitz served Bush as deputy secretary of defense.
Before the anthrax attacks on Congress, PNAC advocated "advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool," Boyle wrote in "Biowarfare and Terrorism," (Clarity Press).
Biological warfare inolves the use of living organisms for military purposes. Such weapons can be viral, bacterial, and fungal, among other forms, and can be spread over a large geographic terrain by wind, water, insect, animal, or human transmission, according to Jeremy Rifkin, author of "The Biotech Century"(Penguin).
Rifkin has written "it is widely acknowledged that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between defensive and offensive research in the field." And Jackie Cabasso, of Western States Legal Foundation of Oakland, Calif., noted, "With biological weapons, the line between offense and defense is exceedingly difficult to draw. In the end, secrecy is the greatest enemy of safety."
She added, "The U.S. is now massively expanding its biodefense program, mostly in secretive facilities. Other countries are going to be suspicious. This bodes badly for the future of biological weapons control."
Critics following the biowarfare trail at Fort Detrick, are wondering if President Bush --- who scrapped the nuclear proliferation treaty and then had the Pentagon design new nuclear weapons --- isn't also ignoring the BWC in order to create new germ warfare pathogens.
(Sherwood Ross is an American reporter and columnist. He worked for the Chicago Daily News and has written for wire services and national magazines. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com)
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
To become a Member of Global Research
The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com
www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.
For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com
© Copyright Sherwood Ross, afterdowningstreet.org/node, 2007
The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=4688
© Copyright 2005 GlobalResearch.ca
Web site engine by Polygraphx Multimedia © Copyright 2005
Forgotten February - (A Brief Peek at America's Unrestrained Brutality) by Mickey Z.
Just in case anyone needs reminding that "USA" has always stood for "United States of Aggression," here are a forgotten few from February's Files:
February 1898
In 1897, Teddy Roosevelt stated bluntly, "I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one." His wait lasted less than a year.
February 15, 1898 was a muggy Tuesday night in Havana Harbor. Some 350 crew and officers settled in on board the Maine. "At 9:40 p.m., the ship's forward end abruptly lifted itself from the water," writes author Tom Miller. "Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion. Within seconds, another eruption-this one deafening and massive-splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn't battened down, and most that was, flying more than 200 feet into the air."
The Maine was in Havana Harbor in 1898 on a purportedly friendly mission. "At a certain point in that spring, (President) McKinley and the business community began to see that their object, to get Spain out of Cuba, could not be accomplished without war," writes Howard Zinn, "and that their accompanying object, the securing of American military and economic influence in Cuba, could not be left to the Cuban rebels, but could be ensured only by U.S. intervention."
American newspapers, especially those run by Hearst (New York Journal) and Pulitzer (New York World), jumped on the Maine explosion as the ideal justification to drum up public support for a war of imperialism. "Tabloid headlines depicting Spanish atrocities against Cubans became commonplace, and the influential papers of both men were outdoing each other in the sensationalized screaming for war," says historian Kenneth C. Davis. When Hearst sent artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to supply pictures, he reported that he could not find a war. "You furnish the pictures," Hearst famously replied, "and I'll furnish the war."
(In 1976, Admiral Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy mounted an investigation of the Maine disaster. Rickover and his team of experts concluded that the explosion was probably caused by "spontaneous combustion inside the ship's coal bins," a problem common to ships of that era.)
February 1901
In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the U.S. fought a brutal war of conquest in the Pacific. By 1900, more than 75,000 American troops -- three-quarters of the entire U.S. Army -- were sent to the Philippines. In the face of this overwhelming show of force, the Filipinos turned to guerrilla warfare. The February 5, 1901 edition of the New York World shed some light on the U.S. response to guerilla tactics: "Our soldiers here and there resort to terrible measures with the natives. Captains and lieutenants are sometimes judges, sheriffs and executioners. 'I don't want any more prisoners sent into Manila' was the verbal order from the Governor-General three months ago. It is now the custom to avenge the death of an American soldier by burning to the ground all the houses, and killing right and left the natives who are only suspects."
February 1939
Imagine a rally that involved plenty of marching and arms raised in a Nazi salute to their leader. Somewhere near Nuremberg, perhaps? Guess again. The venue was Madison Square Garden where frenzied members of the German-American Bund cheered Fritz Kuhn as he stood before a 30-foot high portrait of George Washington flanked by black swastikas, leading them in a chant of "Free Amerika!" (a rallying cry which had just recently replaced "Sieg Heil!"), while thirteen hundred New York City policemen stood guard outside the building.
A U.S. citizen who served in the German Army during the First World War, Kuhn's loyalty to Adolf Hitler was surpassed only by his hatred of Jews (like Henry Ford, he went as far as blaming the Jews for Benedict Arnold's treason). When asked if there were any good Jews, Kuhn replied, "If a mosquito is on your arm, you don't ask is it a good or a bad mosquito. You just brush it off." Before you dismiss Kuhn as a fringe character, consider this: The February 20, 1939 rally described above drew 22,000 avid followers.
February 1942
Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 giving the army the unrestricted power to arrest -- without warrants or indictments or hearings -- every Japanese-American on a 150-mile strip along the West Coast (roughly 110,000 men, women, and children) and transport them to internment camps in Colorado, Utah, Arkansas, and other interior states to be kept under prison conditions. The Supreme Court upheld this order and the Japanese-Americans remained in custody for over three years. A Los Angeles Times writer defended the forced relocations by explaining to his readers that "a viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched -- so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to be a Japanese, not an American."
Life in the internment camps entailed cramped living spaces with communal meals and bathrooms. The one-room apartments measured twenty by twenty feet and none had running water. The internees were allowed to take along "essential personal effects" from home but were prohibited from bringing razors, scissors, or radios. Outside the shared wards were barbed wire, guard towers with machine guns, and searchlights.
The dislocated Japanese-Americans incurred an estimated loss of $400 million in forced property sales during the internment years, and therein may lie a more Machiavellian motivation than sheer race hatred. "A large engine for the Japanese-American incarcerations was agri-business," says Michio Kaku, a noted nuclear physicist and political activist whose parents were interned from 1942 to 1946. "Agri-businesses in California coveted much of the land owned by Japanese-Americans."
A formal apology came to the 60,000 survivors of internment camps in 1990. The U.S. government paid them each $20,000. While Yale Law Professor Eugene V. Rostow later called the internment camps "our worst wartime mistake," Zinn pointedly asks: "Was it a 'mistake' -- or was it an action to be expected from a nation with a long history of racism and which was fighting a war, not to end racism, but to retain the fundamentals of the American system?"
February 1945
With the Russians advancing rapidly towards Berlin, tens of thousands of German civilians fled into Dresden, believing it to be safe from attack. As a result, the city's population swelled from its usual 600,000 to at least one million. Beside the stream of refugees, Dresden was also known for its china and its Baroque and Rococo architecture. Its galleries housed works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Botticelli. On the evening of February 13, none of this would matter.
Using the Dresden soccer stadium as a reference point, over 2000 British Lancasters and American Flying Fortresses dropped loads of gasoline bombs every 50 square yards out from this marker. The enormous flame that resulted was eight square miles wide, shooting smoke three miles high. For the next eighteen hours, regular bombs were dropped on top of this strange brew. Twenty-five minutes after the bombing, winds reaching 150 miles-per-hour sucked everything into the heart of the storm. Because the air became superheated and rushed upward, the fire lost most of its oxygen, creating tornadoes of flame that can suck the air right out of human lungs.
Seventy percent of the Dresden dead either suffocated or died from poison gases that turned their bodies green and red. The intense heat melted some bodies into the pavement like bubblegum, or shrunk them into three-foot long charred carcasses. Clean-up crews wore rubber boots to wade through the "human soup" found in nearby caves. In other cases, the superheated air propelled victims skyward only to come down in tiny pieces as far as fifteen miles outside Dresden. "The flames ate everything organic, everything that would burn," wrote journalist Phillip Knightley. "People died by the thousands, cooked, incinerated, or suffocated. Then American planes came the next day to machine-gun survivors as they struggled to the banks of the Elbe."
The Allied firebombing did more than shock and awe. The bombing campaign murdered more than 100,000 people-mostly civilians... but the exact number may never be known due to the high number of refugees in the area.
February 1946
Edgar L. Jones, a former war correspondent in the Pacific, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly: "What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers."
February 1966
David Lawrence, editor of US News & World Report, wrote: "What the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times." When challenged with stories of American atrocities in Vietnam, Lawrence explained, "Primitive peoples with savagery in their hearts have to be helped to understand the true basis of a civilized existence."
February 1968
An unnamed U.S. major, quoted by Associated Press on February 8, 1968, was asked about the American assault on the Vietnamese town of Bentre. The major explained: "It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it."
February 1991
High above a swamp, over 60 miles of coastal Highway 8 from Kuwait to Iraq, a division of the Iraq's Republican Guard withdrew on February 26-27,1991. Baghdad radio had just announced Iraq's acceptance of a cease-fire proposal and, in compliance with UN Resolution 660, Iraqi troops were ordered to withdraw to positions held before August 2, 1990. President George H.W. Bush derisively called the announcement "an outrage" and "a cruel hoax."
"U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours," says Joyce Chediac, a Lebanese-American journalist. "It was like shooting fish in a barrel," one U.S. pilot said. "Many of those massacred fleeing Kuwait were not Iraqi soldiers at all," says Ramsey Clark, "but Palestinians, Sudanese, Egyptians, and other foreign workers."
Randall Richard of the Providence Journal filed this dispatch from he deck of the U.S.S. Ranger: "Air strikes against Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait were being launched so feverishly from this carrier today that pilots said they took whatever bombs happened to be closest to the flight deck. The crews, working to the strains of the Lone Ranger theme, often passed up the projectile of choice... because it took too long to load."
"Every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments," Chediac reported after visiting the scene. "No survivors are known or likely. The cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground, and it's impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel."
"At one spot," Bob Drogin reported in the Los Angeles Times, "snarling wild dogs (had) reduced two corpses to bare ribs. Giant carrion birds pick(ed) at another; only a bootclad foot and eyeless skull are recognizable."
Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer, said: "Even in Vietnam I didn't see anything like this. It's pathetic."
Correction: When you're talking about America, it's not pathetic...it's policy.
Mickey Z. is the author of several books, most recently 50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know (Disinformation Books). He can be found on the Web at: www.mickeyz.net.
February 1898
In 1897, Teddy Roosevelt stated bluntly, "I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one." His wait lasted less than a year.
February 15, 1898 was a muggy Tuesday night in Havana Harbor. Some 350 crew and officers settled in on board the Maine. "At 9:40 p.m., the ship's forward end abruptly lifted itself from the water," writes author Tom Miller. "Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion. Within seconds, another eruption-this one deafening and massive-splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn't battened down, and most that was, flying more than 200 feet into the air."
The Maine was in Havana Harbor in 1898 on a purportedly friendly mission. "At a certain point in that spring, (President) McKinley and the business community began to see that their object, to get Spain out of Cuba, could not be accomplished without war," writes Howard Zinn, "and that their accompanying object, the securing of American military and economic influence in Cuba, could not be left to the Cuban rebels, but could be ensured only by U.S. intervention."
American newspapers, especially those run by Hearst (New York Journal) and Pulitzer (New York World), jumped on the Maine explosion as the ideal justification to drum up public support for a war of imperialism. "Tabloid headlines depicting Spanish atrocities against Cubans became commonplace, and the influential papers of both men were outdoing each other in the sensationalized screaming for war," says historian Kenneth C. Davis. When Hearst sent artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to supply pictures, he reported that he could not find a war. "You furnish the pictures," Hearst famously replied, "and I'll furnish the war."
(In 1976, Admiral Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy mounted an investigation of the Maine disaster. Rickover and his team of experts concluded that the explosion was probably caused by "spontaneous combustion inside the ship's coal bins," a problem common to ships of that era.)
February 1901
In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the U.S. fought a brutal war of conquest in the Pacific. By 1900, more than 75,000 American troops -- three-quarters of the entire U.S. Army -- were sent to the Philippines. In the face of this overwhelming show of force, the Filipinos turned to guerrilla warfare. The February 5, 1901 edition of the New York World shed some light on the U.S. response to guerilla tactics: "Our soldiers here and there resort to terrible measures with the natives. Captains and lieutenants are sometimes judges, sheriffs and executioners. 'I don't want any more prisoners sent into Manila' was the verbal order from the Governor-General three months ago. It is now the custom to avenge the death of an American soldier by burning to the ground all the houses, and killing right and left the natives who are only suspects."
February 1939
Imagine a rally that involved plenty of marching and arms raised in a Nazi salute to their leader. Somewhere near Nuremberg, perhaps? Guess again. The venue was Madison Square Garden where frenzied members of the German-American Bund cheered Fritz Kuhn as he stood before a 30-foot high portrait of George Washington flanked by black swastikas, leading them in a chant of "Free Amerika!" (a rallying cry which had just recently replaced "Sieg Heil!"), while thirteen hundred New York City policemen stood guard outside the building.
A U.S. citizen who served in the German Army during the First World War, Kuhn's loyalty to Adolf Hitler was surpassed only by his hatred of Jews (like Henry Ford, he went as far as blaming the Jews for Benedict Arnold's treason). When asked if there were any good Jews, Kuhn replied, "If a mosquito is on your arm, you don't ask is it a good or a bad mosquito. You just brush it off." Before you dismiss Kuhn as a fringe character, consider this: The February 20, 1939 rally described above drew 22,000 avid followers.
February 1942
Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 giving the army the unrestricted power to arrest -- without warrants or indictments or hearings -- every Japanese-American on a 150-mile strip along the West Coast (roughly 110,000 men, women, and children) and transport them to internment camps in Colorado, Utah, Arkansas, and other interior states to be kept under prison conditions. The Supreme Court upheld this order and the Japanese-Americans remained in custody for over three years. A Los Angeles Times writer defended the forced relocations by explaining to his readers that "a viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched -- so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to be a Japanese, not an American."
Life in the internment camps entailed cramped living spaces with communal meals and bathrooms. The one-room apartments measured twenty by twenty feet and none had running water. The internees were allowed to take along "essential personal effects" from home but were prohibited from bringing razors, scissors, or radios. Outside the shared wards were barbed wire, guard towers with machine guns, and searchlights.
The dislocated Japanese-Americans incurred an estimated loss of $400 million in forced property sales during the internment years, and therein may lie a more Machiavellian motivation than sheer race hatred. "A large engine for the Japanese-American incarcerations was agri-business," says Michio Kaku, a noted nuclear physicist and political activist whose parents were interned from 1942 to 1946. "Agri-businesses in California coveted much of the land owned by Japanese-Americans."
A formal apology came to the 60,000 survivors of internment camps in 1990. The U.S. government paid them each $20,000. While Yale Law Professor Eugene V. Rostow later called the internment camps "our worst wartime mistake," Zinn pointedly asks: "Was it a 'mistake' -- or was it an action to be expected from a nation with a long history of racism and which was fighting a war, not to end racism, but to retain the fundamentals of the American system?"
February 1945
With the Russians advancing rapidly towards Berlin, tens of thousands of German civilians fled into Dresden, believing it to be safe from attack. As a result, the city's population swelled from its usual 600,000 to at least one million. Beside the stream of refugees, Dresden was also known for its china and its Baroque and Rococo architecture. Its galleries housed works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Botticelli. On the evening of February 13, none of this would matter.
Using the Dresden soccer stadium as a reference point, over 2000 British Lancasters and American Flying Fortresses dropped loads of gasoline bombs every 50 square yards out from this marker. The enormous flame that resulted was eight square miles wide, shooting smoke three miles high. For the next eighteen hours, regular bombs were dropped on top of this strange brew. Twenty-five minutes after the bombing, winds reaching 150 miles-per-hour sucked everything into the heart of the storm. Because the air became superheated and rushed upward, the fire lost most of its oxygen, creating tornadoes of flame that can suck the air right out of human lungs.
Seventy percent of the Dresden dead either suffocated or died from poison gases that turned their bodies green and red. The intense heat melted some bodies into the pavement like bubblegum, or shrunk them into three-foot long charred carcasses. Clean-up crews wore rubber boots to wade through the "human soup" found in nearby caves. In other cases, the superheated air propelled victims skyward only to come down in tiny pieces as far as fifteen miles outside Dresden. "The flames ate everything organic, everything that would burn," wrote journalist Phillip Knightley. "People died by the thousands, cooked, incinerated, or suffocated. Then American planes came the next day to machine-gun survivors as they struggled to the banks of the Elbe."
The Allied firebombing did more than shock and awe. The bombing campaign murdered more than 100,000 people-mostly civilians... but the exact number may never be known due to the high number of refugees in the area.
February 1946
Edgar L. Jones, a former war correspondent in the Pacific, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly: "What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers."
February 1966
David Lawrence, editor of US News & World Report, wrote: "What the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times." When challenged with stories of American atrocities in Vietnam, Lawrence explained, "Primitive peoples with savagery in their hearts have to be helped to understand the true basis of a civilized existence."
February 1968
An unnamed U.S. major, quoted by Associated Press on February 8, 1968, was asked about the American assault on the Vietnamese town of Bentre. The major explained: "It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it."
February 1991
High above a swamp, over 60 miles of coastal Highway 8 from Kuwait to Iraq, a division of the Iraq's Republican Guard withdrew on February 26-27,1991. Baghdad radio had just announced Iraq's acceptance of a cease-fire proposal and, in compliance with UN Resolution 660, Iraqi troops were ordered to withdraw to positions held before August 2, 1990. President George H.W. Bush derisively called the announcement "an outrage" and "a cruel hoax."
"U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours," says Joyce Chediac, a Lebanese-American journalist. "It was like shooting fish in a barrel," one U.S. pilot said. "Many of those massacred fleeing Kuwait were not Iraqi soldiers at all," says Ramsey Clark, "but Palestinians, Sudanese, Egyptians, and other foreign workers."
Randall Richard of the Providence Journal filed this dispatch from he deck of the U.S.S. Ranger: "Air strikes against Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait were being launched so feverishly from this carrier today that pilots said they took whatever bombs happened to be closest to the flight deck. The crews, working to the strains of the Lone Ranger theme, often passed up the projectile of choice... because it took too long to load."
"Every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments," Chediac reported after visiting the scene. "No survivors are known or likely. The cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground, and it's impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel."
"At one spot," Bob Drogin reported in the Los Angeles Times, "snarling wild dogs (had) reduced two corpses to bare ribs. Giant carrion birds pick(ed) at another; only a bootclad foot and eyeless skull are recognizable."
Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer, said: "Even in Vietnam I didn't see anything like this. It's pathetic."
Correction: When you're talking about America, it's not pathetic...it's policy.
Mickey Z. is the author of several books, most recently 50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know (Disinformation Books). He can be found on the Web at: www.mickeyz.net.
The Enabling Law in Venezuela – a class point of view
By Patrick Larsen - www.marxist.dk
The bourgeois media in many countries have launched a new attack against the Bolivarian revolution and against Venezuelan President, Hugo Chávez. Having been effectively defeated by the mass movement in the December elections last year, they are now using every attempt to sow doubt and confusion in the Chávez regime and portray it as a regime heading towards dictatorship.
When Chávez made a change of ministers in his cabinet some weeks ago, the bourgeois press singled out the selection of Adán Chávez (Hugo Chávez's brother) as the new Minister of Education as a sign of his "dictatorial and corrupt" tendencies.
Running out of arguments, they have now turned to the new Enabling Law, which gives Chávez the right to rule by decree in certain areas of Venezuelan politics. They portray this as a "consolidation of dictatorship". Their aim is clearly to try to scare workers and youth all around the world away from solidarity with the Venezuelan revolution.
Incredibly, even some groups on the left have begun to diffuse the same prejudices. They are calling on everyone to oppose the Enabling Law on the grounds that it is "undemocratic". They follow this up with demagogic speeches about "democracy from below", etc.
Their concept of democracy is entirely idealist. That is to say, it is democracy taken out of any material context, removed completely from time, place and broader political developments. With such an approach every left-wing activist - as genuine as he or she may be - can be mislead into saying and promoting things that actually benefit the bourgeoisie in a given situation.
Hypocrisy of the international bourgeoisie
The Enabling Law is not - as some desperately try to claim - something new, nor a big surprise. It is not something that Chávez suddenly pulled out of nowhere. Enabling laws are actually a very common feature in Venezuela, and have been used on several occasions by previous governments. The Chávez government used the same method to pass 49 laws in December 2001 that led to the furious oligarchy taking up arms against the government and preparing the failed coup d'etat of April 2002.
Let us ask one question straight away: why did the established international press not protest when previous Venezuelan presidents were given similar powers under similar enabling laws? For example, where were all the critics when Jaime Lusinchi (Venezuelan president 1983-1988) had a similar Enabling Law passed in parliament in June 1984? Or where were their protests when the government of Carlos Andrés Peréz sent the military to slaughter thousands of innocent Venezuelans in the failed Caracazo rising of 1989?
Let us be clear on this one: the bourgeoisie and its press are not at all interested in democracy. Their own version of democracy can be found in Iraq were they have plunged the country into misery, killings and the use of torture against prisoners. That shows their hypocrisy. They have no moral authority whatsoever to discuss democracy with Venezuela. Their interests are crystal clear: they do this only to sow doubts about the progressive nature of the Bolivarian government and to side step the real issue: the nationalisations, which they hate as the devil hates holy water.
A class point of view
It is necessary to see the new Enabling Law in its concrete context and see it from a class point of view. As Chávez has pointed out, the main aim of the law is to allow for a number of expropriations and the nationalisation of various companies and firms - especially ones that have been privatised by previous governments.
We must ask concretely: would this benefit or not the exploited masses of Venezuela? Would it be a step forward for the revolution? Would it accelerate the revolution towards socialism?
There can be but one answer to this question for real revolutionaries: we are entirely in favour of the radical measures against capitalism that Chávez has announced. We support them while arguing that the process be radicalised even further and that the revolution finish off with capitalism once and for all.
Making a class analysis of the real meaning of the law also means taking into account the debates taking place amongst the Venezuelan masses. What is the reaction of ordinary Venezuelan workers and youth towards the new law?
Far from the hysterical attacks one finds in the international bourgeois press, the Venezuelan masses have actually welcomed this law enthusiastically. For them, the burning question is to change society, to change their miserable conditions of life and to make themselves masters of society. They feel that a law speeding up the process is progressive and in the given context they see it as a revolutionary measure that challenges the iron grip of the bureaucrats in the old state apparatus.
This was very aptly described in an article that Michael A. Lebowitz wrote recently for Monthly Review Press (http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/lebowitz010207.html)
"I had dinner last night with two friends (one a first-time visitor), who had spent a full day talking with people active in communal councils in two Caracas neighbourhoods (one extremely poor). And, they were telling me about the frustration and anger of so many with local and ministry officials who were holding back change -- and about their identification with the impatience of Chavez, whom they trusted. Not surprisingly, this led us to a discussion of the Enabling law and of Lopez Maya's interview. No, they said, the people they saw weren't worried about that at all -- they agree with the need for speed. You mean, I asked, that the people are in a hurry? Yes, they readily assented (to my surprise), and one commented that they are less interested in democracy as process than in democracy in practice."
Revolutionary democracy
Chávez won the election with some 63% of the votes. He openly said that if he won, his next term in office would be devoted to the building of a socialist society in Venezuela. That is what he is doing now and that is why it is necessary to speed up the process and have the necessary power to do so. One should think that this alone justifies the new Enabling Law or that it at least makes sense to argue that the Venezuelan people have been completely aware of what they were voting for on December the 3rd.
However, for certain groups on the left, this is not enough. They must fight to maintain their "democratic" credentials, that is to say, they must be seen as respectable and decent democrats. They jump on the bandwagon and join in the chorus of complainers. They denounce the Enabling Law as "a step towards undemocratic rule". There are even some groups on the left that have begun to demand a "sovereign parliament" and promote this as a progressive and even a "socialist" demand in the present situation.
This is a completely false slogan. First of all, it would not change anything fundamental, as the chavista parties hold an absolute majority in parliament as a result of the boycott of the opposition of the parliamentary elections in December 2005. It would only make the process much slower. Secondly, this slogan takes the focus away from the revolutionary movement to the parliament. The question is: who do you believe should be the main driving force in the transformation of Venezuelan society? If you raise the slogan of "a sovereign parliament" you will actually be saying that the main demand is to give power to the 167 deputies in the National Assembly - many of them who are widely distrusted by the masses - and along with it the task of building socialism in Venezuela.
The revolutionary Marxists answer the question in this way: we do not advocate a "sovereign parliament" but a sovereign revolutionary movement. That is to say, we fight for the strengthening of the revolutionary democracy from below - the communal councils in the poor neighbourhoods, the social control councils, the mass revolutionary student organisations and most importantly the movement of occupied factories. We also call for the strengthening of workers' control in state-owned companies and the strengthening of the revolutionary trade union, the UNT. All these organs are embryos of real revolutionary democracy and they must be coordinated and built from below, with the right to recall all representatives, where workers' leaders will receive a workers' wages, and so on. The same goes for the new United Socialist Party, the PSUV. It must be built as an instrument of the rule of the people. Only in that way can a real, revolutionary democracy come about.
The phoney calls for "democracy" the bourgeoisie have undertaken must be rejected by revolutionaries in all countries. We have never shared the same vision of democracy and we never will. Our task is not to join in with the attacks against Chávez but to defend the Venezuelan revolution, while at the same time giving our own perspective to the movement.
See also:
Why Aren't You in a Hurry, Comrade? by Michael A. Lebowitz - Monthly Review (Febryary 2, 2007)
Venezuela: The real meaning of “Fatherland, socialism or death” by Pablo Roldan (February 1, 2007)
Venezuela: Five planks in building socialism, workers’ councils and the role of the working class by Luis Primo (January 23, 2007)
There can be no democracy while the media remain in capitalist hands by Fernando Buen Abad DomÃnguez (January 15, 2007)
“What is the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!” - Chavez is sworn in as president of Venezuela by Jorge Martin (January 12, 2007)
Chavez announces radical measures against capitalism in Venezuela by Fred Weston (January 9, 2007)
Chavez announces United Socialist Party of Venezuela by Jorge Martin (December 20, 2006)
The struggle at Sanitarios Maracay is key for the socialist future of the Bolivarian Revolution (December 13, 2006)
"The dogs bark, but
the caravan moves on"
The bourgeois media in many countries have launched a new attack against the Bolivarian revolution and against Venezuelan President, Hugo Chávez. Having been effectively defeated by the mass movement in the December elections last year, they are now using every attempt to sow doubt and confusion in the Chávez regime and portray it as a regime heading towards dictatorship.
When Chávez made a change of ministers in his cabinet some weeks ago, the bourgeois press singled out the selection of Adán Chávez (Hugo Chávez's brother) as the new Minister of Education as a sign of his "dictatorial and corrupt" tendencies.
Running out of arguments, they have now turned to the new Enabling Law, which gives Chávez the right to rule by decree in certain areas of Venezuelan politics. They portray this as a "consolidation of dictatorship". Their aim is clearly to try to scare workers and youth all around the world away from solidarity with the Venezuelan revolution.
Incredibly, even some groups on the left have begun to diffuse the same prejudices. They are calling on everyone to oppose the Enabling Law on the grounds that it is "undemocratic". They follow this up with demagogic speeches about "democracy from below", etc.
Their concept of democracy is entirely idealist. That is to say, it is democracy taken out of any material context, removed completely from time, place and broader political developments. With such an approach every left-wing activist - as genuine as he or she may be - can be mislead into saying and promoting things that actually benefit the bourgeoisie in a given situation.
Hypocrisy of the international bourgeoisie
The Enabling Law is not - as some desperately try to claim - something new, nor a big surprise. It is not something that Chávez suddenly pulled out of nowhere. Enabling laws are actually a very common feature in Venezuela, and have been used on several occasions by previous governments. The Chávez government used the same method to pass 49 laws in December 2001 that led to the furious oligarchy taking up arms against the government and preparing the failed coup d'etat of April 2002.
Let us ask one question straight away: why did the established international press not protest when previous Venezuelan presidents were given similar powers under similar enabling laws? For example, where were all the critics when Jaime Lusinchi (Venezuelan president 1983-1988) had a similar Enabling Law passed in parliament in June 1984? Or where were their protests when the government of Carlos Andrés Peréz sent the military to slaughter thousands of innocent Venezuelans in the failed Caracazo rising of 1989?
Let us be clear on this one: the bourgeoisie and its press are not at all interested in democracy. Their own version of democracy can be found in Iraq were they have plunged the country into misery, killings and the use of torture against prisoners. That shows their hypocrisy. They have no moral authority whatsoever to discuss democracy with Venezuela. Their interests are crystal clear: they do this only to sow doubts about the progressive nature of the Bolivarian government and to side step the real issue: the nationalisations, which they hate as the devil hates holy water.
A class point of view
It is necessary to see the new Enabling Law in its concrete context and see it from a class point of view. As Chávez has pointed out, the main aim of the law is to allow for a number of expropriations and the nationalisation of various companies and firms - especially ones that have been privatised by previous governments.
We must ask concretely: would this benefit or not the exploited masses of Venezuela? Would it be a step forward for the revolution? Would it accelerate the revolution towards socialism?
There can be but one answer to this question for real revolutionaries: we are entirely in favour of the radical measures against capitalism that Chávez has announced. We support them while arguing that the process be radicalised even further and that the revolution finish off with capitalism once and for all.
Making a class analysis of the real meaning of the law also means taking into account the debates taking place amongst the Venezuelan masses. What is the reaction of ordinary Venezuelan workers and youth towards the new law?
Far from the hysterical attacks one finds in the international bourgeois press, the Venezuelan masses have actually welcomed this law enthusiastically. For them, the burning question is to change society, to change their miserable conditions of life and to make themselves masters of society. They feel that a law speeding up the process is progressive and in the given context they see it as a revolutionary measure that challenges the iron grip of the bureaucrats in the old state apparatus.
This was very aptly described in an article that Michael A. Lebowitz wrote recently for Monthly Review Press (http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/lebowitz010207.html)
"I had dinner last night with two friends (one a first-time visitor), who had spent a full day talking with people active in communal councils in two Caracas neighbourhoods (one extremely poor). And, they were telling me about the frustration and anger of so many with local and ministry officials who were holding back change -- and about their identification with the impatience of Chavez, whom they trusted. Not surprisingly, this led us to a discussion of the Enabling law and of Lopez Maya's interview. No, they said, the people they saw weren't worried about that at all -- they agree with the need for speed. You mean, I asked, that the people are in a hurry? Yes, they readily assented (to my surprise), and one commented that they are less interested in democracy as process than in democracy in practice."
Revolutionary democracy
Chávez won the election with some 63% of the votes. He openly said that if he won, his next term in office would be devoted to the building of a socialist society in Venezuela. That is what he is doing now and that is why it is necessary to speed up the process and have the necessary power to do so. One should think that this alone justifies the new Enabling Law or that it at least makes sense to argue that the Venezuelan people have been completely aware of what they were voting for on December the 3rd.
However, for certain groups on the left, this is not enough. They must fight to maintain their "democratic" credentials, that is to say, they must be seen as respectable and decent democrats. They jump on the bandwagon and join in the chorus of complainers. They denounce the Enabling Law as "a step towards undemocratic rule". There are even some groups on the left that have begun to demand a "sovereign parliament" and promote this as a progressive and even a "socialist" demand in the present situation.
This is a completely false slogan. First of all, it would not change anything fundamental, as the chavista parties hold an absolute majority in parliament as a result of the boycott of the opposition of the parliamentary elections in December 2005. It would only make the process much slower. Secondly, this slogan takes the focus away from the revolutionary movement to the parliament. The question is: who do you believe should be the main driving force in the transformation of Venezuelan society? If you raise the slogan of "a sovereign parliament" you will actually be saying that the main demand is to give power to the 167 deputies in the National Assembly - many of them who are widely distrusted by the masses - and along with it the task of building socialism in Venezuela.
The revolutionary Marxists answer the question in this way: we do not advocate a "sovereign parliament" but a sovereign revolutionary movement. That is to say, we fight for the strengthening of the revolutionary democracy from below - the communal councils in the poor neighbourhoods, the social control councils, the mass revolutionary student organisations and most importantly the movement of occupied factories. We also call for the strengthening of workers' control in state-owned companies and the strengthening of the revolutionary trade union, the UNT. All these organs are embryos of real revolutionary democracy and they must be coordinated and built from below, with the right to recall all representatives, where workers' leaders will receive a workers' wages, and so on. The same goes for the new United Socialist Party, the PSUV. It must be built as an instrument of the rule of the people. Only in that way can a real, revolutionary democracy come about.
The phoney calls for "democracy" the bourgeoisie have undertaken must be rejected by revolutionaries in all countries. We have never shared the same vision of democracy and we never will. Our task is not to join in with the attacks against Chávez but to defend the Venezuelan revolution, while at the same time giving our own perspective to the movement.
See also:
Why Aren't You in a Hurry, Comrade? by Michael A. Lebowitz - Monthly Review (Febryary 2, 2007)
Venezuela: The real meaning of “Fatherland, socialism or death” by Pablo Roldan (February 1, 2007)
Venezuela: Five planks in building socialism, workers’ councils and the role of the working class by Luis Primo (January 23, 2007)
There can be no democracy while the media remain in capitalist hands by Fernando Buen Abad DomÃnguez (January 15, 2007)
“What is the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!” - Chavez is sworn in as president of Venezuela by Jorge Martin (January 12, 2007)
Chavez announces radical measures against capitalism in Venezuela by Fred Weston (January 9, 2007)
Chavez announces United Socialist Party of Venezuela by Jorge Martin (December 20, 2006)
The struggle at Sanitarios Maracay is key for the socialist future of the Bolivarian Revolution (December 13, 2006)
Monday, February 05, 2007
John Pilger: Iran: The War Begins
By John Pilger
As opposition grows in America to the failed Iraq adventure, the Bush administration is preparing public opinion for an attack on Iran, its latest target, by the spring.
01/03/07 "ICHBlog" -- -- The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time" for its dis aster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a "surge" of American troops in Iraq, George W Bush identified Iran as his real target. "We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria," he said. "And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."
"Networks" means Iran. "There is solid evidence," said a State Department spokesman on 24 January, "that Iranian agents are involved in these networks and that they are working with individuals and groups in Iraq and are being sent there by the Iranian government." Like Bush's and Tony Blair's claim that they had irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein was deploying weapons of mass destruction, the "evidence" lacks all credibility. Iran has a natural affinity with the Shia majority of Iraq, and has been implacably opposed to al-Qaeda, condemning the 9/11 attacks and supporting the United States in Afghanistan. Syria has done the same. Investigations by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and others, including British military officials, have concluded that Iran is not engaged in the cross-border supply of weapons. General Peter Pace, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said no such evidence exists.
As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows, "neo-con" fanatics such as Vice-President Dick Che- ney believe their opportunity to control Iran's oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring. For public consumption, there are potent myths. In concert with Israel and Washington's Zionist and fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their "strategy" is to end Iran's nuclear threat.
In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon, nor has it ever threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of building a nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory, and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations - until gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian nuclear programme to military use.
The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to "go anywhere and see anything". They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, says that an attack on Iran will have "catastrophic consequences" and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.
Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went to war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland. Unlike Israel, the world's fifth military power - with its thermo nuclear weapons aimed at Middle East targets and an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions, as the enforcer of the world's longest illegal occupation - Iran has a history of obeying international law and occupies no territory other than its own.
The "threat" from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran's "nuclear ambitions", just as the vocabulary of Saddam's non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage. Accompanying this is a demonising that has become standard practice. As Edward Herman has pointed out, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "has done yeoman service in facilitating [this]"; yet a close examination of his notorious remark about Israel in October 2005 reveals how it has been distorted. According to Juan Cole, American professor of modern Middle East and south Asian history at the University of Michigan, and other Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad did not call for Israel to be "wiped off the map". He said: "The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." This, says Cole, "does not imply military action or killing anyone at all". Ahmadinejad compared the demise of the Israeli regime to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Iranian regime is repressive, but its power is diffuse and exercised by the mullahs, with whom Ahmadinejad is often at odds. An attack would surely unite them.
Nuclear option
The one piece of "solid evidence" is the threat posed by the United States. An American naval build-up in the eastern Mediterranean has begun. This is almost certainly part of what the Pentagon calls CONPLAN, which is the aerial bombing of Iran. In 2004, National Security Presidential Directive 35, entitled "Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorisation", was issued. It is classified, of course, but the presumption has long been that NSPD 35 authorised the stockpiling and deployment of "tactical" nuclear weapons in the Middle East.
This does not mean Bush will use them against Iran, but for the first time since the most dangerous years of the cold war, the use of what were then called "limited" nuclear weapons is being discussed openly in Washington. What they are debating is the prospect of other Hiroshimas and of radioactive fallout across the Middle East and central Asia. Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker last year that American bombers "have been flying simulated nuclear weapons delivery missions . . . since last summer".
The well-informed Arab Times in Kuwait says that Bush will attack Iran before the end of April. One of Russia's most senior military strategists, General Leonid Ivashov, says the US will use nuclear munitions delivered by cruise missiles launched from the Mediterranean. "The war in Iraq," he wrote on 24 January, "was just one element in a series of steps in the process of regional destabilisation.
It was only a phase in getting closer to dealing with Iran and other countries. [When the attack on Iran begins] Israel is sure to come under Iranian missile strikes . . . Posing as victims, the Israelis . . . will suffer some tolerable damage and then the outraged US will destabilise Iran finally, making it look like a noble mission of retribution . . . Public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian . . . hysteria, . . . leaks, disinformation et cetera . . . It . . . remain[s] unclear . . . whether the US Congress is going to authorise the war."
Asked about a US Senate resolution disapproving of the "surge" of US troops to Iraq, Vice-President Cheney said: "It won't stop us." Last November, a majority of the American electorate voted for the Democratic Party to control Congress and stop the war in Iraq.
Apart from insipid speeches of "disapproval", this has not happened and is unlikely to happen. Influential Democrats, such as the new leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and the would-be presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, have disported themselves before the Israeli lobby. Edwards is regarded in his party as a "liberal". He was one of a high-level American contingent at a recent Israeli conference in Herzliya, where he spoke about "an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel [sic]. At the top of these threats is Iran . . . All options are on the table to ensure that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon." Hillary Clinton has said: "US policy must be unequivocal . . . We have to keep all options on the table." Pelosi and Howard Dean, another liberal, have distinguished themselves by attacking the former president Jimmy Carter, who oversaw the Camp David Agreement between Israel and Egypt and has had the gall to write a truthful book accusing Israel of becoming an "apartheid state". Pelosi said: "Carter does not speak for the Democratic Party." She is right, alas.
In Britain, Downing Street has been presented with a document entitled Answering the Charges by Professor Abbas Edalat, of Imperial College London, on behalf of others seeking to expose the disinformation on Iran. Blair remains silent. Apart from the usual honourable exceptions, parliament remains shamefully silent, too.
Can this really be happening again, less than four years after the invasion of Iraq, which has left some 650,000 people dead? I wrote virtually this same article early in 2003; for Iran now, read Iraq then. And is it not remarkable that North Korea has not been attacked? North Korea has nuclear weapons.
In numerous surveys, such as the one released on 23 January by the BBC World Service, "we", the majority of humanity, have made clear our revulsion for Bush and his vassals. As for Blair, the man is now politically and morally naked for all to see. So who speaks out, apart from Professor Edalat and his colleagues? Privileged journalists, scholars and artists, writers and thespians, who sometimes speak about "freedom of speech", are as silent as a dark West End theatre. What are they waiting for? The declaration of another thousand-year Reich, or a mushroom cloud in the Middle East, or both?
[John Pilger is a renowned author, journalist and documentary film-maker. A war correspondent, his writings have appear in numerous magazines, and newspapers.]
As opposition grows in America to the failed Iraq adventure, the Bush administration is preparing public opinion for an attack on Iran, its latest target, by the spring.
01/03/07 "ICHBlog" -- -- The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time" for its dis aster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a "surge" of American troops in Iraq, George W Bush identified Iran as his real target. "We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria," he said. "And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."
"Networks" means Iran. "There is solid evidence," said a State Department spokesman on 24 January, "that Iranian agents are involved in these networks and that they are working with individuals and groups in Iraq and are being sent there by the Iranian government." Like Bush's and Tony Blair's claim that they had irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein was deploying weapons of mass destruction, the "evidence" lacks all credibility. Iran has a natural affinity with the Shia majority of Iraq, and has been implacably opposed to al-Qaeda, condemning the 9/11 attacks and supporting the United States in Afghanistan. Syria has done the same. Investigations by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and others, including British military officials, have concluded that Iran is not engaged in the cross-border supply of weapons. General Peter Pace, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said no such evidence exists.
As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows, "neo-con" fanatics such as Vice-President Dick Che- ney believe their opportunity to control Iran's oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring. For public consumption, there are potent myths. In concert with Israel and Washington's Zionist and fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their "strategy" is to end Iran's nuclear threat.
In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon, nor has it ever threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of building a nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory, and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations - until gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian nuclear programme to military use.
The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to "go anywhere and see anything". They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, says that an attack on Iran will have "catastrophic consequences" and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.
Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went to war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland. Unlike Israel, the world's fifth military power - with its thermo nuclear weapons aimed at Middle East targets and an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions, as the enforcer of the world's longest illegal occupation - Iran has a history of obeying international law and occupies no territory other than its own.
The "threat" from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran's "nuclear ambitions", just as the vocabulary of Saddam's non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage. Accompanying this is a demonising that has become standard practice. As Edward Herman has pointed out, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "has done yeoman service in facilitating [this]"; yet a close examination of his notorious remark about Israel in October 2005 reveals how it has been distorted. According to Juan Cole, American professor of modern Middle East and south Asian history at the University of Michigan, and other Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad did not call for Israel to be "wiped off the map". He said: "The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." This, says Cole, "does not imply military action or killing anyone at all". Ahmadinejad compared the demise of the Israeli regime to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Iranian regime is repressive, but its power is diffuse and exercised by the mullahs, with whom Ahmadinejad is often at odds. An attack would surely unite them.
Nuclear option
The one piece of "solid evidence" is the threat posed by the United States. An American naval build-up in the eastern Mediterranean has begun. This is almost certainly part of what the Pentagon calls CONPLAN, which is the aerial bombing of Iran. In 2004, National Security Presidential Directive 35, entitled "Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorisation", was issued. It is classified, of course, but the presumption has long been that NSPD 35 authorised the stockpiling and deployment of "tactical" nuclear weapons in the Middle East.
This does not mean Bush will use them against Iran, but for the first time since the most dangerous years of the cold war, the use of what were then called "limited" nuclear weapons is being discussed openly in Washington. What they are debating is the prospect of other Hiroshimas and of radioactive fallout across the Middle East and central Asia. Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker last year that American bombers "have been flying simulated nuclear weapons delivery missions . . . since last summer".
The well-informed Arab Times in Kuwait says that Bush will attack Iran before the end of April. One of Russia's most senior military strategists, General Leonid Ivashov, says the US will use nuclear munitions delivered by cruise missiles launched from the Mediterranean. "The war in Iraq," he wrote on 24 January, "was just one element in a series of steps in the process of regional destabilisation.
It was only a phase in getting closer to dealing with Iran and other countries. [When the attack on Iran begins] Israel is sure to come under Iranian missile strikes . . . Posing as victims, the Israelis . . . will suffer some tolerable damage and then the outraged US will destabilise Iran finally, making it look like a noble mission of retribution . . . Public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian . . . hysteria, . . . leaks, disinformation et cetera . . . It . . . remain[s] unclear . . . whether the US Congress is going to authorise the war."
Asked about a US Senate resolution disapproving of the "surge" of US troops to Iraq, Vice-President Cheney said: "It won't stop us." Last November, a majority of the American electorate voted for the Democratic Party to control Congress and stop the war in Iraq.
Apart from insipid speeches of "disapproval", this has not happened and is unlikely to happen. Influential Democrats, such as the new leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and the would-be presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, have disported themselves before the Israeli lobby. Edwards is regarded in his party as a "liberal". He was one of a high-level American contingent at a recent Israeli conference in Herzliya, where he spoke about "an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel [sic]. At the top of these threats is Iran . . . All options are on the table to ensure that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon." Hillary Clinton has said: "US policy must be unequivocal . . . We have to keep all options on the table." Pelosi and Howard Dean, another liberal, have distinguished themselves by attacking the former president Jimmy Carter, who oversaw the Camp David Agreement between Israel and Egypt and has had the gall to write a truthful book accusing Israel of becoming an "apartheid state". Pelosi said: "Carter does not speak for the Democratic Party." She is right, alas.
In Britain, Downing Street has been presented with a document entitled Answering the Charges by Professor Abbas Edalat, of Imperial College London, on behalf of others seeking to expose the disinformation on Iran. Blair remains silent. Apart from the usual honourable exceptions, parliament remains shamefully silent, too.
Can this really be happening again, less than four years after the invasion of Iraq, which has left some 650,000 people dead? I wrote virtually this same article early in 2003; for Iran now, read Iraq then. And is it not remarkable that North Korea has not been attacked? North Korea has nuclear weapons.
In numerous surveys, such as the one released on 23 January by the BBC World Service, "we", the majority of humanity, have made clear our revulsion for Bush and his vassals. As for Blair, the man is now politically and morally naked for all to see. So who speaks out, apart from Professor Edalat and his colleagues? Privileged journalists, scholars and artists, writers and thespians, who sometimes speak about "freedom of speech", are as silent as a dark West End theatre. What are they waiting for? The declaration of another thousand-year Reich, or a mushroom cloud in the Middle East, or both?
[John Pilger is a renowned author, journalist and documentary film-maker. A war correspondent, his writings have appear in numerous magazines, and newspapers.]
Venezuela Bolivariana: People and the struggle of the 4th world war
| http://www.calleymedia.org/ 2004 documentary on the impact of financial neo-liberalism on Latin America and other parts of the world and what Hugo Chavez is doing to stop its spread in Venezuela. | |
The Nightmare of Afghan Women - Not the Same as Being Equal
Afghanistan remains the forgotten war and yet, in an eerie lockstep with Iraq, it seems to be following a distinctly Bush administration-style path toward "the gates of hell." While almost all attention in Washington and the U.S. media has been focused on the President's new "surge" plan in Iraq -- is it for 21,000 or 50,000 American troops? Just how astronomical will the bills be? Just how strong will Congressional opposition prove? Just how bad, according to American intelligence, is the situation? -- Afghanistan is experiencing its own quiet surge plan: more U.S. (and NATO) troops, more military aid, more reconstruction funds, more fighting, more casualties, heavier weaponry, more air power, more bad news, and predictions of worse to come.
The repetitive and dismal headlines, often tucked away in back pages, tell the tale:
On the fighting:
"Airstrike kills up to Seven in Afghanistan"
"12 militants killed in West Afghanistan"
"Nato offensive 'kills 30 Taleban'"
"Group: Over 1,000 Afghan civilians killed" ("More than 1,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2006, most of them as a result of attacks by the Taliban and other anti-government forces in the country's unstable south, a rights group said Tuesday…")
"Driving the Taleban off Nipple Hill -- again"
"No foreseeable end to assaults facing Royal Marines in Helmand" ("Another day, another attack. Yesterday the barrage of mortars, rockets and rifle fire began raining down on the British base at Kajaki at just after six in the morning…")
"Taleban forces retake town" ("Taleban forces in southern Afghanistan have taken control of a town which British troops had pulled out of after a peace deal with local elders…")
On calls for intensification of the military struggle:
"Britain to increase forces in Afghanistan"
"NATO to step up efforts to control Afghan border: general"
"U.S. lawmakers, back from Afghanistan, say more NATO troops needed"
On the repetitively dismal tale of "reconstructing" Afghanistan and on drugs:
"Afghan rebuilding hit by ‘violence and waste'" ("The international body established to co-ordinate Afghanistan's reconstruction effort marked its one-year anniversary on Wednesday by admitting it was struggling to make progress in the face of rising violence, waste and poor administration.")
"AFGHANISTAN: Girls and women traded for opium debts" ("On 4 November 2006, Nasima, 25, a member of a local women's council, grabbed the AK-47 from the policeman guarding the council meeting in the Grishk district of southern Helmand province and killed herself. She had had enough of the daily beatings by her husband. Like many other women in Helmand, Nasima was given away by her family in 2005. Her father owed a huge amount to an opium dealer…")
On predictions of more and worse to come (with faint hopes of better sooner or later):
"New U.S. commander in Afghanistan expects rise in suicide attacks in 2007" ("The incoming commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan said Monday he expects Taliban militants to launch more suicide attacks this year than in 2006, when militants set off a record 139 such bombings…")
"NATO general expects offensive, says Taliban beaten" ("The Taliban will launch an offensive within months once the snows melt, but they are effectively a beaten force, according to the outgoing head of NATO forces in Afghanistan...")
So goes the repetitive, if ever deepening, tragedy of our other war -- and under such headlines lie massive tragedies that seldom make the headlines anywhere. Ann Jones, who has spent much time as a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan these last years and wrote a moving book, Kabul in Winter, on her experiences, turns to one of those tragedies: the fate of Afghan women. Tom
Not the Same as Being Equal
Women in Afghanistan
By Ann Jones
Born in Afghanistan but raised in the United States, like many in the worldwide Afghan Diaspora, Manizha Naderi is devoted to helping her homeland. For years she worked with Women for Afghan Women, a New York based organization serving Afghan women wherever they may be. Last fall, she returned to Kabul, the capital, to try to create a Family Guidance Center. Its goal was to rescue women -- and their families -- from homemade violence. It's tough work. After three decades of almost constant warfare, most citizens are programmed to answer the slightest challenge with violence. In Afghanistan it's the default response.
Manizha Naderi has been sizing up the problem in the capital and last week she sent me a copy of her report. A key passage went like this:
"During the past year, a rash of reports on the situation of women in Afghanistan has been issued by Afghan governmental agencies and by foreign and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that claim a particular interest in women's rights or in Afghanistan or both. More reports are in the offing. What has sparked them is the dire situation of women in the country, the systematic violations of their human rights, and the failure of concerned parties to achieve significant improvements by providing women with legal protections rooted in a capable, honest, and stable judiciary system, education and employment opportunities, safety from violence, much of it savage, and protection from hidebound customs originating in the conviction that women are the property of men."
I'd hoped for better news. Instead, her report brought back so many things I'd seen for myself during the last five years spent, off and on, in her country.
****
Last year in Herat, as I was walking with an Afghan colleague to a meeting on women's rights, I spotted an ice cream vendor in the hot, dusty street. I rushed ahead and returned with two cones of lemony ice. I held one out to my friend. "Forgive me," she said. "I can't." She was wearing a burqa.
It was a stupid mistake. I'd been in Afghanistan a long time, in the company every day of women encased from head to toe in pleated polyester body bags. Occasionally I put one on myself, just to get the feel of being stifled in the sweaty sack, blind behind the mesh eye mask. I'd watched women trip on their burqas and fall. I'd watched women collide with cars they couldn't see. I knew a woman badly burned when her burqa caught fire. I knew another who suffered a near-fatal skull fracture when her burqa snagged in a taxi door and slammed her to the pavement as the vehicle sped away. But I'd never before noted this fact: it is not possible for a woman wearing a burqa to eat an ice cream cone.
We gave the cones away to passing children and laughed about it, but to me it was the saddest thing.
****
Ever since the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, George W. Bush has boasted of "liberating" Afghan women from the Taliban and the burqa. His wife Laura, after a publicity junket to Afghanistan in 2005, appeared on Jay Leno's show to say that she hadn't seen a single woman wearing a burqa.
But these are the sorts of wildly optimistic self-delusions that have made Bush notorious. His wife, whose visit to Afghanistan lasted almost six hours, spent much of that time at the American air base and none of it in the Afghan streets where most women, to this day, go about in big blue bags.
It's true that after the fall of the Taliban lots of women in the capital went back to work in schools, hospitals, and government ministries, while others found better paying jobs with international humanitarian agencies. In 2005, thanks to a quota system imposed by the international community, women took 27% of the seats in the lower house of the new parliament, a greater percentage than women enjoy in most Western legislatures, including our own. Yet these hopeful developments are misleading.
The fact is that the "liberation" of Afghan women is mostly theoretical. The Afghan Constitution adopted in 2004 declares that "The Citizens of Afghanistan -- whether man or woman -- have equal Rights and Duties before the Law." But what law? The judicial system -- ultra-conservative, inadequate, incompetent, and notoriously corrupt -- usually bases decisions on idiosyncratic interpretations of Islamic Sharia, tribal customary codes, or simple bribery. And legal "scholars" instruct women that having "equal Rights and Duties" is not the same as being equal to men.
Post-Taliban Afghanistan, under President Hamid Karzai, also ratified key international agreements on human rights: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Treaty of Civil and Political Rights, and CEDAW: the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Like the Constitution, these essential documents provide a foundation for realizing the human rights of women.
But building on that paper foundation -- amid poverty, illiteracy, misogyny, and ongoing warfare -- is something else again.
That's why, for the great majority of Afghan women, life has scarcely changed at all. That's why even an educated and informed leader like my colleague, on her way to a UN agency to work on women's rights, is still unable to eat an ice cream cone.
****
For most Afghan women the burqa is the least of their problems.
Afghanistan is just about the poorest country in the world. Only Burkina Faso and Niger sometimes get worse ratings. After nearly three decades of warfare and another of drought, millions of Afghans are without safe water or sanitation or electricity, even in the capital city. Millions are without adequate food and nutrition. Millions have access only to the most rudimentary health care, or none at all.
Diseases such as TB and polio, long eradicated in most of the world, flourish here. They hit women and children hard. One in four children dies before the age of five, mostly from preventable illnesses such as cholera and diarrhea. Half of all women of childbearing age who die do so in childbirth, giving Afghanistan one of the highest maternal death rates in the world. Average life expectancy hovers around 42 years.
Notice that we're still talking women's rights here: the fundamental economic and social rights that belong to all human beings.
There are other grim statistics. About 85% of Afghan women are illiterate. About 95% are routinely subjected to violence in the home. And the home is where most Afghan women in rural areas, and many in cities, are still customarily confined. Public space and public life belong almost exclusively to men. President Karzai heads the country while his wife, a qualified gynecologist with needed skills, stays at home.
These facts are well known. During more than five years of Western occupation, they haven't changed.
Afghan women and girls are, by custom and practice, the property of men. They may be traded and sold like any commodity. Although Afghan law sets the minimum marriageable age for girls at sixteen, girls as young as eight or nine are commonly sold into marriage. Women doctors in Kabul maternity hospitals describe terrible life-threatening "wedding night" injuries that husbands inflict on child brides. In the countryside, far from medical help, such girls die.
Under the tribal code of the Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group, men customarily hand over women and girls -- surplus sisters or widows, daughters or nieces -- to other men to make amends for some offense or to pay off some indebtedness, often to a drug lord. To Pashtuns the trade-off is a means of maintaining "justice" and social harmony, but international human rights observers define what happens to the women and girls used in such "conflict resolution" as "slavery."
Given the rigid confinement of women, a surprising number try to escape. But any woman on her own outside the home is assumed to be guilty of the crime of "zina" -- engaging in sexual activity. That's why "running away" is itself a crime. One crime presupposes the other.
When she is caught, as most runaways are, she may be taken to jail for an indefinite term or returned to her husband or father or brothers who may then murder her to restore the family honor.
The same thing happens to a rape victim, force being no excuse for sexual contact -- unless she is married to the man who raped her. In that case, she can be raped as often as he likes.
In Kabul, where women and girls move about more freely, many are snatched by traffickers and sold into sexual slavery. The traffickers are seldom pursued or punished because once a girl is abducted she is as good as dead anyway, even to loving parents bound by the code of honor. The weeping mother of a kidnapped teenage girl once told me, "I pray she does not come back because my husband will have to kill her."
Many a girl kills herself. To escape beatings or sexual abuse or forced marriage. To escape prison or honor killing, if she's been seduced or raped or falsely accused. To escape life, if she's been forbidden to marry the man she would choose for herself.
Suicide also brings dishonor, so families cover it up. Only when city girls try to kill themselves by setting themselves on fire do their cases become known, for if they do not die at once, they may be taken to hospital. In 2003, scores of cases of self-immolation were reported in the city of Herat; the following year, as many were recorded in Kabul. Although such incidents are notoriously underreported, during the past year 150 cases were noted in western Afghanistan, 197 in Herat, and at least 34 in the south.
The customary codes and traditional practices that made life unbearable for these burned girls predate the Taliban, and they remain in force today, side by side with the new constitution and international documents that speak of women's rights.
Tune in a Kabul television station and you'll see evidence that Afghan women are poised at a particularly schizophrenic moment in their history. Watching televised parliamentary sessions, you'll see women who not only sit side by side with men -- a dangerous, generally forbidden proximity -- but actually rise to argue with them. Yet who can forget poor murdered Shaima, the lively, youthful presenter of a popular TV chat show for young people? Her father and brother killed her, or so men and women say approvingly, because they found her job shameful. Mullahs and public officials issue edicts from time to time condemning women on television, or television itself.
****
Many people believe the key to improving life for women, and all Afghans, is education, particularly because so many among Afghanistan's educated elite left the country during its decades of wars. So the international community invests in education projects -- building schools, printing textbooks, teaching teachers, organizing literacy classes for women -- and the Bush administration in particular boasts that five million children now go to school.
But that's fewer than half the kids of school age, and less than a third of the girls. The highest enrollments are in cities – 85% of children in Kabul -- while, in the Pashtun south, enrollments drop below 20% overall and near zero for girls. More than half the students enrolled in school live in Kabul and its environs, yet even there an estimated 60,000 children are not in school, but in the streets, working as vendors, trash-pickers, beggars, or thieves.
None of this is new. For a century, Afghan rulers -- from kings to communists -- have tried to unveil women and advance education. In the 1970s and 1980s, many women in the capital went about freely, without veils. They worked in offices, schools, hospitals. They went to university and became doctors, nurses, teachers, judges, engineers. They drove their own cars. They wore Western fashions and traveled abroad. But when Kabul's communists called for universal education throughout the country, provincial conservatives opposed to educating women rebelled.
Afghan women of the Kabul elite haven't yet caught up to where they were thirty-five years ago. But once again ultra-conservatives are up in arms. This time it's the Taliban, back in force throughout the southern half of the country. Among their tactics: blowing up or burning schools (150 in 2005, 198 in 2006) and murdering teachers, especially women who teach girls. UNICEF estimates that in four southern provinces more than half the schools -- 380 out of 748 -- no longer provide any education at all. Last September the Taliban shot down the middle-aged woman who headed the provincial office for women's affairs in Kandahar. A few brave colleagues went back to the office in body armor, knowing it would not save them. Now, in the southern provinces -- more than half the country -- women and girls stay home.
I blame George W. Bush, the "liberator" who looked the other way. In 2001, the United States military claimed responsibility for these provinces, the heart of Taliban country; but diverted to adventures in the oilfields of Iraq, it failed for five years to provide the security international humanitarians needed to do the promised work of reconstruction. Afghans grew discouraged. Last summer, when the U.S. handed the job to NATO, British and Canadian "peacekeepers" walked right into war with the resurgent Taliban. By year's end, more than 4,000 Afghans were dead -- Taliban, "suspected" insurgents, and civilians. Speaking recently of dead women and children -- trapped between U.S. bombers and NATO troops on the one hand and Taliban forces backed (unofficially) by Pakistan on the other -- President Karzai began to weep.
It's winter in Afghanistan now. No time to make war. But come spring, the Taliban promise a new offensive to throw out Karzai and foreign invaders. The British commander of NATO forces has already warned: "We could actually fail here."
He also advised a British reporter that Westerners shouldn't even mention women's rights when more important things are at stake. As if security is not a woman's right. And peace.
Come spring, Afghan women could lose it all.
Ann Jones, who was a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan periodically from 2002 to 2006, is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (Metropolitan Books, 2006, and soon to be in paperback). The New York Times described her book as "a work of impassioned reportage… eloquent and persuasive." That's journalese for: What she saw in Afghanistan really made her mad.
[Note: This piece was adapted from a feature article that appears in the February issue of Brazil's leading women's magazine, Marie Claire Brazil. Anyone interested in seeing the photos that accompany the article can visit Ann Jones' website.]
Copyright 2007 Ann Jones
The repetitive and dismal headlines, often tucked away in back pages, tell the tale:
On the fighting:
"Airstrike kills up to Seven in Afghanistan"
"12 militants killed in West Afghanistan"
"Nato offensive 'kills 30 Taleban'"
"Group: Over 1,000 Afghan civilians killed" ("More than 1,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2006, most of them as a result of attacks by the Taliban and other anti-government forces in the country's unstable south, a rights group said Tuesday…")
"Driving the Taleban off Nipple Hill -- again"
"No foreseeable end to assaults facing Royal Marines in Helmand" ("Another day, another attack. Yesterday the barrage of mortars, rockets and rifle fire began raining down on the British base at Kajaki at just after six in the morning…")
"Taleban forces retake town" ("Taleban forces in southern Afghanistan have taken control of a town which British troops had pulled out of after a peace deal with local elders…")
On calls for intensification of the military struggle:
"Britain to increase forces in Afghanistan"
"NATO to step up efforts to control Afghan border: general"
"U.S. lawmakers, back from Afghanistan, say more NATO troops needed"
On the repetitively dismal tale of "reconstructing" Afghanistan and on drugs:
"Afghan rebuilding hit by ‘violence and waste'" ("The international body established to co-ordinate Afghanistan's reconstruction effort marked its one-year anniversary on Wednesday by admitting it was struggling to make progress in the face of rising violence, waste and poor administration.")
"AFGHANISTAN: Girls and women traded for opium debts" ("On 4 November 2006, Nasima, 25, a member of a local women's council, grabbed the AK-47 from the policeman guarding the council meeting in the Grishk district of southern Helmand province and killed herself. She had had enough of the daily beatings by her husband. Like many other women in Helmand, Nasima was given away by her family in 2005. Her father owed a huge amount to an opium dealer…")
On predictions of more and worse to come (with faint hopes of better sooner or later):
"New U.S. commander in Afghanistan expects rise in suicide attacks in 2007" ("The incoming commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan said Monday he expects Taliban militants to launch more suicide attacks this year than in 2006, when militants set off a record 139 such bombings…")
"NATO general expects offensive, says Taliban beaten" ("The Taliban will launch an offensive within months once the snows melt, but they are effectively a beaten force, according to the outgoing head of NATO forces in Afghanistan...")
So goes the repetitive, if ever deepening, tragedy of our other war -- and under such headlines lie massive tragedies that seldom make the headlines anywhere. Ann Jones, who has spent much time as a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan these last years and wrote a moving book, Kabul in Winter, on her experiences, turns to one of those tragedies: the fate of Afghan women. Tom
Not the Same as Being Equal
Women in Afghanistan
By Ann Jones
Born in Afghanistan but raised in the United States, like many in the worldwide Afghan Diaspora, Manizha Naderi is devoted to helping her homeland. For years she worked with Women for Afghan Women, a New York based organization serving Afghan women wherever they may be. Last fall, she returned to Kabul, the capital, to try to create a Family Guidance Center. Its goal was to rescue women -- and their families -- from homemade violence. It's tough work. After three decades of almost constant warfare, most citizens are programmed to answer the slightest challenge with violence. In Afghanistan it's the default response.
Manizha Naderi has been sizing up the problem in the capital and last week she sent me a copy of her report. A key passage went like this:
"During the past year, a rash of reports on the situation of women in Afghanistan has been issued by Afghan governmental agencies and by foreign and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that claim a particular interest in women's rights or in Afghanistan or both. More reports are in the offing. What has sparked them is the dire situation of women in the country, the systematic violations of their human rights, and the failure of concerned parties to achieve significant improvements by providing women with legal protections rooted in a capable, honest, and stable judiciary system, education and employment opportunities, safety from violence, much of it savage, and protection from hidebound customs originating in the conviction that women are the property of men."
I'd hoped for better news. Instead, her report brought back so many things I'd seen for myself during the last five years spent, off and on, in her country.
****
Last year in Herat, as I was walking with an Afghan colleague to a meeting on women's rights, I spotted an ice cream vendor in the hot, dusty street. I rushed ahead and returned with two cones of lemony ice. I held one out to my friend. "Forgive me," she said. "I can't." She was wearing a burqa.
It was a stupid mistake. I'd been in Afghanistan a long time, in the company every day of women encased from head to toe in pleated polyester body bags. Occasionally I put one on myself, just to get the feel of being stifled in the sweaty sack, blind behind the mesh eye mask. I'd watched women trip on their burqas and fall. I'd watched women collide with cars they couldn't see. I knew a woman badly burned when her burqa caught fire. I knew another who suffered a near-fatal skull fracture when her burqa snagged in a taxi door and slammed her to the pavement as the vehicle sped away. But I'd never before noted this fact: it is not possible for a woman wearing a burqa to eat an ice cream cone.
We gave the cones away to passing children and laughed about it, but to me it was the saddest thing.
****
Ever since the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, George W. Bush has boasted of "liberating" Afghan women from the Taliban and the burqa. His wife Laura, after a publicity junket to Afghanistan in 2005, appeared on Jay Leno's show to say that she hadn't seen a single woman wearing a burqa.
But these are the sorts of wildly optimistic self-delusions that have made Bush notorious. His wife, whose visit to Afghanistan lasted almost six hours, spent much of that time at the American air base and none of it in the Afghan streets where most women, to this day, go about in big blue bags.
It's true that after the fall of the Taliban lots of women in the capital went back to work in schools, hospitals, and government ministries, while others found better paying jobs with international humanitarian agencies. In 2005, thanks to a quota system imposed by the international community, women took 27% of the seats in the lower house of the new parliament, a greater percentage than women enjoy in most Western legislatures, including our own. Yet these hopeful developments are misleading.
The fact is that the "liberation" of Afghan women is mostly theoretical. The Afghan Constitution adopted in 2004 declares that "The Citizens of Afghanistan -- whether man or woman -- have equal Rights and Duties before the Law." But what law? The judicial system -- ultra-conservative, inadequate, incompetent, and notoriously corrupt -- usually bases decisions on idiosyncratic interpretations of Islamic Sharia, tribal customary codes, or simple bribery. And legal "scholars" instruct women that having "equal Rights and Duties" is not the same as being equal to men.
Post-Taliban Afghanistan, under President Hamid Karzai, also ratified key international agreements on human rights: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Treaty of Civil and Political Rights, and CEDAW: the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Like the Constitution, these essential documents provide a foundation for realizing the human rights of women.
But building on that paper foundation -- amid poverty, illiteracy, misogyny, and ongoing warfare -- is something else again.
That's why, for the great majority of Afghan women, life has scarcely changed at all. That's why even an educated and informed leader like my colleague, on her way to a UN agency to work on women's rights, is still unable to eat an ice cream cone.
****
For most Afghan women the burqa is the least of their problems.
Afghanistan is just about the poorest country in the world. Only Burkina Faso and Niger sometimes get worse ratings. After nearly three decades of warfare and another of drought, millions of Afghans are without safe water or sanitation or electricity, even in the capital city. Millions are without adequate food and nutrition. Millions have access only to the most rudimentary health care, or none at all.
Diseases such as TB and polio, long eradicated in most of the world, flourish here. They hit women and children hard. One in four children dies before the age of five, mostly from preventable illnesses such as cholera and diarrhea. Half of all women of childbearing age who die do so in childbirth, giving Afghanistan one of the highest maternal death rates in the world. Average life expectancy hovers around 42 years.
Notice that we're still talking women's rights here: the fundamental economic and social rights that belong to all human beings.
There are other grim statistics. About 85% of Afghan women are illiterate. About 95% are routinely subjected to violence in the home. And the home is where most Afghan women in rural areas, and many in cities, are still customarily confined. Public space and public life belong almost exclusively to men. President Karzai heads the country while his wife, a qualified gynecologist with needed skills, stays at home.
These facts are well known. During more than five years of Western occupation, they haven't changed.
Afghan women and girls are, by custom and practice, the property of men. They may be traded and sold like any commodity. Although Afghan law sets the minimum marriageable age for girls at sixteen, girls as young as eight or nine are commonly sold into marriage. Women doctors in Kabul maternity hospitals describe terrible life-threatening "wedding night" injuries that husbands inflict on child brides. In the countryside, far from medical help, such girls die.
Under the tribal code of the Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group, men customarily hand over women and girls -- surplus sisters or widows, daughters or nieces -- to other men to make amends for some offense or to pay off some indebtedness, often to a drug lord. To Pashtuns the trade-off is a means of maintaining "justice" and social harmony, but international human rights observers define what happens to the women and girls used in such "conflict resolution" as "slavery."
Given the rigid confinement of women, a surprising number try to escape. But any woman on her own outside the home is assumed to be guilty of the crime of "zina" -- engaging in sexual activity. That's why "running away" is itself a crime. One crime presupposes the other.
When she is caught, as most runaways are, she may be taken to jail for an indefinite term or returned to her husband or father or brothers who may then murder her to restore the family honor.
The same thing happens to a rape victim, force being no excuse for sexual contact -- unless she is married to the man who raped her. In that case, she can be raped as often as he likes.
In Kabul, where women and girls move about more freely, many are snatched by traffickers and sold into sexual slavery. The traffickers are seldom pursued or punished because once a girl is abducted she is as good as dead anyway, even to loving parents bound by the code of honor. The weeping mother of a kidnapped teenage girl once told me, "I pray she does not come back because my husband will have to kill her."
Many a girl kills herself. To escape beatings or sexual abuse or forced marriage. To escape prison or honor killing, if she's been seduced or raped or falsely accused. To escape life, if she's been forbidden to marry the man she would choose for herself.
Suicide also brings dishonor, so families cover it up. Only when city girls try to kill themselves by setting themselves on fire do their cases become known, for if they do not die at once, they may be taken to hospital. In 2003, scores of cases of self-immolation were reported in the city of Herat; the following year, as many were recorded in Kabul. Although such incidents are notoriously underreported, during the past year 150 cases were noted in western Afghanistan, 197 in Herat, and at least 34 in the south.
The customary codes and traditional practices that made life unbearable for these burned girls predate the Taliban, and they remain in force today, side by side with the new constitution and international documents that speak of women's rights.
Tune in a Kabul television station and you'll see evidence that Afghan women are poised at a particularly schizophrenic moment in their history. Watching televised parliamentary sessions, you'll see women who not only sit side by side with men -- a dangerous, generally forbidden proximity -- but actually rise to argue with them. Yet who can forget poor murdered Shaima, the lively, youthful presenter of a popular TV chat show for young people? Her father and brother killed her, or so men and women say approvingly, because they found her job shameful. Mullahs and public officials issue edicts from time to time condemning women on television, or television itself.
****
Many people believe the key to improving life for women, and all Afghans, is education, particularly because so many among Afghanistan's educated elite left the country during its decades of wars. So the international community invests in education projects -- building schools, printing textbooks, teaching teachers, organizing literacy classes for women -- and the Bush administration in particular boasts that five million children now go to school.
But that's fewer than half the kids of school age, and less than a third of the girls. The highest enrollments are in cities – 85% of children in Kabul -- while, in the Pashtun south, enrollments drop below 20% overall and near zero for girls. More than half the students enrolled in school live in Kabul and its environs, yet even there an estimated 60,000 children are not in school, but in the streets, working as vendors, trash-pickers, beggars, or thieves.
None of this is new. For a century, Afghan rulers -- from kings to communists -- have tried to unveil women and advance education. In the 1970s and 1980s, many women in the capital went about freely, without veils. They worked in offices, schools, hospitals. They went to university and became doctors, nurses, teachers, judges, engineers. They drove their own cars. They wore Western fashions and traveled abroad. But when Kabul's communists called for universal education throughout the country, provincial conservatives opposed to educating women rebelled.
Afghan women of the Kabul elite haven't yet caught up to where they were thirty-five years ago. But once again ultra-conservatives are up in arms. This time it's the Taliban, back in force throughout the southern half of the country. Among their tactics: blowing up or burning schools (150 in 2005, 198 in 2006) and murdering teachers, especially women who teach girls. UNICEF estimates that in four southern provinces more than half the schools -- 380 out of 748 -- no longer provide any education at all. Last September the Taliban shot down the middle-aged woman who headed the provincial office for women's affairs in Kandahar. A few brave colleagues went back to the office in body armor, knowing it would not save them. Now, in the southern provinces -- more than half the country -- women and girls stay home.
I blame George W. Bush, the "liberator" who looked the other way. In 2001, the United States military claimed responsibility for these provinces, the heart of Taliban country; but diverted to adventures in the oilfields of Iraq, it failed for five years to provide the security international humanitarians needed to do the promised work of reconstruction. Afghans grew discouraged. Last summer, when the U.S. handed the job to NATO, British and Canadian "peacekeepers" walked right into war with the resurgent Taliban. By year's end, more than 4,000 Afghans were dead -- Taliban, "suspected" insurgents, and civilians. Speaking recently of dead women and children -- trapped between U.S. bombers and NATO troops on the one hand and Taliban forces backed (unofficially) by Pakistan on the other -- President Karzai began to weep.
It's winter in Afghanistan now. No time to make war. But come spring, the Taliban promise a new offensive to throw out Karzai and foreign invaders. The British commander of NATO forces has already warned: "We could actually fail here."
He also advised a British reporter that Westerners shouldn't even mention women's rights when more important things are at stake. As if security is not a woman's right. And peace.
Come spring, Afghan women could lose it all.
Ann Jones, who was a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan periodically from 2002 to 2006, is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (Metropolitan Books, 2006, and soon to be in paperback). The New York Times described her book as "a work of impassioned reportage… eloquent and persuasive." That's journalese for: What she saw in Afghanistan really made her mad.
[Note: This piece was adapted from a feature article that appears in the February issue of Brazil's leading women's magazine, Marie Claire Brazil. Anyone interested in seeing the photos that accompany the article can visit Ann Jones' website.]
Copyright 2007 Ann Jones
The Nightmare of Afghan Women - Not the Same as Being Equal
Afghanistan remains the forgotten war and yet, in an eerie lockstep with Iraq, it seems to be following a distinctly Bush administration-style path toward "the gates of hell." While almost all attention in Washington and the U.S. media has been focused on the President's new "surge" plan in Iraq -- is it for 21,000 or 50,000 American troops? Just how astronomical will the bills be? Just how strong will Congressional opposition prove? Just how bad, according to American intelligence, is the situation? -- Afghanistan is experiencing its own quiet surge plan: more U.S. (and NATO) troops, more military aid, more reconstruction funds, more fighting, more casualties, heavier weaponry, more air power, more bad news, and predictions of worse to come.
The repetitive and dismal headlines, often tucked away in back pages, tell the tale:
On the fighting:
"Airstrike kills up to Seven in Afghanistan"
"12 militants killed in West Afghanistan"
"Nato offensive 'kills 30 Taleban'"
"Group: Over 1,000 Afghan civilians killed" ("More than 1,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2006, most of them as a result of attacks by the Taliban and other anti-government forces in the country's unstable south, a rights group said Tuesday…")
"Driving the Taleban off Nipple Hill -- again"
"No foreseeable end to assaults facing Royal Marines in Helmand" ("Another day, another attack. Yesterday the barrage of mortars, rockets and rifle fire began raining down on the British base at Kajaki at just after six in the morning…")
"Taleban forces retake town" ("Taleban forces in southern Afghanistan have taken control of a town which British troops had pulled out of after a peace deal with local elders…")
On calls for intensification of the military struggle:
"Britain to increase forces in Afghanistan"
"NATO to step up efforts to control Afghan border: general"
"U.S. lawmakers, back from Afghanistan, say more NATO troops needed"
On the repetitively dismal tale of "reconstructing" Afghanistan and on drugs:
"Afghan rebuilding hit by ‘violence and waste'" ("The international body established to co-ordinate Afghanistan's reconstruction effort marked its one-year anniversary on Wednesday by admitting it was struggling to make progress in the face of rising violence, waste and poor administration.")
"AFGHANISTAN: Girls and women traded for opium debts" ("On 4 November 2006, Nasima, 25, a member of a local women's council, grabbed the AK-47 from the policeman guarding the council meeting in the Grishk district of southern Helmand province and killed herself. She had had enough of the daily beatings by her husband. Like many other women in Helmand, Nasima was given away by her family in 2005. Her father owed a huge amount to an opium dealer…")
On predictions of more and worse to come (with faint hopes of better sooner or later):
"New U.S. commander in Afghanistan expects rise in suicide attacks in 2007" ("The incoming commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan said Monday he expects Taliban militants to launch more suicide attacks this year than in 2006, when militants set off a record 139 such bombings…")
"NATO general expects offensive, says Taliban beaten" ("The Taliban will launch an offensive within months once the snows melt, but they are effectively a beaten force, according to the outgoing head of NATO forces in Afghanistan...")
So goes the repetitive, if ever deepening, tragedy of our other war -- and under such headlines lie massive tragedies that seldom make the headlines anywhere. Ann Jones, who has spent much time as a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan these last years and wrote a moving book, Kabul in Winter, on her experiences, turns to one of those tragedies: the fate of Afghan women. Tom
Not the Same as Being Equal
Women in Afghanistan
By Ann Jones
Born in Afghanistan but raised in the United States, like many in the worldwide Afghan Diaspora, Manizha Naderi is devoted to helping her homeland. For years she worked with Women for Afghan Women, a New York based organization serving Afghan women wherever they may be. Last fall, she returned to Kabul, the capital, to try to create a Family Guidance Center. Its goal was to rescue women -- and their families -- from homemade violence. It's tough work. After three decades of almost constant warfare, most citizens are programmed to answer the slightest challenge with violence. In Afghanistan it's the default response.
Manizha Naderi has been sizing up the problem in the capital and last week she sent me a copy of her report. A key passage went like this:
"During the past year, a rash of reports on the situation of women in Afghanistan has been issued by Afghan governmental agencies and by foreign and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that claim a particular interest in women's rights or in Afghanistan or both. More reports are in the offing. What has sparked them is the dire situation of women in the country, the systematic violations of their human rights, and the failure of concerned parties to achieve significant improvements by providing women with legal protections rooted in a capable, honest, and stable judiciary system, education and employment opportunities, safety from violence, much of it savage, and protection from hidebound customs originating in the conviction that women are the property of men."
I'd hoped for better news. Instead, her report brought back so many things I'd seen for myself during the last five years spent, off and on, in her country.
****
Last year in Herat, as I was walking with an Afghan colleague to a meeting on women's rights, I spotted an ice cream vendor in the hot, dusty street. I rushed ahead and returned with two cones of lemony ice. I held one out to my friend. "Forgive me," she said. "I can't." She was wearing a burqa.
It was a stupid mistake. I'd been in Afghanistan a long time, in the company every day of women encased from head to toe in pleated polyester body bags. Occasionally I put one on myself, just to get the feel of being stifled in the sweaty sack, blind behind the mesh eye mask. I'd watched women trip on their burqas and fall. I'd watched women collide with cars they couldn't see. I knew a woman badly burned when her burqa caught fire. I knew another who suffered a near-fatal skull fracture when her burqa snagged in a taxi door and slammed her to the pavement as the vehicle sped away. But I'd never before noted this fact: it is not possible for a woman wearing a burqa to eat an ice cream cone.
We gave the cones away to passing children and laughed about it, but to me it was the saddest thing.
****
Ever since the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, George W. Bush has boasted of "liberating" Afghan women from the Taliban and the burqa. His wife Laura, after a publicity junket to Afghanistan in 2005, appeared on Jay Leno's show to say that she hadn't seen a single woman wearing a burqa.
But these are the sorts of wildly optimistic self-delusions that have made Bush notorious. His wife, whose visit to Afghanistan lasted almost six hours, spent much of that time at the American air base and none of it in the Afghan streets where most women, to this day, go about in big blue bags.
It's true that after the fall of the Taliban lots of women in the capital went back to work in schools, hospitals, and government ministries, while others found better paying jobs with international humanitarian agencies. In 2005, thanks to a quota system imposed by the international community, women took 27% of the seats in the lower house of the new parliament, a greater percentage than women enjoy in most Western legislatures, including our own. Yet these hopeful developments are misleading.
The fact is that the "liberation" of Afghan women is mostly theoretical. The Afghan Constitution adopted in 2004 declares that "The Citizens of Afghanistan -- whether man or woman -- have equal Rights and Duties before the Law." But what law? The judicial system -- ultra-conservative, inadequate, incompetent, and notoriously corrupt -- usually bases decisions on idiosyncratic interpretations of Islamic Sharia, tribal customary codes, or simple bribery. And legal "scholars" instruct women that having "equal Rights and Duties" is not the same as being equal to men.
Post-Taliban Afghanistan, under President Hamid Karzai, also ratified key international agreements on human rights: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Treaty of Civil and Political Rights, and CEDAW: the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Like the Constitution, these essential documents provide a foundation for realizing the human rights of women.
But building on that paper foundation -- amid poverty, illiteracy, misogyny, and ongoing warfare -- is something else again.
That's why, for the great majority of Afghan women, life has scarcely changed at all. That's why even an educated and informed leader like my colleague, on her way to a UN agency to work on women's rights, is still unable to eat an ice cream cone.
****
For most Afghan women the burqa is the least of their problems.
Afghanistan is just about the poorest country in the world. Only Burkina Faso and Niger sometimes get worse ratings. After nearly three decades of warfare and another of drought, millions of Afghans are without safe water or sanitation or electricity, even in the capital city. Millions are without adequate food and nutrition. Millions have access only to the most rudimentary health care, or none at all.
Diseases such as TB and polio, long eradicated in most of the world, flourish here. They hit women and children hard. One in four children dies before the age of five, mostly from preventable illnesses such as cholera and diarrhea. Half of all women of childbearing age who die do so in childbirth, giving Afghanistan one of the highest maternal death rates in the world. Average life expectancy hovers around 42 years.
Notice that we're still talking women's rights here: the fundamental economic and social rights that belong to all human beings.
There are other grim statistics. About 85% of Afghan women are illiterate. About 95% are routinely subjected to violence in the home. And the home is where most Afghan women in rural areas, and many in cities, are still customarily confined. Public space and public life belong almost exclusively to men. President Karzai heads the country while his wife, a qualified gynecologist with needed skills, stays at home.
These facts are well known. During more than five years of Western occupation, they haven't changed.
Afghan women and girls are, by custom and practice, the property of men. They may be traded and sold like any commodity. Although Afghan law sets the minimum marriageable age for girls at sixteen, girls as young as eight or nine are commonly sold into marriage. Women doctors in Kabul maternity hospitals describe terrible life-threatening "wedding night" injuries that husbands inflict on child brides. In the countryside, far from medical help, such girls die.
Under the tribal code of the Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group, men customarily hand over women and girls -- surplus sisters or widows, daughters or nieces -- to other men to make amends for some offense or to pay off some indebtedness, often to a drug lord. To Pashtuns the trade-off is a means of maintaining "justice" and social harmony, but international human rights observers define what happens to the women and girls used in such "conflict resolution" as "slavery."
Given the rigid confinement of women, a surprising number try to escape. But any woman on her own outside the home is assumed to be guilty of the crime of "zina" -- engaging in sexual activity. That's why "running away" is itself a crime. One crime presupposes the other.
When she is caught, as most runaways are, she may be taken to jail for an indefinite term or returned to her husband or father or brothers who may then murder her to restore the family honor.
The same thing happens to a rape victim, force being no excuse for sexual contact -- unless she is married to the man who raped her. In that case, she can be raped as often as he likes.
In Kabul, where women and girls move about more freely, many are snatched by traffickers and sold into sexual slavery. The traffickers are seldom pursued or punished because once a girl is abducted she is as good as dead anyway, even to loving parents bound by the code of honor. The weeping mother of a kidnapped teenage girl once told me, "I pray she does not come back because my husband will have to kill her."
Many a girl kills herself. To escape beatings or sexual abuse or forced marriage. To escape prison or honor killing, if she's been seduced or raped or falsely accused. To escape life, if she's been forbidden to marry the man she would choose for herself.
Suicide also brings dishonor, so families cover it up. Only when city girls try to kill themselves by setting themselves on fire do their cases become known, for if they do not die at once, they may be taken to hospital. In 2003, scores of cases of self-immolation were reported in the city of Herat; the following year, as many were recorded in Kabul. Although such incidents are notoriously underreported, during the past year 150 cases were noted in western Afghanistan, 197 in Herat, and at least 34 in the south.
The customary codes and traditional practices that made life unbearable for these burned girls predate the Taliban, and they remain in force today, side by side with the new constitution and international documents that speak of women's rights.
Tune in a Kabul television station and you'll see evidence that Afghan women are poised at a particularly schizophrenic moment in their history. Watching televised parliamentary sessions, you'll see women who not only sit side by side with men -- a dangerous, generally forbidden proximity -- but actually rise to argue with them. Yet who can forget poor murdered Shaima, the lively, youthful presenter of a popular TV chat show for young people? Her father and brother killed her, or so men and women say approvingly, because they found her job shameful. Mullahs and public officials issue edicts from time to time condemning women on television, or television itself.
****
Many people believe the key to improving life for women, and all Afghans, is education, particularly because so many among Afghanistan's educated elite left the country during its decades of wars. So the international community invests in education projects -- building schools, printing textbooks, teaching teachers, organizing literacy classes for women -- and the Bush administration in particular boasts that five million children now go to school.
But that's fewer than half the kids of school age, and less than a third of the girls. The highest enrollments are in cities – 85% of children in Kabul -- while, in the Pashtun south, enrollments drop below 20% overall and near zero for girls. More than half the students enrolled in school live in Kabul and its environs, yet even there an estimated 60,000 children are not in school, but in the streets, working as vendors, trash-pickers, beggars, or thieves.
None of this is new. For a century, Afghan rulers -- from kings to communists -- have tried to unveil women and advance education. In the 1970s and 1980s, many women in the capital went about freely, without veils. They worked in offices, schools, hospitals. They went to university and became doctors, nurses, teachers, judges, engineers. They drove their own cars. They wore Western fashions and traveled abroad. But when Kabul's communists called for universal education throughout the country, provincial conservatives opposed to educating women rebelled.
Afghan women of the Kabul elite haven't yet caught up to where they were thirty-five years ago. But once again ultra-conservatives are up in arms. This time it's the Taliban, back in force throughout the southern half of the country. Among their tactics: blowing up or burning schools (150 in 2005, 198 in 2006) and murdering teachers, especially women who teach girls. UNICEF estimates that in four southern provinces more than half the schools -- 380 out of 748 -- no longer provide any education at all. Last September the Taliban shot down the middle-aged woman who headed the provincial office for women's affairs in Kandahar. A few brave colleagues went back to the office in body armor, knowing it would not save them. Now, in the southern provinces -- more than half the country -- women and girls stay home.
I blame George W. Bush, the "liberator" who looked the other way. In 2001, the United States military claimed responsibility for these provinces, the heart of Taliban country; but diverted to adventures in the oilfields of Iraq, it failed for five years to provide the security international humanitarians needed to do the promised work of reconstruction. Afghans grew discouraged. Last summer, when the U.S. handed the job to NATO, British and Canadian "peacekeepers" walked right into war with the resurgent Taliban. By year's end, more than 4,000 Afghans were dead -- Taliban, "suspected" insurgents, and civilians. Speaking recently of dead women and children -- trapped between U.S. bombers and NATO troops on the one hand and Taliban forces backed (unofficially) by Pakistan on the other -- President Karzai began to weep.
It's winter in Afghanistan now. No time to make war. But come spring, the Taliban promise a new offensive to throw out Karzai and foreign invaders. The British commander of NATO forces has already warned: "We could actually fail here."
He also advised a British reporter that Westerners shouldn't even mention women's rights when more important things are at stake. As if security is not a woman's right. And peace.
Come spring, Afghan women could lose it all.
Ann Jones, who was a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan periodically from 2002 to 2006, is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (Metropolitan Books, 2006, and soon to be in paperback). The New York Times described her book as "a work of impassioned reportage… eloquent and persuasive." That's journalese for: What she saw in Afghanistan really made her mad.
[Note: This piece was adapted from a feature article that appears in the February issue of Brazil's leading women's magazine, Marie Claire Brazil. Anyone interested in seeing the photos that accompany the article can visit Ann Jones' website.]
Copyright 2007 Ann Jones
The repetitive and dismal headlines, often tucked away in back pages, tell the tale:
On the fighting:
"Airstrike kills up to Seven in Afghanistan"
"12 militants killed in West Afghanistan"
"Nato offensive 'kills 30 Taleban'"
"Group: Over 1,000 Afghan civilians killed" ("More than 1,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2006, most of them as a result of attacks by the Taliban and other anti-government forces in the country's unstable south, a rights group said Tuesday…")
"Driving the Taleban off Nipple Hill -- again"
"No foreseeable end to assaults facing Royal Marines in Helmand" ("Another day, another attack. Yesterday the barrage of mortars, rockets and rifle fire began raining down on the British base at Kajaki at just after six in the morning…")
"Taleban forces retake town" ("Taleban forces in southern Afghanistan have taken control of a town which British troops had pulled out of after a peace deal with local elders…")
On calls for intensification of the military struggle:
"Britain to increase forces in Afghanistan"
"NATO to step up efforts to control Afghan border: general"
"U.S. lawmakers, back from Afghanistan, say more NATO troops needed"
On the repetitively dismal tale of "reconstructing" Afghanistan and on drugs:
"Afghan rebuilding hit by ‘violence and waste'" ("The international body established to co-ordinate Afghanistan's reconstruction effort marked its one-year anniversary on Wednesday by admitting it was struggling to make progress in the face of rising violence, waste and poor administration.")
"AFGHANISTAN: Girls and women traded for opium debts" ("On 4 November 2006, Nasima, 25, a member of a local women's council, grabbed the AK-47 from the policeman guarding the council meeting in the Grishk district of southern Helmand province and killed herself. She had had enough of the daily beatings by her husband. Like many other women in Helmand, Nasima was given away by her family in 2005. Her father owed a huge amount to an opium dealer…")
On predictions of more and worse to come (with faint hopes of better sooner or later):
"New U.S. commander in Afghanistan expects rise in suicide attacks in 2007" ("The incoming commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan said Monday he expects Taliban militants to launch more suicide attacks this year than in 2006, when militants set off a record 139 such bombings…")
"NATO general expects offensive, says Taliban beaten" ("The Taliban will launch an offensive within months once the snows melt, but they are effectively a beaten force, according to the outgoing head of NATO forces in Afghanistan...")
So goes the repetitive, if ever deepening, tragedy of our other war -- and under such headlines lie massive tragedies that seldom make the headlines anywhere. Ann Jones, who has spent much time as a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan these last years and wrote a moving book, Kabul in Winter, on her experiences, turns to one of those tragedies: the fate of Afghan women. Tom
Not the Same as Being Equal
Women in Afghanistan
By Ann Jones
Born in Afghanistan but raised in the United States, like many in the worldwide Afghan Diaspora, Manizha Naderi is devoted to helping her homeland. For years she worked with Women for Afghan Women, a New York based organization serving Afghan women wherever they may be. Last fall, she returned to Kabul, the capital, to try to create a Family Guidance Center. Its goal was to rescue women -- and their families -- from homemade violence. It's tough work. After three decades of almost constant warfare, most citizens are programmed to answer the slightest challenge with violence. In Afghanistan it's the default response.
Manizha Naderi has been sizing up the problem in the capital and last week she sent me a copy of her report. A key passage went like this:
"During the past year, a rash of reports on the situation of women in Afghanistan has been issued by Afghan governmental agencies and by foreign and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that claim a particular interest in women's rights or in Afghanistan or both. More reports are in the offing. What has sparked them is the dire situation of women in the country, the systematic violations of their human rights, and the failure of concerned parties to achieve significant improvements by providing women with legal protections rooted in a capable, honest, and stable judiciary system, education and employment opportunities, safety from violence, much of it savage, and protection from hidebound customs originating in the conviction that women are the property of men."
I'd hoped for better news. Instead, her report brought back so many things I'd seen for myself during the last five years spent, off and on, in her country.
****
Last year in Herat, as I was walking with an Afghan colleague to a meeting on women's rights, I spotted an ice cream vendor in the hot, dusty street. I rushed ahead and returned with two cones of lemony ice. I held one out to my friend. "Forgive me," she said. "I can't." She was wearing a burqa.
It was a stupid mistake. I'd been in Afghanistan a long time, in the company every day of women encased from head to toe in pleated polyester body bags. Occasionally I put one on myself, just to get the feel of being stifled in the sweaty sack, blind behind the mesh eye mask. I'd watched women trip on their burqas and fall. I'd watched women collide with cars they couldn't see. I knew a woman badly burned when her burqa caught fire. I knew another who suffered a near-fatal skull fracture when her burqa snagged in a taxi door and slammed her to the pavement as the vehicle sped away. But I'd never before noted this fact: it is not possible for a woman wearing a burqa to eat an ice cream cone.
We gave the cones away to passing children and laughed about it, but to me it was the saddest thing.
****
Ever since the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, George W. Bush has boasted of "liberating" Afghan women from the Taliban and the burqa. His wife Laura, after a publicity junket to Afghanistan in 2005, appeared on Jay Leno's show to say that she hadn't seen a single woman wearing a burqa.
But these are the sorts of wildly optimistic self-delusions that have made Bush notorious. His wife, whose visit to Afghanistan lasted almost six hours, spent much of that time at the American air base and none of it in the Afghan streets where most women, to this day, go about in big blue bags.
It's true that after the fall of the Taliban lots of women in the capital went back to work in schools, hospitals, and government ministries, while others found better paying jobs with international humanitarian agencies. In 2005, thanks to a quota system imposed by the international community, women took 27% of the seats in the lower house of the new parliament, a greater percentage than women enjoy in most Western legislatures, including our own. Yet these hopeful developments are misleading.
The fact is that the "liberation" of Afghan women is mostly theoretical. The Afghan Constitution adopted in 2004 declares that "The Citizens of Afghanistan -- whether man or woman -- have equal Rights and Duties before the Law." But what law? The judicial system -- ultra-conservative, inadequate, incompetent, and notoriously corrupt -- usually bases decisions on idiosyncratic interpretations of Islamic Sharia, tribal customary codes, or simple bribery. And legal "scholars" instruct women that having "equal Rights and Duties" is not the same as being equal to men.
Post-Taliban Afghanistan, under President Hamid Karzai, also ratified key international agreements on human rights: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Treaty of Civil and Political Rights, and CEDAW: the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Like the Constitution, these essential documents provide a foundation for realizing the human rights of women.
But building on that paper foundation -- amid poverty, illiteracy, misogyny, and ongoing warfare -- is something else again.
That's why, for the great majority of Afghan women, life has scarcely changed at all. That's why even an educated and informed leader like my colleague, on her way to a UN agency to work on women's rights, is still unable to eat an ice cream cone.
****
For most Afghan women the burqa is the least of their problems.
Afghanistan is just about the poorest country in the world. Only Burkina Faso and Niger sometimes get worse ratings. After nearly three decades of warfare and another of drought, millions of Afghans are without safe water or sanitation or electricity, even in the capital city. Millions are without adequate food and nutrition. Millions have access only to the most rudimentary health care, or none at all.
Diseases such as TB and polio, long eradicated in most of the world, flourish here. They hit women and children hard. One in four children dies before the age of five, mostly from preventable illnesses such as cholera and diarrhea. Half of all women of childbearing age who die do so in childbirth, giving Afghanistan one of the highest maternal death rates in the world. Average life expectancy hovers around 42 years.
Notice that we're still talking women's rights here: the fundamental economic and social rights that belong to all human beings.
There are other grim statistics. About 85% of Afghan women are illiterate. About 95% are routinely subjected to violence in the home. And the home is where most Afghan women in rural areas, and many in cities, are still customarily confined. Public space and public life belong almost exclusively to men. President Karzai heads the country while his wife, a qualified gynecologist with needed skills, stays at home.
These facts are well known. During more than five years of Western occupation, they haven't changed.
Afghan women and girls are, by custom and practice, the property of men. They may be traded and sold like any commodity. Although Afghan law sets the minimum marriageable age for girls at sixteen, girls as young as eight or nine are commonly sold into marriage. Women doctors in Kabul maternity hospitals describe terrible life-threatening "wedding night" injuries that husbands inflict on child brides. In the countryside, far from medical help, such girls die.
Under the tribal code of the Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group, men customarily hand over women and girls -- surplus sisters or widows, daughters or nieces -- to other men to make amends for some offense or to pay off some indebtedness, often to a drug lord. To Pashtuns the trade-off is a means of maintaining "justice" and social harmony, but international human rights observers define what happens to the women and girls used in such "conflict resolution" as "slavery."
Given the rigid confinement of women, a surprising number try to escape. But any woman on her own outside the home is assumed to be guilty of the crime of "zina" -- engaging in sexual activity. That's why "running away" is itself a crime. One crime presupposes the other.
When she is caught, as most runaways are, she may be taken to jail for an indefinite term or returned to her husband or father or brothers who may then murder her to restore the family honor.
The same thing happens to a rape victim, force being no excuse for sexual contact -- unless she is married to the man who raped her. In that case, she can be raped as often as he likes.
In Kabul, where women and girls move about more freely, many are snatched by traffickers and sold into sexual slavery. The traffickers are seldom pursued or punished because once a girl is abducted she is as good as dead anyway, even to loving parents bound by the code of honor. The weeping mother of a kidnapped teenage girl once told me, "I pray she does not come back because my husband will have to kill her."
Many a girl kills herself. To escape beatings or sexual abuse or forced marriage. To escape prison or honor killing, if she's been seduced or raped or falsely accused. To escape life, if she's been forbidden to marry the man she would choose for herself.
Suicide also brings dishonor, so families cover it up. Only when city girls try to kill themselves by setting themselves on fire do their cases become known, for if they do not die at once, they may be taken to hospital. In 2003, scores of cases of self-immolation were reported in the city of Herat; the following year, as many were recorded in Kabul. Although such incidents are notoriously underreported, during the past year 150 cases were noted in western Afghanistan, 197 in Herat, and at least 34 in the south.
The customary codes and traditional practices that made life unbearable for these burned girls predate the Taliban, and they remain in force today, side by side with the new constitution and international documents that speak of women's rights.
Tune in a Kabul television station and you'll see evidence that Afghan women are poised at a particularly schizophrenic moment in their history. Watching televised parliamentary sessions, you'll see women who not only sit side by side with men -- a dangerous, generally forbidden proximity -- but actually rise to argue with them. Yet who can forget poor murdered Shaima, the lively, youthful presenter of a popular TV chat show for young people? Her father and brother killed her, or so men and women say approvingly, because they found her job shameful. Mullahs and public officials issue edicts from time to time condemning women on television, or television itself.
****
Many people believe the key to improving life for women, and all Afghans, is education, particularly because so many among Afghanistan's educated elite left the country during its decades of wars. So the international community invests in education projects -- building schools, printing textbooks, teaching teachers, organizing literacy classes for women -- and the Bush administration in particular boasts that five million children now go to school.
But that's fewer than half the kids of school age, and less than a third of the girls. The highest enrollments are in cities – 85% of children in Kabul -- while, in the Pashtun south, enrollments drop below 20% overall and near zero for girls. More than half the students enrolled in school live in Kabul and its environs, yet even there an estimated 60,000 children are not in school, but in the streets, working as vendors, trash-pickers, beggars, or thieves.
None of this is new. For a century, Afghan rulers -- from kings to communists -- have tried to unveil women and advance education. In the 1970s and 1980s, many women in the capital went about freely, without veils. They worked in offices, schools, hospitals. They went to university and became doctors, nurses, teachers, judges, engineers. They drove their own cars. They wore Western fashions and traveled abroad. But when Kabul's communists called for universal education throughout the country, provincial conservatives opposed to educating women rebelled.
Afghan women of the Kabul elite haven't yet caught up to where they were thirty-five years ago. But once again ultra-conservatives are up in arms. This time it's the Taliban, back in force throughout the southern half of the country. Among their tactics: blowing up or burning schools (150 in 2005, 198 in 2006) and murdering teachers, especially women who teach girls. UNICEF estimates that in four southern provinces more than half the schools -- 380 out of 748 -- no longer provide any education at all. Last September the Taliban shot down the middle-aged woman who headed the provincial office for women's affairs in Kandahar. A few brave colleagues went back to the office in body armor, knowing it would not save them. Now, in the southern provinces -- more than half the country -- women and girls stay home.
I blame George W. Bush, the "liberator" who looked the other way. In 2001, the United States military claimed responsibility for these provinces, the heart of Taliban country; but diverted to adventures in the oilfields of Iraq, it failed for five years to provide the security international humanitarians needed to do the promised work of reconstruction. Afghans grew discouraged. Last summer, when the U.S. handed the job to NATO, British and Canadian "peacekeepers" walked right into war with the resurgent Taliban. By year's end, more than 4,000 Afghans were dead -- Taliban, "suspected" insurgents, and civilians. Speaking recently of dead women and children -- trapped between U.S. bombers and NATO troops on the one hand and Taliban forces backed (unofficially) by Pakistan on the other -- President Karzai began to weep.
It's winter in Afghanistan now. No time to make war. But come spring, the Taliban promise a new offensive to throw out Karzai and foreign invaders. The British commander of NATO forces has already warned: "We could actually fail here."
He also advised a British reporter that Westerners shouldn't even mention women's rights when more important things are at stake. As if security is not a woman's right. And peace.
Come spring, Afghan women could lose it all.
Ann Jones, who was a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan periodically from 2002 to 2006, is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (Metropolitan Books, 2006, and soon to be in paperback). The New York Times described her book as "a work of impassioned reportage… eloquent and persuasive." That's journalese for: What she saw in Afghanistan really made her mad.
[Note: This piece was adapted from a feature article that appears in the February issue of Brazil's leading women's magazine, Marie Claire Brazil. Anyone interested in seeing the photos that accompany the article can visit Ann Jones' website.]
Copyright 2007 Ann Jones
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