A Pentagon probe into the death of Iraqi civilians last November in the Iraqi city of Haditha will show that U.S. Marines "killed innocent civilians in cold blood," a U.S. lawmaker said Wednesday.
From the beginning, Iraqis in the town of Haditha said U.S. Marines deliberately killed 15 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including seven women and three children.
One young Iraqi girl said the Marines killed six members of her family, including her parents. "The Americans came into the room where my father was praying," she said, "and shot him."
On Wednesday, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said the accounts are true.
Military officials told NBC News that the Marine Corps' own evidence appears to show Murtha is right.
A videotape taken by an Iraqi showed the aftermath of the alleged attack: a blood-smeared bedroom floor and bits of what appear to be human flesh and bullet holes on the walls.
The video, obtained by Time magazine, was broadcast a day after town residents told The Associated Press that American troops entered homes on Nov. 19 and shot dead 15 members of two families, including a 3-year-old girl, after a roadside bomb killed a U.S. Marine.
On Nov. 20, U.S. Marines spokesman Capt. Jeffrey Pool issued a statement saying that on the previous day a roadside bomb had killed 15 civilians and a Marine. In a later gunbattle, U.S. and Iraqi troops killed eight insurgents, he said.
U.S. military officials later confirmed that the version of events was wrong.
Also known as a stinking lie.
Murtha, a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, said at a news conference Wednesday that sources within the military have told him that an internal investigation will show that "there was no firefight, there was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."
Military officials say Marine Corp photos taken immediately after the incident show many of the victims were shot at close range, in the head and chest, execution-style. One photo shows a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer, shot dead, said the officials, who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity because the investigation hasn't been completed.
One military official says it appears the civilians were deliberately killed by the Marines, who were outraged at the death of their fellow Marine.
"This one is ugly," one official told NBC News.
Ugly, and entirely predictable.
And for every "regrettable incident" like this, where mountains of evidence force the military to admit the truth, there are other little massacres -- God only knows how many -- that are buried in reports of civilians "killed by an IED" or "caught in a firefight with insurgents."
Recall the reports of snipers taking out old ladies trying to get food during the siege of Falluja, or the video of that marine killing a wounded Iraqi in cold blood.
The soldiers, regardless of whether they're ever brought to trial, will be punished forever by the memories of their crimes. There's no escape; my grandfather told me he had nightmares from World War II every single night, without exception, until the day he died sixty years later. And he was a medic with a clean conscience.
But the real culprits won't be punished. There are two damn many of them.
It's not just Bush and Cheney and the rest of the madmen who conjured up this war, it's the Democratic hawks that enabled them. It's Kerry and Lieberman and all the rest and, yes, even Jack Murtha.
And it's the cowardly scumbags who spun their glorious war narrative and convinced a whole bunch of ordinary citizens to jump on board. It's the Tom Friedmans and the Peter Beinarts -- and even some on this very site -- who only realized this war was a mistake when it proved to be as disastrous as every other "war of choice." We told them that war is bloody hell and they called us "pacifists" and "appeasers."
Well there's your fucking war. It's not a video game and it's not glowing green explosions on CNN; it's "a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer, shot dead."
And there's a lot more mothers and young children waiting for you maniacs in Iran.
Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/36417/
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
The Enron Story Everyone Is Missing: The Bush-Ken Lay Connection
With the May 25 conviction of former Enron chief Kenneth Lay on charges of conspiring to commit securities and wire fraud, it may seem as though justice has been done. But as Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer has been writing for years, no accounting of the Enron scandal will be complete until we have full disclosure of Lay’s entanglements with the White House.
Check out this classic Scheer column (reprinted in his new book, “Playing President," and below), which reminds us:
By Robert Scheer
Published Dec. 11, 2001, in the Los Angeles Times
Enron is Whitewater in spades. This isn’t just some rinky-dink land investment like the one dredged up by right-wing enemies to haunt the Clinton White House--but rather it has the makings of the greatest presidential scandal since the Teapot Dome.
The Bush administration has a long and intimate relationship with Enron, whose much-discredited chairman, Kenneth L. Lay, was a primary financial backer of George W. Bush’s rise to the presidency.
It was Enron that provided the model for the administration’s trickle-down attempt to revive an economy that’s been in steep decline during Bush’s tenure. That model gives the fat-cat corporate hotshots everything they want in return for bankrolling political campaigns. Not to worry about the rest of us because, hey, what’s good for Enron is good for America. That it hasn’t been is now painfully clear.
What did Enron get in return for its contributions? It got its way on deregulation, for one thing. Remember when the administration refused to assist California and other states during the energy crisis, and consumers paid the steep price?
So greedy was Enron that it locked its own workers into a pension plan based on inflated company stock values and suspect hidden partnerships, while the top leadership led by Lay made out like bandits.
Bush should be called as a witness in the congressional hearings scheduled to unravel this mess. One thing that should come up in the hearings is then-Gov. Bush’s October 1997 telephone call on behalf of Lay to then-Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge to help Enron crack into the tightly regulated Pennsylvania electricity market.
“I called George W. to kind of tell him what was going on,” Lay told the New York Times about the 1997 phone call, “and I said that it would be very helpful to Enron, which is obviously a large company in the state of Texas, if he could just call the governor [of Pennsylvania] and tell him [Enron] is a serious company, this is a professional company, a good company.”
Since we now know Enron lacked those virtues, it’s clear Bush was used to sell a bill of goods to the unsuspecting Pennsylvania folks.
That Lay was instrumental in Bush’s rise to the presidency is indisputable. Since 1993, Lay and top Enron executives donated nearly $2 million to Bush. Lay also personally donated $326,000 in soft money to the Republican Party in the three years prior to Bush’s presidential bid, and he was one of the Republican “pioneers” who raised $100,000 in smaller contributions for Bush. Lay’s wife donated $100,000 for inauguration festivities.
As governor, Bush did what Enron wanted, cutting taxes and deregulating utilities. The deregulation ideology, which George W. long had adopted as gospel, allowed dubious bookkeeping and other acts of chicanery that shocked Wall Street and drove a $60-billion company, seventh on the Fortune 500 list, into bankruptcy.
This emerging scandal makes Whitewater seem puny in comparison; clearly there ought to be at least as aggressive a congressional inquiry into the connection between the Bush administration and the Enron debacle. Facts must be revealed, beginning with the content of Lay’s private meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney to create the administration’s energy policy.
What was Lay’s role in the sudden replacement of Curtis Hebert Jr. as Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman? As the New York Times reported, Hebert “had barely settled into his new job this year when he had an unsettling telephone conversation with Kenneth L. Lay, [in which Lay] prodded him to back ... a faster pace in opening up access to the electricity transmission grid to companies like Enron.” Lay admits making the call but in an unctuous defense of his influence peddling said, “The final decision on [Hebert’s job] was going to be the president’s, certainly not ours.” Soon after, Hebert was replaced by Texan Pat Wood, who was favored by Lay.
Other questions: Was there any conflict of interest in the roles played by key Bush aides? Political advisor Karl Rove owned as much as $250,000 in Enron stock. And economic advisor Larry Lindsay and Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick went straight from Enron’s payroll to their federal jobs.
There are other Enron alum in the administration, including Army Secretary Thomas White Jr., who, as an Enron executive, held stock and options totaling $50 million to $100 million.
We have a right to know whether the Enron alums in the administration were tipped off in time to bail out with profit the way Lay and the other Enron top execs did, while their workers and stockholders--and eventually U.S. taxpayers--are being left holding the suddenly empty bag.
Check out this classic Scheer column (reprinted in his new book, “Playing President," and below), which reminds us:
- Lay was the primary backer of Bush's rise to the presidency.
- Lay privately met with Dick Cheney to create the administration’s energy policy.
- In 1997 Bush called then-Pa. Gov. Tom Ridge on Lay’s behalf to open that state’s market to energy trading.
By Robert Scheer
Published Dec. 11, 2001, in the Los Angeles Times
Enron is Whitewater in spades. This isn’t just some rinky-dink land investment like the one dredged up by right-wing enemies to haunt the Clinton White House--but rather it has the makings of the greatest presidential scandal since the Teapot Dome.
The Bush administration has a long and intimate relationship with Enron, whose much-discredited chairman, Kenneth L. Lay, was a primary financial backer of George W. Bush’s rise to the presidency.
It was Enron that provided the model for the administration’s trickle-down attempt to revive an economy that’s been in steep decline during Bush’s tenure. That model gives the fat-cat corporate hotshots everything they want in return for bankrolling political campaigns. Not to worry about the rest of us because, hey, what’s good for Enron is good for America. That it hasn’t been is now painfully clear.
What did Enron get in return for its contributions? It got its way on deregulation, for one thing. Remember when the administration refused to assist California and other states during the energy crisis, and consumers paid the steep price?
So greedy was Enron that it locked its own workers into a pension plan based on inflated company stock values and suspect hidden partnerships, while the top leadership led by Lay made out like bandits.
Bush should be called as a witness in the congressional hearings scheduled to unravel this mess. One thing that should come up in the hearings is then-Gov. Bush’s October 1997 telephone call on behalf of Lay to then-Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge to help Enron crack into the tightly regulated Pennsylvania electricity market.
“I called George W. to kind of tell him what was going on,” Lay told the New York Times about the 1997 phone call, “and I said that it would be very helpful to Enron, which is obviously a large company in the state of Texas, if he could just call the governor [of Pennsylvania] and tell him [Enron] is a serious company, this is a professional company, a good company.”
Since we now know Enron lacked those virtues, it’s clear Bush was used to sell a bill of goods to the unsuspecting Pennsylvania folks.
That Lay was instrumental in Bush’s rise to the presidency is indisputable. Since 1993, Lay and top Enron executives donated nearly $2 million to Bush. Lay also personally donated $326,000 in soft money to the Republican Party in the three years prior to Bush’s presidential bid, and he was one of the Republican “pioneers” who raised $100,000 in smaller contributions for Bush. Lay’s wife donated $100,000 for inauguration festivities.
As governor, Bush did what Enron wanted, cutting taxes and deregulating utilities. The deregulation ideology, which George W. long had adopted as gospel, allowed dubious bookkeeping and other acts of chicanery that shocked Wall Street and drove a $60-billion company, seventh on the Fortune 500 list, into bankruptcy.
This emerging scandal makes Whitewater seem puny in comparison; clearly there ought to be at least as aggressive a congressional inquiry into the connection between the Bush administration and the Enron debacle. Facts must be revealed, beginning with the content of Lay’s private meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney to create the administration’s energy policy.
What was Lay’s role in the sudden replacement of Curtis Hebert Jr. as Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman? As the New York Times reported, Hebert “had barely settled into his new job this year when he had an unsettling telephone conversation with Kenneth L. Lay, [in which Lay] prodded him to back ... a faster pace in opening up access to the electricity transmission grid to companies like Enron.” Lay admits making the call but in an unctuous defense of his influence peddling said, “The final decision on [Hebert’s job] was going to be the president’s, certainly not ours.” Soon after, Hebert was replaced by Texan Pat Wood, who was favored by Lay.
Other questions: Was there any conflict of interest in the roles played by key Bush aides? Political advisor Karl Rove owned as much as $250,000 in Enron stock. And economic advisor Larry Lindsay and Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick went straight from Enron’s payroll to their federal jobs.
There are other Enron alum in the administration, including Army Secretary Thomas White Jr., who, as an Enron executive, held stock and options totaling $50 million to $100 million.
We have a right to know whether the Enron alums in the administration were tipped off in time to bail out with profit the way Lay and the other Enron top execs did, while their workers and stockholders--and eventually U.S. taxpayers--are being left holding the suddenly empty bag.
The Evil Is in Our Government - Is the Bush Regime a state sponsor of terrorism? by Paul Craig Roberts
The Evil Is in Our Government
Is the Bush Regime a state sponsor of terrorism?
A powerful case can be made that it is.
In the past three years, the Bush Regime has murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and an unknown number of Afghan ones.
U.S. Marines, our finest and proudest military force, are under criminal investigation for breaking into Iraqi homes and murdering entire families. In an unprecedented event, Gen. Michael Hagee, the Marine Corps commandant, has found it necessary to fly to Iraq to tell our best-trained troops to stop murdering civilians.
Gen. Hagee found it necessary to tell the U.S. Marines: "We do not employ force just for the sake of employing force. We use lethal force only when justified, proportional, and most importantly, lawful."
The war criminals in the Bush Regime have dismissed the murders as "collateral damage," but they are in fact murders. Otherwise, there would be no criminal investigations, and the Marine commandant would not be burdened with the embarrassment of having to fly to Iraq to lecture U.S. Marines on the lawful use of force.
The criminal Bush Regime has now murdered more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. The Bush Regime is also responsible for 20,000 U.S. casualties (dead, maimed for life, and wounded).
Bush damns the "axis of evil." But who has the "axis of evil" attacked? Iran has attacked no one. North Korea has attacked no country for more than a half century. Iraq attacked Kuwait a decade and a half ago, apparently after securing permission from the U.S. ambassador.
Isn't the real axis of evil Bush-Blair-Olmert? Bush and Blair have attacked two countries, slaughtering their citizens. Olmert is urging them on to attack a third country – Iran.
Where does the danger to the world reside? In Iran, a small, religious country where the family is intact and the government is constrained by religious authority and ancient traditions, or in the U.S. where propaganda rules and the powerful executive branch has removed itself from accountability by breaking the constitutional restraints on its power?
Why is the U.S. superpower orchestrating fear of puny Iran?
The U.S. government has spent the past half century interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, overthrowing or assassinating their chosen leaders and imposing its puppets on foreign peoples. To what country has Iran done this, or Iraq, or North Korea?
Americans think that they are the salt of the earth. The hubris that comes from this self-righteous belief makes Americans blind to the evil of their leaders. How can American leaders be evil when Americans are so good and so wonderful?
How many Serbs were slaughtered by American bombs released from high above the clouds, and for what reason? Who even remembers the propagandistic lies that the Clinton administration told us about why we absolutely had to drop bombs on the Serbs?
Wasn't it evil for the U.S. to bomb Iraq for a decade and to embargo medicines for children? When U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked if she thought an embargo that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was justified, she replied, "yes."
The former terrible tyrant ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, is on trial for killing 150 people. The U.S. government murdered 500,000 Iraqi children prior to Bush's invasion. When the U.S. government murders people, whether Serbs, Branch Davidians at Waco, or Iraqi women and children, it is "collateral damage." But we put Saddam Hussein on trial for putting down rebellions.
Gentle reader, do you believe that the Bush Regime will not shoot you down in the streets if you have a rebellion?
Kabul convulsed after US vehicle ploughs into crowd By Tom Coghlan in Helmand and Farhad Peikar in Kabul
The deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan spread to the capital, Kabul, yesterday with sustained and deadly rioting after a US military vehicle ploughed into a group of civilians.
The US military said one person was killed and six injured and the vehicle had a "mechanical failure". The Afghan presidential palace said the vehicle had killed five Afghans. In the rioting, at least 14 died and 142 were injured.
The government imposed a curfew in Kabul. Yousuf Stanezai, an interior ministry spokesman, said all residents were to stay off the streets between 10pm and 4am. Anyone found outside would suffer "serious measures".
Akhmed Muneer, 27, a restaurant owner who saw the aftermath of the road accident, said US personnel opened fire, killing three people and wounding one, after incensed people turned on them at the scene. Afghan police lost control as unrest intensified and they opened fire, killing or wounding 20, Mr Muneer believed.
Rioting spread to many parts of the city, focused against foreign interests, with gunfire audible through the day. The offices of the charity Care International were burnt, and another mob looted furniture and attempted to burn the new Serena Hotel near the Kabul river, the city's first five-star venue.
Two bodies lay on the street outside the Serena, another two could be seen outside the women's affairs ministry and one outside the Kabul Business Centre in the Shar-e-Naw district, an area with many Western guesthouses. Also reportedly attacked were the Afghan parliament building, the interior ministry and a local television station, which filmed the destruction of its own studios.
Rioters, some carrying swords, roamed the streets, and there were reports of at least one Western aid worker pulled from his car and beaten. Cars were also burnt. The UN and foreign aid agencies placed an immediate ban on all movement within the city.
"There are some signs that things are calming," a UN spokesman, Adrian Edwards, said. "We remain very vigilant and on security alert. We are trying to ascertain whether it will be possible to get our staff home tonight; guesthouses have been attacked." UN staff were transported in armed convoys to designated safe houses overnight.
The last riots in Kabul were in February after publication of cartoons in Western newspapers depicting the Prophet Mohamed. Last year, there were disturbances over allegations that US guards desecrated the Koran in Guantanamo Bay. Both times, rioting spread to other parts of the country and continued for several days.
The underlying causes of yesterday's violence appear to be linked to growing anger and disillusionment with the Western-funded reconstruction effort.
"This pressure has been building for two or three years," said Dr Hamidullah Tarzi, a former finance minister and political analyst. "From the radio, people have heard that billions of dollars are flowing into the country but they have got nothing. The cost of living has gone up, prices have risen and people are getting desperate. This is a warning to the government of the future; more serious repercussions. They must heed this warning."
Afghan politicians and the local press have blamed "overpaid" and "wasteful" NGOs, and the UN for the failure to make significant improvements to living conditions since 2001.
Many aid workers and diplomats say Afghanistan was almost totally ruined by the time the Taliban fell and much of the $12bn (£6.5bn) spent since then has gone on rebuilding the most basic infrastructure, a process impeded by endemic corruption, a Taliban insurgency in the south and a narcotics industry worth more than 50 per cent of the entire Afghan economy.
In the southern province of Helmand, Afghan officials reported a US airstrike on a mosque in Kajaki which killed 50 Taliban fighters, allegedly including several Taliban leaders. The area lies north of Camp Bastion, the new British camp in Helmand, which will eventually house more than 3,000 British troops.
The US military said one person was killed and six injured and the vehicle had a "mechanical failure". The Afghan presidential palace said the vehicle had killed five Afghans. In the rioting, at least 14 died and 142 were injured.
The government imposed a curfew in Kabul. Yousuf Stanezai, an interior ministry spokesman, said all residents were to stay off the streets between 10pm and 4am. Anyone found outside would suffer "serious measures".
Akhmed Muneer, 27, a restaurant owner who saw the aftermath of the road accident, said US personnel opened fire, killing three people and wounding one, after incensed people turned on them at the scene. Afghan police lost control as unrest intensified and they opened fire, killing or wounding 20, Mr Muneer believed.
Rioting spread to many parts of the city, focused against foreign interests, with gunfire audible through the day. The offices of the charity Care International were burnt, and another mob looted furniture and attempted to burn the new Serena Hotel near the Kabul river, the city's first five-star venue.
Two bodies lay on the street outside the Serena, another two could be seen outside the women's affairs ministry and one outside the Kabul Business Centre in the Shar-e-Naw district, an area with many Western guesthouses. Also reportedly attacked were the Afghan parliament building, the interior ministry and a local television station, which filmed the destruction of its own studios.
Rioters, some carrying swords, roamed the streets, and there were reports of at least one Western aid worker pulled from his car and beaten. Cars were also burnt. The UN and foreign aid agencies placed an immediate ban on all movement within the city.
"There are some signs that things are calming," a UN spokesman, Adrian Edwards, said. "We remain very vigilant and on security alert. We are trying to ascertain whether it will be possible to get our staff home tonight; guesthouses have been attacked." UN staff were transported in armed convoys to designated safe houses overnight.
The last riots in Kabul were in February after publication of cartoons in Western newspapers depicting the Prophet Mohamed. Last year, there were disturbances over allegations that US guards desecrated the Koran in Guantanamo Bay. Both times, rioting spread to other parts of the country and continued for several days.
The underlying causes of yesterday's violence appear to be linked to growing anger and disillusionment with the Western-funded reconstruction effort.
"This pressure has been building for two or three years," said Dr Hamidullah Tarzi, a former finance minister and political analyst. "From the radio, people have heard that billions of dollars are flowing into the country but they have got nothing. The cost of living has gone up, prices have risen and people are getting desperate. This is a warning to the government of the future; more serious repercussions. They must heed this warning."
Afghan politicians and the local press have blamed "overpaid" and "wasteful" NGOs, and the UN for the failure to make significant improvements to living conditions since 2001.
Many aid workers and diplomats say Afghanistan was almost totally ruined by the time the Taliban fell and much of the $12bn (£6.5bn) spent since then has gone on rebuilding the most basic infrastructure, a process impeded by endemic corruption, a Taliban insurgency in the south and a narcotics industry worth more than 50 per cent of the entire Afghan economy.
In the southern province of Helmand, Afghan officials reported a US airstrike on a mosque in Kajaki which killed 50 Taliban fighters, allegedly including several Taliban leaders. The area lies north of Camp Bastion, the new British camp in Helmand, which will eventually house more than 3,000 British troops.
A War of Religions? God Forbid! by Uri Avnery
ONE OF our former Chiefs-of-Staff, the late Rafael ("Raful") Eytan, who was not the brightest, once asked a foreign guest: "Are you Jewish or Christian?"
"I am an atheist!" the man replied.
"Okay, Okay," Raful demanded impatiently, "but a Jewish atheist or a Christian atheist?"
Well, I myself am a 100% atheist. And I am increasingly worried that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, which dominates our entire life, is assuming a more and more religious character.
THE HISTORICAL CONFLICT began as a clash between two national movements, which used religious motifs only as a decoration.
The Zionist movement was non-religious from the start, if not anti-religious. Almost all the Founding Fathers were self-declared atheists.
In his book "Der Judenstaat", the original charter of Zionism, Theodor Herzl said that "we shall know how to keep (our clergymen) in their temples." Chaim Weitzman was an agnostic scientist. Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted his body to be cremated - a sin in Judaism. David Ben-Gurion refused to cover his head even at funerals.
All the great rabbis of the day, both Hassidim and their opponents, the Missnagdim, condemned Herzl and cursed him ferociously. They rejected the basic thesis of Zionism, that the Jews are a "nation" in the European sense, instead regarding the Jews as a holy people held together by observance of the divine commandments.
Moreover, in the eyes of the rabbis, the Zionist idea itself was a cardinal sin. The Almighty decreed the exile of the Jews as punishment for their sins. Therefore, only the Almighty Himself may revoke the punishment and send the Messiah, who will lead the Jews back to the holy land. Until then, it is strictly prohibited to "return en masse". By organizing mass immigration to the country, the Zionists rebel against God and, worst of all, hold up the coming of the Messiah. Some Hassidim, like the Satmar sect in America, and a small but principled group in Israel, the Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City) in Jerusalem, still adhere to this belief.
True, the Zionists expropriated the symbols of Judaism (the Star of David, the candlestick of the Temple, the prayer shawl that was turned into a flag, even the name "Zion") but that was only utilitarian manipulation. The small religious faction that joined Zionism (the "Religious Zionists") was a marginal group.
Before the Holocaust, we learned in the Zionist schools in Palestine to treat with pitiless scorn everything that was "exile Jewish" - the Jewish religion, the Jewish Stetl, the Jewish social structure (the "inverted pyramid"). Only the Holocaust changed the attitude towards the Jewish past in the diaspora, referred to in Hebrew as "Exile".)
Ben-Gurion made some concessions to the religious factions, including the anti-Zionist Orthodox. He released some hundreds of Yeshiva-students from military service and set up a separate "state-religious" school system. His aim was to acquire convenient coalition partners. But these steps were based on the assumption (common to all of us at the time) that the Jewish religion would evaporate anyhow under the burning Israeli sun and disappear altogether in one or two generations.
All this changed in the wake of the Six-day War. The Jewish religion staged an astounding comeback.
ON THE Palestinian side, something similar happened, but against a quite different background.
The Arab national movement, too, was born under the influence of the European national idea. Its spiritual fathers called for the liberation of the Arab nation from the shackles of Ottoman rule, and later from the yoke of European colonialism. Many of its founders were Arab Christians.
When a distinct Palestinian national movement came into being, following the Balfour Declaration and the setting up of the British Government of Palestine, it had no religious character. In order to fight it, the British appointed a religious personality to the leadership of the Palestinian community in Palestine: Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who quickly assumed the leadership of the Palestinian struggle against the Zionist immigration. He endeavored to give a religious face to the Palestinian-Arab rebellion. Accusing the Zionist of designs on the Temple Mount with its holy Islamic shrines, he tried to mobilize the Muslim peoples in support of the Palestinians.
The Mufti failed miserably, and his failure played a part in the catastrophe of his people. The Palestinians have all but obliterated him from their history. In the 1950s, they idolized Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, the standard-bearer of secular, pan-Arab nationalism. Later, when Yasser Arafat founded the modern Palestinian national movement, he did not distinguish between Muslims and Christians. Right up to his death, he insisted on calling for the liberation of the "mosques and churches" of Jerusalem.
At one stage of its development, the PLO called for the creation of a "Democratic secular state, where Muslims, Jews and Christians will live together". (Arafat did not like the term "secular", preferring "la-maliah", meaning "non-sectarian".)
George Habash, the leader of the "Arab Nationalists" and later of the "Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine", is a Christian.
This situation changed with the outbreak of the first intifada, at the end of 1987. Only then did the Islamist movements, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, start to take over the national struggle.
THE ASTOUNDING victory of the Israeli army in the Six-day war, which looked like a miracle, effected a profound political and cultural change in Israel.
When the shofar sounded at the Western Wall, the religious youth, which had until then been vegetating on the fringe, occupied the center of the stage.
Suddenly it was discovered that the religious education system, which had been set up by Ben-Gurion as a political bribe and contrary to his own convictions, had been quietly turning out a fanatical religious product. The religious youth movement, which had suffered all these years from feelings of humiliation and inferiority, was filled with zeal and started the settlement drive, leading the main national effort: the annexation of the occupied territories.
The Jewish religion itself underwent a mutation. This mutant shed all universal values and became a narrow, militant, xenophobic tribal creed, aiming at conquest and ethnic cleansing. The religious-Zionists of the new sort are convinced that they are fulfilling the will of God and preparing the ground for the coming of the Messiah. The "national-religious" cabinet ministers, that had always belonged to the moderate wing of the government, gave way to a new, extremist leadership with tendencies towards religious fascism.
Israel has not become a religious state. It still has a large secular majority. According to the authoritative Israeli Government Bureau of Statistics, only 8% of Israeli Jews define themselves as "Orthodox"
(Haredim), 9% as "religious" (meaning Religious Zionists), 45% as "secular, non-religious" and 27% as "secular, traditional".
However, because of their role in the settlement enterprise, the "religious"
have acquired a huge influence over the political process. They have practically prevented any move towards peace with the Palestinians. They have also provoked a religious reaction on the other side.
THE PALESTINIAN resistance to the occupation, which reached a peak with the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987, has given a big push to the religious forces. Until then, these had been growing quietly (not without the encouragement of the occupation authorities, which saw in them a counterweight to the secular PLO.)
The first intifada led to the Oslo agreement and brought Yasser Arafat back to Palestine. But the new Palestinian authority failed in its aim of putting an end to the occupation and establishing a secular Palestinian state. With settlements continually expanding all over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian public increasingly tended to support armed resistance. In this struggle, and with the limited means available, the religious factions excelled. A religious person is more ready to sacrifice his life in a suicide attack than his secular cousin.
The anger of the Palestinian public over the corruption that has infected sections of the secular Fatah leadership (but not the ascetic Yasser Arafat, whose reputation remained clean) has increased even more the popularity of the religious, whose honesty is unquestioned.
FOR YEARS I have been haunted by a nightmare: that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would change from a national to a religious confrontation.
A national conflict, terrible as it may be, is soluble. The last two centuries have seen many national wars, and almost all of them ended in a territorial compromise. Such conflicts are basically logical, and can be terminated in a rational way.
Not so religious conflicts. When all sides are bound by divine commandments, the attainment of a compromise becomes far more difficult.
Religious Jews believe that God promised them all of the holy land. Thus, giving away any of it to "foreigners" is an unforgivable sin. In the eyes of Muslim believers, the whole country is a Waqf (religious trust), and it is therefore absolutely forbidden to surrender any part of it to unbelievers.
(When the Caliph Omar conquered Palestine some 1400 years ago, he declared it a Waqf. His motive was quite practical: to prevent his generals from dividing the land between themselves, as was their wont.)
By the way, the evangelical fundamentalists who dominate Washington at this time also see the Holy Land as a religious property, to which the Jews must return in order to make possible the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Is a compromise between these forces possible? Certainly yes, but it is much more difficult. A devout Muslim is allowed to declare a Hudna (armistice) for a hundred years and more, without condemning his soul to hell. Ariel Sharon, who began the evacuation of settlers, spoke about "long-range temporary arrangements". In politics, "temporary" measures have a tendency to become permanent.
But wisdom, sophistication and a lot of patience are needed to reach a resolution of the conflict in these circumstances.
On the day Arafat died, many Israelis were angry with me for saying (in a Haaretz interview) that we shall yet long for this secular leader, who was both willing and able to make peace with us. I said that his elimination removes the last obstacle to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Palestine and the entire Arab world.
One did not need to be a prophet to see that.
"I am an atheist!" the man replied.
"Okay, Okay," Raful demanded impatiently, "but a Jewish atheist or a Christian atheist?"
Well, I myself am a 100% atheist. And I am increasingly worried that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, which dominates our entire life, is assuming a more and more religious character.
THE HISTORICAL CONFLICT began as a clash between two national movements, which used religious motifs only as a decoration.
The Zionist movement was non-religious from the start, if not anti-religious. Almost all the Founding Fathers were self-declared atheists.
In his book "Der Judenstaat", the original charter of Zionism, Theodor Herzl said that "we shall know how to keep (our clergymen) in their temples." Chaim Weitzman was an agnostic scientist. Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted his body to be cremated - a sin in Judaism. David Ben-Gurion refused to cover his head even at funerals.
All the great rabbis of the day, both Hassidim and their opponents, the Missnagdim, condemned Herzl and cursed him ferociously. They rejected the basic thesis of Zionism, that the Jews are a "nation" in the European sense, instead regarding the Jews as a holy people held together by observance of the divine commandments.
Moreover, in the eyes of the rabbis, the Zionist idea itself was a cardinal sin. The Almighty decreed the exile of the Jews as punishment for their sins. Therefore, only the Almighty Himself may revoke the punishment and send the Messiah, who will lead the Jews back to the holy land. Until then, it is strictly prohibited to "return en masse". By organizing mass immigration to the country, the Zionists rebel against God and, worst of all, hold up the coming of the Messiah. Some Hassidim, like the Satmar sect in America, and a small but principled group in Israel, the Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City) in Jerusalem, still adhere to this belief.
True, the Zionists expropriated the symbols of Judaism (the Star of David, the candlestick of the Temple, the prayer shawl that was turned into a flag, even the name "Zion") but that was only utilitarian manipulation. The small religious faction that joined Zionism (the "Religious Zionists") was a marginal group.
Before the Holocaust, we learned in the Zionist schools in Palestine to treat with pitiless scorn everything that was "exile Jewish" - the Jewish religion, the Jewish Stetl, the Jewish social structure (the "inverted pyramid"). Only the Holocaust changed the attitude towards the Jewish past in the diaspora, referred to in Hebrew as "Exile".)
Ben-Gurion made some concessions to the religious factions, including the anti-Zionist Orthodox. He released some hundreds of Yeshiva-students from military service and set up a separate "state-religious" school system. His aim was to acquire convenient coalition partners. But these steps were based on the assumption (common to all of us at the time) that the Jewish religion would evaporate anyhow under the burning Israeli sun and disappear altogether in one or two generations.
All this changed in the wake of the Six-day War. The Jewish religion staged an astounding comeback.
ON THE Palestinian side, something similar happened, but against a quite different background.
The Arab national movement, too, was born under the influence of the European national idea. Its spiritual fathers called for the liberation of the Arab nation from the shackles of Ottoman rule, and later from the yoke of European colonialism. Many of its founders were Arab Christians.
When a distinct Palestinian national movement came into being, following the Balfour Declaration and the setting up of the British Government of Palestine, it had no religious character. In order to fight it, the British appointed a religious personality to the leadership of the Palestinian community in Palestine: Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who quickly assumed the leadership of the Palestinian struggle against the Zionist immigration. He endeavored to give a religious face to the Palestinian-Arab rebellion. Accusing the Zionist of designs on the Temple Mount with its holy Islamic shrines, he tried to mobilize the Muslim peoples in support of the Palestinians.
The Mufti failed miserably, and his failure played a part in the catastrophe of his people. The Palestinians have all but obliterated him from their history. In the 1950s, they idolized Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, the standard-bearer of secular, pan-Arab nationalism. Later, when Yasser Arafat founded the modern Palestinian national movement, he did not distinguish between Muslims and Christians. Right up to his death, he insisted on calling for the liberation of the "mosques and churches" of Jerusalem.
At one stage of its development, the PLO called for the creation of a "Democratic secular state, where Muslims, Jews and Christians will live together". (Arafat did not like the term "secular", preferring "la-maliah", meaning "non-sectarian".)
George Habash, the leader of the "Arab Nationalists" and later of the "Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine", is a Christian.
This situation changed with the outbreak of the first intifada, at the end of 1987. Only then did the Islamist movements, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, start to take over the national struggle.
THE ASTOUNDING victory of the Israeli army in the Six-day war, which looked like a miracle, effected a profound political and cultural change in Israel.
When the shofar sounded at the Western Wall, the religious youth, which had until then been vegetating on the fringe, occupied the center of the stage.
Suddenly it was discovered that the religious education system, which had been set up by Ben-Gurion as a political bribe and contrary to his own convictions, had been quietly turning out a fanatical religious product. The religious youth movement, which had suffered all these years from feelings of humiliation and inferiority, was filled with zeal and started the settlement drive, leading the main national effort: the annexation of the occupied territories.
The Jewish religion itself underwent a mutation. This mutant shed all universal values and became a narrow, militant, xenophobic tribal creed, aiming at conquest and ethnic cleansing. The religious-Zionists of the new sort are convinced that they are fulfilling the will of God and preparing the ground for the coming of the Messiah. The "national-religious" cabinet ministers, that had always belonged to the moderate wing of the government, gave way to a new, extremist leadership with tendencies towards religious fascism.
Israel has not become a religious state. It still has a large secular majority. According to the authoritative Israeli Government Bureau of Statistics, only 8% of Israeli Jews define themselves as "Orthodox"
(Haredim), 9% as "religious" (meaning Religious Zionists), 45% as "secular, non-religious" and 27% as "secular, traditional".
However, because of their role in the settlement enterprise, the "religious"
have acquired a huge influence over the political process. They have practically prevented any move towards peace with the Palestinians. They have also provoked a religious reaction on the other side.
THE PALESTINIAN resistance to the occupation, which reached a peak with the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987, has given a big push to the religious forces. Until then, these had been growing quietly (not without the encouragement of the occupation authorities, which saw in them a counterweight to the secular PLO.)
The first intifada led to the Oslo agreement and brought Yasser Arafat back to Palestine. But the new Palestinian authority failed in its aim of putting an end to the occupation and establishing a secular Palestinian state. With settlements continually expanding all over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian public increasingly tended to support armed resistance. In this struggle, and with the limited means available, the religious factions excelled. A religious person is more ready to sacrifice his life in a suicide attack than his secular cousin.
The anger of the Palestinian public over the corruption that has infected sections of the secular Fatah leadership (but not the ascetic Yasser Arafat, whose reputation remained clean) has increased even more the popularity of the religious, whose honesty is unquestioned.
FOR YEARS I have been haunted by a nightmare: that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would change from a national to a religious confrontation.
A national conflict, terrible as it may be, is soluble. The last two centuries have seen many national wars, and almost all of them ended in a territorial compromise. Such conflicts are basically logical, and can be terminated in a rational way.
Not so religious conflicts. When all sides are bound by divine commandments, the attainment of a compromise becomes far more difficult.
Religious Jews believe that God promised them all of the holy land. Thus, giving away any of it to "foreigners" is an unforgivable sin. In the eyes of Muslim believers, the whole country is a Waqf (religious trust), and it is therefore absolutely forbidden to surrender any part of it to unbelievers.
(When the Caliph Omar conquered Palestine some 1400 years ago, he declared it a Waqf. His motive was quite practical: to prevent his generals from dividing the land between themselves, as was their wont.)
By the way, the evangelical fundamentalists who dominate Washington at this time also see the Holy Land as a religious property, to which the Jews must return in order to make possible the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Is a compromise between these forces possible? Certainly yes, but it is much more difficult. A devout Muslim is allowed to declare a Hudna (armistice) for a hundred years and more, without condemning his soul to hell. Ariel Sharon, who began the evacuation of settlers, spoke about "long-range temporary arrangements". In politics, "temporary" measures have a tendency to become permanent.
But wisdom, sophistication and a lot of patience are needed to reach a resolution of the conflict in these circumstances.
On the day Arafat died, many Israelis were angry with me for saying (in a Haaretz interview) that we shall yet long for this secular leader, who was both willing and able to make peace with us. I said that his elimination removes the last obstacle to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Palestine and the entire Arab world.
One did not need to be a prophet to see that.
Shin Bet and the Israeli Academy - Partners in Human Rights Abuses? By JONATHAN COOK
There were some remarkable admissions in a piece by the distinguished Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling in the immediate wake of the British teaching union NATFHE's vote yesterday to offer members moral backing if they boycott Israeli universities. British academics opposed to Israeli colleagues' complicity in the lengthy and continuing occupation of the Palestinians are now advised to boycott them and their institutions.
Today, and quite incidentally, Kimmerling wrote in the daily Ha'aretz newspaper of a decision taken by his own institution, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to offer a special fast-track degree programme to members of the General Security Service, or the Shin Bet, which has used its fearsome intelligence gathering abilties to maintain the occupation of the Palestinians for nearly four decades.
The Shin Bet is possibly best known for its interrogation methods when extracting confessions from detainees. Although torture was banned by the country's Supreme Court in 1999, the Shin Bet has continued with its notorious practices during the second intifada, according to the Israeli human rights group the Public Committee against Torture.
According to Kimmerling, Shin Bet staff will not only be encouraged to further their education with government grants (maybe no bad thing), but the Shin Bet itself will be able to devise the study course. As Kimmerling notes, the most likely result will be a "professional studies" programme relating to the Shin Bet's work.
Kimmerling rightly observes that such a programme clashes with the very values of free speech and free thought supposedly embodied by his university: "Although both institutions [the Shin Bet and Hebrew University] conduct 'research', the objects of the research and the methodologies are day and night."
Such arrangements are nothing new in Israeli academia, Kimmerling points out. There are strong ties between the universities and the defence industry because "some university staff join academia after [military] service and careers in the defense establishment, and not all of them manage to 'go civilian'."
In fact, Kimmerling understates the problem. Anyone who has spent time in an Israeli university will know that its academic staff and the country's huge defence industry are intimately entwined. The geography department of Haifa University, for example, was until very recently headed by Prof Arnon Sofer, who is best known in Israel for advocating ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, both occupied Palestinian non-citizens from the West Bank and the minority of Palestinian citizens from Israel.
Sofer, who has also taught at the National Defence College and the Police Training College for many decades, once boasted to me that he had imparted his values to almost every senior security official in Israel. Stickers on the doors of nearly every lecturer in his department declare membership of the National Security Studies Center, Sofer's own government-funded "research" body that disseminates his obscene ideas.
Kimmerling offers his own high-profile example of this "partnership". Menachem Milson, the dean of the humanities faculty at Hebrew University, was in the 1970s and 1980s head of the military government -- misleadingly known as the civil adminstration -- in the West Bank. In that post he developed the notorious "Village Leagues", local Palestinian militias financed by Israel whose role was to weaken Palestinian support for Fatah and thus prolong the occupation while Israel concentrated on its illegal colonisation of the territory.
Kimmerling himself has written at length about the terrible nature of Israel's occupation: that it has been designed to destroy any hope of Palestinian sovereignty even in the small ghettoes left to the Palestinians of their original homeland by extending Jewish domination. He even coined a term for this slow and relentless erosion of the Palestinian people's rights: politicide.
So, given his own evidence, what are Kimmerling's conclusions about the legitimacy of the British union's boycott? That it is, he warns, "no small hypocrisy". This judgment echoes his denunciation last year of the short-lived decision by another British union, the Association of University Teachers (AUT), to recommend a boycott of several Israeli universities. After vigorous campaigning by pro-Israel supporters, the vote was rapidly overturned.
What are Kimmerling's reasons for objecting to such boycotts? Because "no one dared propose a boycott of American or British academic institutions after the invasion of Iraq, or Chinese academe for human rights violations."
Are these comparisons, dutifully trotted out by apologists for Israeli occupation of much less intellectual stature than Kimmerling, reasonable? Let's examine them.
The Chinese abuse of its own population's rights and the violation of the Tibetan people's rights through its lengthy occupation of their homeland deserve continuous and vocal denunciation. But does it follow that a boycott of Chinese universities would have the same meaning and effectiveness as one of Israeli universities?
China has long been treated by the West as a pariah nation, even if it often covertly trades with Western governments. No one in the West describes China as a democracy or believes that the Chinese authorities have allowed any room for civil society to emerge. In fact, we know that Chinese dissidents, including academics, have received terrible punishments, such as being imprisoned, tortured and killed.
So how exactly does Kimmerling imagine that a boycott of Chinese universities will encourage dissident views, and how will this help progressive politics in the country? If the Chinese government offers no space for critical voices, how can actions by British academics make a difference?
What is needed in the case of China is concerted sanctions by Western governments against the Chinese authorities. The fact that this has not been forthcoming is not the responsbility of European or American academia.
Also, unlike China, the tiny country of Israel receives huge sums of aid from the United States -- this week it was announced that the House of Representatives has approved $2.5 billion for next year -- and special trading status with the European Union that greatly benefits the Israeli economy. Most of the US money does not have to be accounted for, thereby subsidising the occupation industry of which the universities are a part and the harmful government-sponsored initiatives of professors such as Arnon Sofer.
So while on the one hand China is officially condemned as an authoritarian and anti-democratic state for its abuse of human rights, Israel is showered with financial rewards for its occupation. It therefore falls on British and American academics to distance themselves from their government's support for Israel through the limited means available to them.
What about American and British universities? Following NATFHE's logic, should British academics be boycotted for the invasion and occupation of Iraq?
Ignoring the obvious point that British academics are hardly in a position to boycott themselves, let's examine Kimmerling's argument. He is suggesting that there is a double standard at work: British academics are seeking to punish Israeli academics for the occupation while no one is punishing British academics over the occupation of Iraq. But this analogy is patently false.
First, the reason the British union wants Israeli academics punished is for their collective silence and collaboration with the occupation. One of Israel's main universities, Bar Ilan, has a campus in the West Bank settlement of Ariel, which the government intends to annex behind the wall it is building. As Ariel is about 14km from the Green Line, the pre-1967 border, such a move will end any hope of a viable Palestinian state.
With a few honorable exceptions -- Ilan Pappe, Tanya Reinhart and Kimmerling himself -- almost no one in Israeli academia is speaking out against the occupation or about their own universities' implicit or overt support of it. Kimmerling's article about the Shin Bet studies programme is a very rare example of such public dissent.
That is hardly true in Britain, where academics have been at the forefront of the huge opposition in the UK to the invasion of Iraq and to the country's subsequent occupation. Campuses are alive with protest and debate about the legitimacy of Britain's role in Iraq. The fact that it is not represented in the British media is a failure by the country's media, not the academics.
The same is most definitely not true in Israeli universities, where protests by Jewish staff and students all but never occur. Arab students who have tried to protest against the occupation of the Palestinian territories at Haifa University, where most of them are based, must seek a permit from the university authorities which they are almost always denied. Demonstrations are usually filmed by university officials. Students are then arrested later by the police, and others punished by university special disciplinary committees. Arab students facing these sanctions have rarely received any support from Jewish students or academics.
(It should also be noted that Palestinians are denied all acess to Israeli universities to study, while their own educational opportunities are severely damaged by the checkpoints, curfews and invasions associated with the occupation. Arab students belong to the country's minority of Palestinian citizens, one in five of the population, who are grossly under-represented on campuses and systematically stripped of their voice. Arab lecturers account for less than 1 per cent of academic staff.)
The second point is that whereas the American and British occupation of Iraq is in its infancy, the Israeli one is reaching what should be its mid-life crisis. At what point does inaction, turning a blind eye, become culpable? Surely four decades of ignoring the Israeli occupation stretches our denials of moral responsibility beyond credibility.
Were the occupation of Iraq still to be in its stride by the year 2040, and British universities keeping quiet, I would very much hope academics around the world would be taking action against their British and American colleagues too.
Which leads us to the third difference. Whereas the success or failure of American goals in Iraq is still open to question, Israel's plans to steal Palestinian land have been consistently successful and are only gathering pace. In fact, as British union delegates appear to understand, hopes of salvaging any viable state for the Palestinians have almost run out of steam. The Israeli government is now planning the final stages of its annexation of Palestinian land -- misleadingly called "convergence" -- and with it the destruction of any chances of meaningful Palestinian statehood.
Kimmerling, however, does have one valid point. In truth, it will be hard to boycott American academics and universities even if they prove themselves in the long run to be as spineless as Israeli ones. This is because the Western academic system is sustained by American academia; without it, the system would probably collapse.
The fact that it will be difficult to penalise American academics may be unfair, but it is hardly justifiable grounds for British academics to shun their moral responsibilities to bring whatever pressure they can to bear on Israel to end its gratuitious occupation. Such boycott campaigns can be effective -- as should be obvious from the high-level efforts made by the Israeli government last year to help overturn the boycott vote by the AUT.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
Today, and quite incidentally, Kimmerling wrote in the daily Ha'aretz newspaper of a decision taken by his own institution, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to offer a special fast-track degree programme to members of the General Security Service, or the Shin Bet, which has used its fearsome intelligence gathering abilties to maintain the occupation of the Palestinians for nearly four decades.
The Shin Bet is possibly best known for its interrogation methods when extracting confessions from detainees. Although torture was banned by the country's Supreme Court in 1999, the Shin Bet has continued with its notorious practices during the second intifada, according to the Israeli human rights group the Public Committee against Torture.
According to Kimmerling, Shin Bet staff will not only be encouraged to further their education with government grants (maybe no bad thing), but the Shin Bet itself will be able to devise the study course. As Kimmerling notes, the most likely result will be a "professional studies" programme relating to the Shin Bet's work.
Kimmerling rightly observes that such a programme clashes with the very values of free speech and free thought supposedly embodied by his university: "Although both institutions [the Shin Bet and Hebrew University] conduct 'research', the objects of the research and the methodologies are day and night."
Such arrangements are nothing new in Israeli academia, Kimmerling points out. There are strong ties between the universities and the defence industry because "some university staff join academia after [military] service and careers in the defense establishment, and not all of them manage to 'go civilian'."
In fact, Kimmerling understates the problem. Anyone who has spent time in an Israeli university will know that its academic staff and the country's huge defence industry are intimately entwined. The geography department of Haifa University, for example, was until very recently headed by Prof Arnon Sofer, who is best known in Israel for advocating ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, both occupied Palestinian non-citizens from the West Bank and the minority of Palestinian citizens from Israel.
Sofer, who has also taught at the National Defence College and the Police Training College for many decades, once boasted to me that he had imparted his values to almost every senior security official in Israel. Stickers on the doors of nearly every lecturer in his department declare membership of the National Security Studies Center, Sofer's own government-funded "research" body that disseminates his obscene ideas.
Kimmerling offers his own high-profile example of this "partnership". Menachem Milson, the dean of the humanities faculty at Hebrew University, was in the 1970s and 1980s head of the military government -- misleadingly known as the civil adminstration -- in the West Bank. In that post he developed the notorious "Village Leagues", local Palestinian militias financed by Israel whose role was to weaken Palestinian support for Fatah and thus prolong the occupation while Israel concentrated on its illegal colonisation of the territory.
Kimmerling himself has written at length about the terrible nature of Israel's occupation: that it has been designed to destroy any hope of Palestinian sovereignty even in the small ghettoes left to the Palestinians of their original homeland by extending Jewish domination. He even coined a term for this slow and relentless erosion of the Palestinian people's rights: politicide.
So, given his own evidence, what are Kimmerling's conclusions about the legitimacy of the British union's boycott? That it is, he warns, "no small hypocrisy". This judgment echoes his denunciation last year of the short-lived decision by another British union, the Association of University Teachers (AUT), to recommend a boycott of several Israeli universities. After vigorous campaigning by pro-Israel supporters, the vote was rapidly overturned.
What are Kimmerling's reasons for objecting to such boycotts? Because "no one dared propose a boycott of American or British academic institutions after the invasion of Iraq, or Chinese academe for human rights violations."
Are these comparisons, dutifully trotted out by apologists for Israeli occupation of much less intellectual stature than Kimmerling, reasonable? Let's examine them.
The Chinese abuse of its own population's rights and the violation of the Tibetan people's rights through its lengthy occupation of their homeland deserve continuous and vocal denunciation. But does it follow that a boycott of Chinese universities would have the same meaning and effectiveness as one of Israeli universities?
China has long been treated by the West as a pariah nation, even if it often covertly trades with Western governments. No one in the West describes China as a democracy or believes that the Chinese authorities have allowed any room for civil society to emerge. In fact, we know that Chinese dissidents, including academics, have received terrible punishments, such as being imprisoned, tortured and killed.
So how exactly does Kimmerling imagine that a boycott of Chinese universities will encourage dissident views, and how will this help progressive politics in the country? If the Chinese government offers no space for critical voices, how can actions by British academics make a difference?
What is needed in the case of China is concerted sanctions by Western governments against the Chinese authorities. The fact that this has not been forthcoming is not the responsbility of European or American academia.
Also, unlike China, the tiny country of Israel receives huge sums of aid from the United States -- this week it was announced that the House of Representatives has approved $2.5 billion for next year -- and special trading status with the European Union that greatly benefits the Israeli economy. Most of the US money does not have to be accounted for, thereby subsidising the occupation industry of which the universities are a part and the harmful government-sponsored initiatives of professors such as Arnon Sofer.
So while on the one hand China is officially condemned as an authoritarian and anti-democratic state for its abuse of human rights, Israel is showered with financial rewards for its occupation. It therefore falls on British and American academics to distance themselves from their government's support for Israel through the limited means available to them.
What about American and British universities? Following NATFHE's logic, should British academics be boycotted for the invasion and occupation of Iraq?
Ignoring the obvious point that British academics are hardly in a position to boycott themselves, let's examine Kimmerling's argument. He is suggesting that there is a double standard at work: British academics are seeking to punish Israeli academics for the occupation while no one is punishing British academics over the occupation of Iraq. But this analogy is patently false.
First, the reason the British union wants Israeli academics punished is for their collective silence and collaboration with the occupation. One of Israel's main universities, Bar Ilan, has a campus in the West Bank settlement of Ariel, which the government intends to annex behind the wall it is building. As Ariel is about 14km from the Green Line, the pre-1967 border, such a move will end any hope of a viable Palestinian state.
With a few honorable exceptions -- Ilan Pappe, Tanya Reinhart and Kimmerling himself -- almost no one in Israeli academia is speaking out against the occupation or about their own universities' implicit or overt support of it. Kimmerling's article about the Shin Bet studies programme is a very rare example of such public dissent.
That is hardly true in Britain, where academics have been at the forefront of the huge opposition in the UK to the invasion of Iraq and to the country's subsequent occupation. Campuses are alive with protest and debate about the legitimacy of Britain's role in Iraq. The fact that it is not represented in the British media is a failure by the country's media, not the academics.
The same is most definitely not true in Israeli universities, where protests by Jewish staff and students all but never occur. Arab students who have tried to protest against the occupation of the Palestinian territories at Haifa University, where most of them are based, must seek a permit from the university authorities which they are almost always denied. Demonstrations are usually filmed by university officials. Students are then arrested later by the police, and others punished by university special disciplinary committees. Arab students facing these sanctions have rarely received any support from Jewish students or academics.
(It should also be noted that Palestinians are denied all acess to Israeli universities to study, while their own educational opportunities are severely damaged by the checkpoints, curfews and invasions associated with the occupation. Arab students belong to the country's minority of Palestinian citizens, one in five of the population, who are grossly under-represented on campuses and systematically stripped of their voice. Arab lecturers account for less than 1 per cent of academic staff.)
The second point is that whereas the American and British occupation of Iraq is in its infancy, the Israeli one is reaching what should be its mid-life crisis. At what point does inaction, turning a blind eye, become culpable? Surely four decades of ignoring the Israeli occupation stretches our denials of moral responsibility beyond credibility.
Were the occupation of Iraq still to be in its stride by the year 2040, and British universities keeping quiet, I would very much hope academics around the world would be taking action against their British and American colleagues too.
Which leads us to the third difference. Whereas the success or failure of American goals in Iraq is still open to question, Israel's plans to steal Palestinian land have been consistently successful and are only gathering pace. In fact, as British union delegates appear to understand, hopes of salvaging any viable state for the Palestinians have almost run out of steam. The Israeli government is now planning the final stages of its annexation of Palestinian land -- misleadingly called "convergence" -- and with it the destruction of any chances of meaningful Palestinian statehood.
Kimmerling, however, does have one valid point. In truth, it will be hard to boycott American academics and universities even if they prove themselves in the long run to be as spineless as Israeli ones. This is because the Western academic system is sustained by American academia; without it, the system would probably collapse.
The fact that it will be difficult to penalise American academics may be unfair, but it is hardly justifiable grounds for British academics to shun their moral responsibilities to bring whatever pressure they can to bear on Israel to end its gratuitious occupation. Such boycott campaigns can be effective -- as should be obvious from the high-level efforts made by the Israeli government last year to help overturn the boycott vote by the AUT.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
How Hugo Chavez Treats His People Compared to George Bush - Pick the Leader You'd Want
How Hugo Chavez Treats His People Compared to George Bush - Pick the Leader You'd Want
Compare how things are in the US now to the way they are today under Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. The stark difference between them almost seems like they're happening on two different planets. My country is the hostile planet earth of George Bush that's indifferent to essential human needs and believes imperial oppression is good for us. Venezuela is quite different because of Hugo Chavez's alternate vision. It's a people-friendly one dedicated to helping all Venezuelans (especially the most needy) by providing an array of essential social programs and services unimaginable in the US: free universal health and dental care for all, free education to the highest levels, food security and clean water, micro credit and support for small business, land and home ownership for the people, worker cooperatives and independent community radio free from the poison spread by the corporate-owned media and much more. And along with all that, Chavez instituted a participatory democracy under which ordinary people have a real say in how the country is governed. Can anyone imagine those things happening in the US? Impossible.
There's more, lots of it but here's just a sample. Hugo Chavez aids his neighbors and doesn't threaten to invade them or any others; the country has no secret prisons; no illegal political prisoners or illegal detentions; doesn't practice torture; doesn't ethnically cleanse its population from neighborhoods wanted for redevelopment or entire cities like the US did to its black population of New Orleans to turn that city into a giant theme park for the rich and tourist trade; has never suspended constitutional law even in the face of a coup d'etat, mass street riots and a crippling US-instigated oil lockout and shutdown; and is working to clean up and change a legacy and systemic climate of corruption and inefficient state bureaucracy.
Now compare that record to how the US operates. It devotes its immense resources to plunder, slaughter and destruction and treats ordinary people like production inputs or commodities - to be used as needed and dumped when they no longer are. The Bush administration, in its infinite arrogance, claims the right to forcibly oust any government it views as a threat to its security. It doesn't matter if it is, just that we say it is. It sees Chavez as such a threat and has tried and failed three times to remove him with a fourth attempt likely well underway. I've said before Hugo Chavez is the greatest of all threats to US hegemony everywhere - the threat of a good example that left in place may grow and spread to other countries in the region and beyond.
The Bush administration won't tolerate that and is either fomenting another coup to oust Chavez, likely with intent to kill him so he won't rise again from the deposed, or will go to war if that's what it takes to get the job done. Should it happen, as I'm convinced it will, it will be no different from how the US has treated its Latin American neighbors for over 150 years. Over that time, the US invaded Mexico and stole the half of the country it wanted. That began what became a tradition as from then until now it continued to remove the governments of a dozen Latin American countries it disapproved of (none of which posed a threat except to our hegemony) by coup or armed incursion and did it four dozen different times for whatever convenient reasons it concocted to justify its action. We even gave names to our hostile actions using benign language Orwell would have approved of. My favorite was Herbert Hoover's (and later Franklin Roosevelt's) Good Neighbor Policy. It was about as good as his economic policy at home that with lots of help from the Federal Reserve caused The Great Depression that ravaged the country for a decade and took the German and Japanese aggression and world war they started (with our nudging) to pull us out of it. War is good for business, and a big one is terrific.
Look at more examples of how different things are in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez wants no part of the destructive neoliberal policies imposed by the WTO, IMF and World Bank but preferred by Washington because they only favor us. Instead he's used the nation's resources for the public good and promoted the Bolivarian notion of Latin American integration through economic aid and joint ventures that benefit those countries participating in them equally. Some difference from the Washington Consensus that's a one-way street with a dead-end for developing countries sucked into it.
Now look at the differences between the two countries in some of their current economic data. In Venezuela, an economic boom lifting all boats is the result of Chavez's policies (helped by high oil prices, of course). The economy is soaring, inflation and unemployment are down, and Chavez has continued his policy since 2000 of raising the minimum wage each year by 20 - 30%. He just raised it again in the first quarter of 2006 by another 10%. Data from Venezuela's National Statistics Institute show the result. The poverty rate stood at 80% for many years before Chavez was elected. A year before he came into office in 1997 it was an official 61%. The latest figures available as of the end of 2005 show the rate now down to under 44%, a dramatic change in a short time.
It was all different before Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution that began in 1998. The country was a sham 40 year elite-controlled "democracy" (for the rich and powerful only) with 80% of the people in desperate poverty and 75% of the arable land owned by 5% of the population; its schools and hospitals were crumbling and two-thirds of the people had no access to basic medical care and most everything else; it was mostly an oil-based economy and political system controlled by and benefitting the rich and well-off middle class only and all under the giant shadow and dominance of the US that just cared about it's access to and control of the nation's oil and as much other wealth as it could suck out of the country. It took plenty. In all of Latin American from 1990 - 2002, US banks and transnational corporations earned about $1,000,000,000,000 ($1 trillion) in profits and were the main beneficiary of nearly $180 billion of state-owned enterprises privatized and thus expropriated from the people.
Now compare the Chavez achievements to the US under George Bush. We're by far the richest country in the world with nearly enough resources to be able to pave the streets with gold if they were used responsibly. The US's 2005 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was over 90 times greater than Venezuela's with a population about 12 times greater. Here's another comparison I cited in an earlier article on VHeadline.com. The largest US corporation in 2005, Exxon-Mobil, alone had gross sales about 2.8 times greater than Venezuela's total GDP.
So with all that wealth, what do the numbers show. Over 46 million Americans have no health insurance and millions more have too little; inner city schools are so deliberately degraded that millions of kids in them finish up unable to read, write or do math; the official US Department of Education illiteracy rate is about 20% compared to Venezuela where it's virtually zero; adjusted for inflation, the average working person in the US earns less than 30 years ago and the federal minimum wage (a paltry $5.15 an hour) hasn't been raised since 1997; the growing wealth gap between rich and poor has never been greater in modern times; the average CEO in 2004 earned 431 times the income of the average working person, a ten-fold increase in the spread since 1980; the official poverty rate is 12.7% or about 37 million people in 2005 and rising, but it's widely acknowledged the number is rigged and true figure is much higher; the prison population is the largest in the world and growing by 1000 new inmates a week; higher paid manufacturing and many high-tech jobs are being exported to low wage countries and replaced by low-paying service ones with few or no benefits; the ranks of organized labor have dropped from about one third of all workers in 1958 to under 13% today; and the level of racism is as great as before the landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s that was passed to end it.
Had enough, or can I throw in one more for good measure for those who follow the monthly reports from the US Labor Department. The official unemployment rate it reports is dead wrong according to some economists willing and honest enough to speak out about it. They claim (and I agree with them) the true current figure would be about 12% instead of the reported 4.7% if the rate today was calculated the same way it was during The Great Depression when it rose to a peak of 25% and the Roosevelt administration was alarmed enough to think its consequences might cause a Russian-style revolution. That's why we got all the great New Deal social programs from a government that cared enough or was scared enough to give them to us. Now George Bush wants to end them all including our landmark Social Security along with Medicare, Medicaid and about everything else to transfer more wealth to the rich and fund his war machine. Bush's policies are the opposite of Franklin Roosevelt's. He's the greatest wrecker of social programs since the late 19th century and age of the "robber barons" when the country had few social gains to reverse and didn't think about adding any.
And in case any VHeadline readers need reminding: under the Bush Big Oil administration, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the US is just under $3 as a result of blatant market manipulation mostly at the refinery level to deliberately keep it high. That's perfectly acceptable to the Bush administration run by former oil men and one woman who had an oil tanker named after her. Compare that to Venezuela where gasoline costs 12 cents a gallon. Anyone detect a strange odor? It's coming from the smell of corruption from the Capitol and White House. Anyone thinking it's about time we stopped putting up with this outrage and began acting to take our government back. It's up to us to do it because no one there will give it to us.
The Mouse on Steroids By William Fisher
We can't be blamed if Venezuela's mini-public diplomacy program reminds us of "The Mouse That Roared" - and we can almost hear the gnashing teeth in the White House SitRoom.
I refer to the program being waged in the US by Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. Under that program, Citgo, Venezuela's wholly-owned gas and oil subsidiary, provides discounts up to 60 per cent on heating oil to poor communities in the US.
Known as petro-diplomacy, the program is currently operating in Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Local politicians, desperate for ways to reduce energy costs for their constituents, have welcomed it with open arms. In New York, Harlem congressman Charles Rangel announced expansion of the program into upper Manhattan, and Citgo struck a deal with three nonprofit organizations in the Bronx to deliver five million gallons of heating oil at 45 percent below the market price. Citgo says the deal will amount to a savings of $4 million for the 8,000 low-income households slated to benefit from the plan.
Citgo says the program has benefited more than 180,000 households - and is now attracting some big-name supporters (though Condoleezza Rice is not one of them).
Citgo says it initiated the heating oil program late last year in an effort to help low-income families in the US to cope with the cold winter and high oil costs. The Venezuelan government says the program costs Citgo relatively little because the oil is being supplied directly, without middlemen, who usually make substantial profits.
But Venezuela's "oil for the poor" program has also met with opposition from some local politicians. Last October, Citgo proposed to substitute diesel fuel for home heating oil, which is used only by a small number of Chicagoans. It offered a 40 percent discount on 7.2 million gallons of diesel if it was used for Chicago's public buses. Though the deal could have saved the city approximately $15 million, the offer was rejected over the objections of other elected officials and labor groups.
Undeterred, Chavez is now proposing a second phase of the program. He told a delegation of beneficiaries of the program that in addition to the 40% discount, only 30% would go towards Citgo's expenses and the remaining 30% would be set aside for a special local development fund, to help unemployed in the communities to set up cooperatives. The products of such cooperatives could then be sold to Venezuela, Chavez suggested.
The idea was immediately embraced by former Massachusetts Representative Joe Kennedy, a member of the US delegation and a key figure in facilitating the heating oil program in Boston via his Citizens Energy Corporation.
"This concept allows families to work out of poverty; it helps them by giving them the tools such as money to build a roof over their head, instead of just a one-shot benefit," said Kennedy.
Chavez also announced that the program will be doubled next year from its current level of 40 million gallons. "No one should believe that this is just a momentary interest," Chavez told the group. "Leave at ease and tell your neighbors of the communities you represent that the program will continue; it has just begun," he said.
Chavez insisted that the program was not designed to buy support in the US, as many critics claimed, but is rather an example of corporate responsibility, because Citgo, which is now making large profits in the US, is now giving back to communities in which it does business. "Citgo has done good business in the US. We believe companies, along with making a profit. need to have social responsibilities for the people they sell to," said Chavez.
Chavez pointed out that in the 20 years Venezuela has owned Citgo, it never paid dividends to the Venezuelan state. Only in 2004 and 2005 has it begun to repatriate some of its profits to Venezuela, he said.
He also cited the program as "an example of his government's efforts to move towards socialism, in which countries relate to each other on the basis of cooperation, solidarity, and complementarity." Venezuela also provides discounted fuel to other countries in Latin America.
Meanwhile, despite a State Department spokesman's comment that the US has "no objections" to Citgo's offers, the Bush administration continues to ramp up its war of words - and equipment - on Chavez and his buddies, Iran, Cuba and Bolivia.
Chavez has certainly been pushing all the right buttons in the White House and the State Department. He proposed a new free trade pact between Venezuela, Cuba, and Bolivia, and pledged to help Bolivia's new President, Evo Morales, with $1.5 billion in energy investments. Bolivia has the second-largest natural gas reserves in South America after Venezuela. Venezuela's state-owned oil company, PDVSA, and Bolivia's state-owned YPFB are expected to produce natural gas in a joint venture. Chavez has also pledged to be a reliable oil-supplier to his mentor, Fidel Castro.
He recently said he does not believe that Iran 's nuclear program is a front for secret efforts to produce an atomic bomb. "I don't believe that the United States or anyone else has the right ... to prohibit that a country has nuclear energy," Chavez said at a news conference in London. He repeated a warning that any military strike against Iran would send the price of crude oil soaring above US $100 a barrel and trigger an enormous military escalation in the Middle East. He also called Bush a "terrorist."
This kind of rhetoric is unlikely to win Chavez many friends in the US - at least not in the White House or the State Department or the US Congress.
The Bush administration's retaliation has bordered on the petty. The US recently announced it would cease to sell American-made military hardware to Venezuela, citing what it claims is a lack of support by Chavez for counter-terrorism efforts, a State Department official said. Venezuela lost no time in countering that it would buy from the Russians and sell off its fleet of American-made fighter planes - which are little more than a pile of scrap metal, since the US has been withholding spare parts for the planes for some time.
And you really can't have an authentic international incident without someone in Congress calling for an investigation.
Enter Congressman Joe Barton, the powerful Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. This stalwart recipient of some $2 million in campaign contributions from the energy industry announced he would launch an investigation into possible antitrust violations by a major oil company.
No, not ExxonMobil or Chevron, but - wait for it - Citgo.
As reported in the New York Daily News, in a letter to the Houston-based Citgo, Barton demanded that company officials produce all records, minutes, logs, emails and even desk calendars related to Citgo's novel program of supplying discounted heating oil to low-income communities in the United States.
"The bellicose Venezuelan decided to meddle in American energy policy, and we think it might prove instructive to know how," Larry Neal, deputy staff director for Barton's committee, told the Daily News.
According to the newspaper, Barton's letter lists "a bunch of questions" he wants Citgo to answer, including "how and why were the particular beneficiaries of this program selected" and whether the program "runs afoul of any US laws, including but not limited to, antitrust laws."
But Congressman Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said he was flabbergasted by Barton's investigation. "The Republicans are on another planet when it comes to energy policy," Markey said.
Instead of doing something about skyrocketing oil prices, Markey said, the Republicans are probing "a charitable donation of heating oil to relieve the suffering of a few thousand American families."
US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman seemed to agree. He told CNN that the US government has no problems with Venezuela's "oil for the poor" offer. "We view it, as corporate philanthropy. We're all for that. Nobody in the Energy Department, or in the government for that matter, is going oppose that. If that's what Mr. Chavez and his colleagues who own CITGO choose to do, I'm certainly not going to criticize," Bodman said.
Sounds like Mr. Bodman left his talking points in his other suit.
Where all this is heading should be well known to US policymakers - we've been there before. It's not like Latin American populism is anything new. And we have all the tools and all the experience - if not the will - to be trying to bring the countries of Latin America together to address real and urgent needs. It's time for America - and Mr. Chavez - to abandon the current tit-for-tat diplomacy that can only further separate us from our troubled backyard.
Yet we seem to be hell bent on elevating populists to heroes by backing Big Oil and acting as though every rhetorically over-the-top utterance from folks like Chavez is another Cuban Missile Crisis.
It would be instructive if someone in the State Department remembered that the road we're traveling looks very much like the one that took us to our insane Cuba policy.
William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press in Florida. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.
I refer to the program being waged in the US by Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. Under that program, Citgo, Venezuela's wholly-owned gas and oil subsidiary, provides discounts up to 60 per cent on heating oil to poor communities in the US.
Known as petro-diplomacy, the program is currently operating in Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Local politicians, desperate for ways to reduce energy costs for their constituents, have welcomed it with open arms. In New York, Harlem congressman Charles Rangel announced expansion of the program into upper Manhattan, and Citgo struck a deal with three nonprofit organizations in the Bronx to deliver five million gallons of heating oil at 45 percent below the market price. Citgo says the deal will amount to a savings of $4 million for the 8,000 low-income households slated to benefit from the plan.
Citgo says the program has benefited more than 180,000 households - and is now attracting some big-name supporters (though Condoleezza Rice is not one of them).
Citgo says it initiated the heating oil program late last year in an effort to help low-income families in the US to cope with the cold winter and high oil costs. The Venezuelan government says the program costs Citgo relatively little because the oil is being supplied directly, without middlemen, who usually make substantial profits.
But Venezuela's "oil for the poor" program has also met with opposition from some local politicians. Last October, Citgo proposed to substitute diesel fuel for home heating oil, which is used only by a small number of Chicagoans. It offered a 40 percent discount on 7.2 million gallons of diesel if it was used for Chicago's public buses. Though the deal could have saved the city approximately $15 million, the offer was rejected over the objections of other elected officials and labor groups.
Undeterred, Chavez is now proposing a second phase of the program. He told a delegation of beneficiaries of the program that in addition to the 40% discount, only 30% would go towards Citgo's expenses and the remaining 30% would be set aside for a special local development fund, to help unemployed in the communities to set up cooperatives. The products of such cooperatives could then be sold to Venezuela, Chavez suggested.
The idea was immediately embraced by former Massachusetts Representative Joe Kennedy, a member of the US delegation and a key figure in facilitating the heating oil program in Boston via his Citizens Energy Corporation.
"This concept allows families to work out of poverty; it helps them by giving them the tools such as money to build a roof over their head, instead of just a one-shot benefit," said Kennedy.
Chavez also announced that the program will be doubled next year from its current level of 40 million gallons. "No one should believe that this is just a momentary interest," Chavez told the group. "Leave at ease and tell your neighbors of the communities you represent that the program will continue; it has just begun," he said.
Chavez insisted that the program was not designed to buy support in the US, as many critics claimed, but is rather an example of corporate responsibility, because Citgo, which is now making large profits in the US, is now giving back to communities in which it does business. "Citgo has done good business in the US. We believe companies, along with making a profit. need to have social responsibilities for the people they sell to," said Chavez.
Chavez pointed out that in the 20 years Venezuela has owned Citgo, it never paid dividends to the Venezuelan state. Only in 2004 and 2005 has it begun to repatriate some of its profits to Venezuela, he said.
He also cited the program as "an example of his government's efforts to move towards socialism, in which countries relate to each other on the basis of cooperation, solidarity, and complementarity." Venezuela also provides discounted fuel to other countries in Latin America.
Meanwhile, despite a State Department spokesman's comment that the US has "no objections" to Citgo's offers, the Bush administration continues to ramp up its war of words - and equipment - on Chavez and his buddies, Iran, Cuba and Bolivia.
Chavez has certainly been pushing all the right buttons in the White House and the State Department. He proposed a new free trade pact between Venezuela, Cuba, and Bolivia, and pledged to help Bolivia's new President, Evo Morales, with $1.5 billion in energy investments. Bolivia has the second-largest natural gas reserves in South America after Venezuela. Venezuela's state-owned oil company, PDVSA, and Bolivia's state-owned YPFB are expected to produce natural gas in a joint venture. Chavez has also pledged to be a reliable oil-supplier to his mentor, Fidel Castro.
He recently said he does not believe that Iran 's nuclear program is a front for secret efforts to produce an atomic bomb. "I don't believe that the United States or anyone else has the right ... to prohibit that a country has nuclear energy," Chavez said at a news conference in London. He repeated a warning that any military strike against Iran would send the price of crude oil soaring above US $100 a barrel and trigger an enormous military escalation in the Middle East. He also called Bush a "terrorist."
This kind of rhetoric is unlikely to win Chavez many friends in the US - at least not in the White House or the State Department or the US Congress.
The Bush administration's retaliation has bordered on the petty. The US recently announced it would cease to sell American-made military hardware to Venezuela, citing what it claims is a lack of support by Chavez for counter-terrorism efforts, a State Department official said. Venezuela lost no time in countering that it would buy from the Russians and sell off its fleet of American-made fighter planes - which are little more than a pile of scrap metal, since the US has been withholding spare parts for the planes for some time.
And you really can't have an authentic international incident without someone in Congress calling for an investigation.
Enter Congressman Joe Barton, the powerful Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. This stalwart recipient of some $2 million in campaign contributions from the energy industry announced he would launch an investigation into possible antitrust violations by a major oil company.
No, not ExxonMobil or Chevron, but - wait for it - Citgo.
As reported in the New York Daily News, in a letter to the Houston-based Citgo, Barton demanded that company officials produce all records, minutes, logs, emails and even desk calendars related to Citgo's novel program of supplying discounted heating oil to low-income communities in the United States.
"The bellicose Venezuelan decided to meddle in American energy policy, and we think it might prove instructive to know how," Larry Neal, deputy staff director for Barton's committee, told the Daily News.
According to the newspaper, Barton's letter lists "a bunch of questions" he wants Citgo to answer, including "how and why were the particular beneficiaries of this program selected" and whether the program "runs afoul of any US laws, including but not limited to, antitrust laws."
But Congressman Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said he was flabbergasted by Barton's investigation. "The Republicans are on another planet when it comes to energy policy," Markey said.
Instead of doing something about skyrocketing oil prices, Markey said, the Republicans are probing "a charitable donation of heating oil to relieve the suffering of a few thousand American families."
US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman seemed to agree. He told CNN that the US government has no problems with Venezuela's "oil for the poor" offer. "We view it, as corporate philanthropy. We're all for that. Nobody in the Energy Department, or in the government for that matter, is going oppose that. If that's what Mr. Chavez and his colleagues who own CITGO choose to do, I'm certainly not going to criticize," Bodman said.
Sounds like Mr. Bodman left his talking points in his other suit.
Where all this is heading should be well known to US policymakers - we've been there before. It's not like Latin American populism is anything new. And we have all the tools and all the experience - if not the will - to be trying to bring the countries of Latin America together to address real and urgent needs. It's time for America - and Mr. Chavez - to abandon the current tit-for-tat diplomacy that can only further separate us from our troubled backyard.
Yet we seem to be hell bent on elevating populists to heroes by backing Big Oil and acting as though every rhetorically over-the-top utterance from folks like Chavez is another Cuban Missile Crisis.
It would be instructive if someone in the State Department remembered that the road we're traveling looks very much like the one that took us to our insane Cuba policy.
William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press in Florida. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.
Cochabamba’s Water War: The Start of Other Struggles by Claudia Lopez
Cochabamba’s Water War: The Start of Other Struggles
Written by Claudia Lopez, Translated by Nancy Wallace
Monday, 29 May 2006
En Español: Aqui
Written by Claudia Lopez, Translated by Nancy Wallace
Monday, 29 May 2006
En Español: Aqui
In 1985 the Bolivian state, headed by the MNR (Nationalist Revolutionary Movement) proudly pronounced the end of the economic crisis with the Supreme Decree 21060, putting the country on the same neoliberal path that had taken hold in the rest of the world.
More than 20 years later, the rate of poverty has increased, along with unemployment and other social ills, all of which in the long term created a new backdrop for struggle and the rebuilding of social movements. In general, it can be said that neoliberalism did not achieve any of its goals or promises of "development with equity". Rather, what it had achieved was to make work flexible, that is to say, to undo labor gains, break down workers’ unions, fragment the proletarian class and apply open contracting (under- employment). By not resolving the main problems of the country, the neoliberal politicians, guided by the transnational monopolies have faced great resistance on the part of popular organizations and the general population since 2000, the year of the water war, a popular turning point which marked the start of a great process of change and constituted the rise of social movements and a succession of repeated rebellions which continue to the present time.
The Water War of Cochabamba (April 2000)
The emergence of conflict.
For decades Cochabamba has had a growing problem relating to the shortage and poor management of water. The expansion of the population due to the migration of peasants and unemployed miners, among other things, has resulted in a huge increase in inhabitants and demand for water for domestic use. Add to this such environmental factors as seasonal droughts, and the result has been a situation of real water shortages. This brings into play a chain of conflicts, which reached a high point in September of 1999 when the Bolivian government, with the complicity of the municipality of Cochabamba, handed over the concession for water service and distribution to Aguas del Tunari, a subsidiary of the North American transnational Bechtel.
At the same time they passed law 2029, which turned water into merchandise, conflicting with the uses and customs of the irrigating peasantry. The immediate consequence of Bechtel’s installation in the city was rate increases as large as 200% in some cases.
In rural areas, the new business affected the irrigating peasantry whose traditional and self managed water systems and uses were at risk. By installing water meters to charge for water use, the transnational tried to take over the wells and irrigation systems that the agrarian communities had built with their own hands.
In a word: It was all about the privatization of water in the city and in the countryside. This situation crystallized towards the end of December, 1999, when almost spontaneously, a heterogeneous social tapestry made up of many social sectors (unionized workers, neighborhood groups, professional associations, transportation workers, teachers, irrigating peasants, coca leaf growers, students, etc.) rejected the plan.
This diverse gathering from different sectors found its voice and unity around a new organizing entity called the Coalition for Defense of Water and Life. The Coalition is a sort of citizens’ union which pulls together different sectors, both from the city and the countryside, but is radically different from the traditional unions because it bring together a large variety of sectors who gather without intermediaries in large assemblies to discuss, decide and carry out
The Coalition is a space where the relationships are between equals, a space for words and action. A space in which the people give a mandate to their spokespeople to be the eyes, the ears, the voice and the heart of their will. A space in which we started to take steps to recuperate a common good such as water, without expecting anything from the government or the owners of wealth. The backbone of the Coalition is made up of irrigating peasants and factory workers, who together with other sectors, began the mobilizations that opened the great popular revolt of April 2000, an insurrection that kicked Bechtel out of Bolivia.
It can be said with certainty that the Water War is one of the most important collective experiences of popular struggle in recent times, above all because it lead to the triumph of social movements after decades of defeats and numbness, and also because it became a reference point which opened a new epoch in Bolivia: a stage of victorious and repeated rebellions against neoliberalism.
Factory Workers
The inclusion of factory workers to the conflict was important to achieve its growth, since their inclusion established a connection between the irrigating peasantry and urban industrial workers. Organically, the workers’ movement as such is totally weakened, as in many other places in the world and Latin America . In Cochabamba, for example, the working sector is made up of 40 or 50 thousand workers, of which only 6 thousand are organized in unions. This does not mean that workers don’t exist but rather that they are trapped in new conditions of under-employment that make them almost invisible and as a direct consequence they have lost and/or have lost understanding of their labor rights. In addition the old organizational forms for workers such as the COB have fallen into a downward spiral of disrepute, low participation and verticalism. Faced with the crisis of representation of the COB, the factory workers of Cochabamba, through great effort, were able to achieve high levels of credibility with the population, due mainly to its informational work against worker flexibility, and their contribution to the formation of new unions. Another important aspect that turned the factory workers into important players in the Coalition was the fact that their building was in the center of the city, and people, during mobilizations, generally gathered there. From then on, the factory workers’ site became a sort of general quarters for the Coalition.
Another fact that stands out about the participation of the factory workers in the revolt was the daring action of 500 shoe factory workers from "Manaco", who, in support of 60 unfairly fired workers, moved into the center of the city to demand the incorporation of the urban population into the conflict: an army of bicycles covered the 15 km. between the factory and the city center, calling on the city residents to continue the struggle against the high cost of water and blocking the main urban roads. These workers, in their travels through the urban zones, showed that they were fighting against the privatization of water and also against the firings in the factory, inspiring many sectors of the population to join the mobilizations.
Lessons Learned
This whole process was marked by solidarity between all citizens and sectors that mutually supported one another to sustain the long and difficult struggle against the privatization of water.
The lessons from this experience are about new forms of organization and struggle, about more flexible coalitions of youth, women, children and old people, which spontaneously created other forms of democracy, of participation, of opinion and decision making, We can say with certainty that in this revolt the people exercised an authentic power, on the margins of the state, which by the way, simply dissolved, being replaced by a big de-centralized network of mutual aid which took charge of the management of community matters during the time of the uprising. Self-defense, safety, food distribution in the city, were all in the hands of the people who organized themselves without any help from the state or its representatives. As of this gigantic, daring and worthy effort by simple, hard working people, the country changed. The slum dwellers, the social sectors, the communities, the unions and associations proved that it was possible to loose our fear, to win, to re-gain our dignity, our common goods, and our natural resources, that there is no fatal destiny. In April 2000, the people of Cochabamba burst onto the political scene with a concrete demand: "The Water is Ours, and the Decisions Too!". As of those days in April, new social movements have emerged, in an autonomous way, without the intervention of any political party, with collective leadership and decision making practices carried out in assemblies. The political and economic model of neo-liberalism has been broken. The revolt of Cochabamba, which started 6 years ago, ended in January of this year when Bechtel formally abandoned its legal case which asked the Bolivian people to pay 50 million dollars in damages. Bechtel made the demand in a secret court of the World Bank. After a long campaign of protests, and local and international social pressure, Bechtel withdrew its demand and people won what marks an historic reference world wide.
The new scene following the elections
December 18, 2005, Evo Morales won the elections with 54% of the vote, the highest absolute and proportional vote received by any candidate since the democratic opening of 1982. This overwhelming victory opened a new, unforeseen and unscripted stage in Bolivia. On December 18, 2005, Bolivia certainly celebrated, after the long cycle of rebellions, uprisings, mobilizations and indigenous and popular insurgencies begun in 2000. The triumph of Evo Morales is cause for celebration, but it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the happiness that Bolivia is experiencing and that has surprised the world through the press is nothing less than the result of a tense struggle of resistance first, followed by the offensive of that gigantic conglomeration of men and women, young and old, who embodied the Water War of 2000. This process, begun in 2000 has put a human fence of struggle around the plunder of our common goods such as water, hydrocarbons, expelling transnationals, rejecting the overwhelming advance of transnational capital, and also rejecting the impositions of financial organizations such the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO. We have shut out and defeated the claims to perpetual power of those interests throughout these heroic past 6 years by means of: road blockages, closing off the city, uprisings and insurrections and marches, land occupations, closing the valves of the gas pipelines, occupation of oil wells. It has been 6 years filled with struggles, bravery, and indignation turned into public protest, of discussions and deliberations about the path to take. This is the reason for the electoral victory of December 18. The victory cannot be seen as a victory of individuals, of personalities. This victory is above all a message expressed in votes of the obligation of those who govern, whoever they are, to carry out the agenda established by the indigenous, the peasants and other sectors in 2000.
· The expropriation of our common patrimony, fundamentally the nationalization of our hydrocarbons.
· A Constituent Assembly of popular origin without party control.
· Agrarian Reform to eliminate the latifundios of landlords connected to the elites.
· Trials of the assassins of the people.
Bringing the situation up to date: Working and communitarian Bolivian society has spent a lot of energy over these past years and has achieved this transformation of the order of things. The social energy has been enough to expel the elites from the government using their own resources.. Elections. Nevertheless, the entire institutional platform and the legal framework inherited from colonialism is still standing, and the heterogeneous mix that is in the parliament now, with ponchos and suits and ties are living amidst foreign bureaucratic rules. What’s behind the scene is worrying. The right is dug in, resentful and active in starting to weave new threats. It is coming up with all kinds of blackmail and is betting on frightening the government into becoming an able administrator of its liberal economic and political heritage, or else it is preparing to sweep it out if it radicalizes, and prepare its objective in the next round of the Constituent Assembly.
There are those assert that the rise of Evo Morales is the culmination of the wave of struggles opened in 2000 and that now is the time to institutionalize the gains, and there are those of us who believe the process is not closed, that such social energy has managed to open many windows and doors in order to continue modifying relationships between people, so that thinking and decision making continue about common matters and the forms of emancipation needed in order the change the social world. As such, social organizations are at a crossroad.
Without a doubt the struggle for water, gas, electricity, basic services,. That is to say, survival, has created spaces for deliberation, for proposals, for organization between simple hardworking people from the countryside and the city. These spaces should be strengthened and the communitarian practices should be maintained, because the people of Bolivia are still facing the dictatorship of capital under difficult conditions, but with a great sense of dignity, are building collective, horizontal and transparent leaderships.
The process opened with the Water War of 2000 helped make people who once worked without knowing what became of their labor ask themselves where the product of their work ends up, and to reclaim the control of it for the benefit of all. People who before quietly withstood their sad destiny now have found their tongues and demand to be heard. People who before put up with discrimination against their last name, language, or the color of their skin, now show pride and reclaim a new way of life. Thousands and thousands of indigenous Aymaras and Quechuas, thousands and thousands of workers, of wage earners, of youth, of irrigators, of housewives, have decided to break the abusive monopoly of power, wealth and money concentrated in the hands of a caste of businessmen and racist politicians, and to reclaim our right to enjoy the wealth, our right to participate in public management, our right to deliberate over the administration of the common good. And our wish continues to be the rebuilding of public space through a new society. A new future is what working men and women from the city and countryside have begun to wish for, to dream of, and to build.
Finally: On a day like today, May Day, we struggle for the reaffirmation of the historic interests of the working class. That struggle lasted several decades. That history should not be forgotten, hidden or purged of social content. Only with the recuperation of our historic memory will we be able to take on new collective and communitarian processes.
Long live the fighters and martyrs of Chicago!
Long live the struggle of immigrant workers!
Long live solidarity between peoples!
Troy NY-Cochabamba May 1, 2006
This article is from Claudia Lopez’s talk at the "Lessons From Latin American Workers" Conference in Troy, NY on May 1, 2006
Claudia Lopez is an organizer of the Cochabamba chapter of the Federation of Factory Workers of Bolivia. She is active in the development of political education programs and strategies for Federation members and conducts research on labor issues.
Claudia and the Federation played a key role in the Coalition in Defense of Water and Life, the organization credited with uniting peasants, environmentalists, teachers, blue and white collar workers, housewives, students, elderly and a variety of social sectors in the fight against global giant Bechtel Corporation. This successful campaign, known as the Water War of 2000, reversed Bechtel’s privatization of water in Cochabamba, and created a community based operation of the water supply. The Federation continues to be a part of the Coalition for the Defense of Water and Life. Claudia is currently working to organize sexual workers, and is an activist in Indymedia.
Nancy Wallace, the translator of this piece, is an electrical work and union shop steward in Local, IBEW 97.
Venezuela's Cooperatives Take First Steps Towards National Cooperative Movement By: Michael Fox
The weekend of May 19 to 20, cooperative members from across Venezuela celebrated the first meeting of the National Executive Cooperative Council (CENCOOP). The Cooperative Councils have the difficult task of attempting to articulate and integrate Venezuela’s thousands of cooperatives into a united cooperative movement.
The weekend meeting was held in Caracas at the Catia offices of the Frente Francisco Miranda and was attended by approximately 140 cooperative representatives from across Venezuela; Cooperative Superintendent (SUNACOOP), Carlos Molina; Minister of Popular Economy, Oly Millan; Technical Secretary of the Specialized Reunion of Cooperatives of MERCOSUR, Daniel Bentancur; Executive Director of the Americas office of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), Manuel Mariño; various SUNACOOP state facilitators and employees of the Ministry of Popular Economy.
CENCOOP is composed of a council of 5 cooperative members from each of Venezuela's 25 states, elected from their State Cooperative Council to represent their region. Members of the State Cooperative Council are elected by the Municipal Councils, which are composed of any cooperative member from that municipality interested in participating. Over the past year, SUNACOOP facilitators have been working with cooperative members across the country to organize the cooperatives from each state and to elect their state councils in preparation for this event.
According to SUNACOOP, the Cooperative Councils have two "complementary goals":
"1) Ethical-Political goal of integrating and recuperating the direction of the cooperative community. 2) Political-Technical goal of planning future projects of the cooperative movement."
At the plenary talk on the Cooperative Councils, SUNACOOP Superintendent Carlos Molina explained, "The cooperative councils are a methodology for the construction of participatory democracy that is utilized by the people organized in cooperatives in order to achieve the autonomy and consolidate Venezuelan cooperativism as a social movement, capable of transforming the socio-economic reality."
"CENCOOP is the Executive Branch of the Cooperative Councils" he continued, "and this, of course, is subordinated to the Assembly in the same way that the State Cooperative Councils are subordinated to their State Assemblies. It is a relationship of an inverted pyramid. It is a process of networking and it has given a very particular characteristic to the integration of cooperativism in Venezuela."
The first National assembly of Cooperative Councils was held in the State of Cojedes in January, where more than 600 cooperative members from across the country met to discuss the first steps in the creation of the embryonic Venezuela cooperative movement.
Although SUNACOOP has, until now, been involved in the organization and promotion of the Cooperative Councils, Molina was explicit in explaining that each step of the way, they will be taking more of a hands-off approach, in order to give more autonomy to the cooperative movement.
"In this moment, the creation of CENCOOP is the transfer of the power to the people themselves" said Antonio Galiffa, representative from the state of Falcon, and member of a worker-cooperative, which is initiating the steps to manufacture corn-flour pasta which will be entirely produced in Venezuela. "This step that we are taking today is historic for the cooperative movement in Venezuela, because it is going to assume its own control, and its own destiny, and we are going to know who we are and where we are headed."
On the second day of the meetings, CENCOOP members broke into five "work commissions," through which various proposals were (at times intensely) debated. Among the proposals, were the possibility of a national cooperative bank, a national cooperative education plan, and further involvement in international conferences, such as the ICA reunion in Peru this summer. Members of the Commission on Institutional Relations expressed interest in building ties with foreign cooperative movements, particularly with cooperatives in the United States.
The CENCOOP meetings ended without a signed document, but with the election of a "provisional commission" that will meet next weekend in the state of Aragua to discuss the proposals from the various work commissions. It is still unknown when the next general CENCOOP meeting will be held, but according to various representatives it will most likely take place within the next three months.
"Look, we achieved something absolutely important, which is a national and international organizational structure," said Elba Torres, a representative from Lara state, who was elected to the provisional commission. "We are going to continue working with this proposal, and this 'intermediary commission,' which is going to work in function for the states."
The presence of two members from international organizations of cooperative integration highlighted the international importance of the event and the possibilities for building "bridges" between Venezuela and other cooperative movements.
"CENCOOP is the bridge of communication- of relation- with the rest of Latin America and the world," explained Molina, "that"s why the weight and the significance that we give to the National Executive Cooperative Council, is so important, because it is the extension of cooperativism in Venezuela with the rest of the world... and it is a structure that is formed by the cooperativistas themselves ... and we hope that Venezuelan cooperativism is a valuable force of integration of Latin America and in particular MERCOSUR."
Manuel Mariño is based out of Costa Rica and is the director of the Americas office of the International Cooperative Alliance, which reports to have "700 million individual members worldwide organized in hundreds of thousands of cooperatives in 95 countries." Mariño attended the meetings and expressed that he was impressed by the "great participation" from the cooperative members, but he still has a lot of questions and it appears that the councils still have a long way to go.
"What is going to be the role of the cooperative councils and CENCOOP" he asked, "How are you going to finance the cooperative councils? Are they going to be financed from the State, or are the cooperatives themselves going to finance this institution? If they are going to finance it, but they don't have any judicial standing, well what do you do with the money? And afterwards, it's important to define what are going to be the functions [of the councils] in order not to duplicate or interfere... so they still need to do a lot of work. It appears that the cooperatives councils can be good, but you have to define a lot more."
Mariño also expressed his doubts for the sustainability of the present Venezuelan Cooperative boom, because of the "huge capacity" necessary to attend to all of the cooperatives.
According to SUNACOOPs last official count, there are 108,000 cooperatives in Venezuela, and this number is growing by the hundreds per week. In fact, Venezuela can now boast of being the country with the most coops in the world and over 99% of these coops have been formed since President Hugo Chavez took office 7 years ago. SUNACOOP director, Carlos Molina, declared on Friday that because of this cooperative boom, 6% of the employment in the country is now within the cooperative sector, with an approximate 600,000 individuals.
The present cooperative boom is largely as a result of a very clear Venezuelan state policy of cooperative promotion in the form of financing, preferential taxation, state-contracting, and cooperative education and job-training programs.
"Why cooperativism?" asked Molina in an interview with Venezuelanalysis in March, "because cooperativism is a means of social and economic organization that posses some values and principles that interpret very adequately and very close to the spirit of this [Bolivarian] project."
However, with overwhelming government support mostly going to the new cooperatives and largely ignoring the traditional Venezuelan cooperative sector, this has created tension between the traditional and “Bolivarian” cooperatives. Fortunately, the CENCOOP members at this weekend's meetings constituted a fairly well represented cross-section of the Venezuelan cooperative movement (traditional and Bolivarian), in what appears to be a new era of cooperation among Venezuela's cooperatives.
The weekend meeting was held in Caracas at the Catia offices of the Frente Francisco Miranda and was attended by approximately 140 cooperative representatives from across Venezuela; Cooperative Superintendent (SUNACOOP), Carlos Molina; Minister of Popular Economy, Oly Millan; Technical Secretary of the Specialized Reunion of Cooperatives of MERCOSUR, Daniel Bentancur; Executive Director of the Americas office of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), Manuel Mariño; various SUNACOOP state facilitators and employees of the Ministry of Popular Economy.
CENCOOP is composed of a council of 5 cooperative members from each of Venezuela's 25 states, elected from their State Cooperative Council to represent their region. Members of the State Cooperative Council are elected by the Municipal Councils, which are composed of any cooperative member from that municipality interested in participating. Over the past year, SUNACOOP facilitators have been working with cooperative members across the country to organize the cooperatives from each state and to elect their state councils in preparation for this event.
According to SUNACOOP, the Cooperative Councils have two "complementary goals":
"1) Ethical-Political goal of integrating and recuperating the direction of the cooperative community. 2) Political-Technical goal of planning future projects of the cooperative movement."
At the plenary talk on the Cooperative Councils, SUNACOOP Superintendent Carlos Molina explained, "The cooperative councils are a methodology for the construction of participatory democracy that is utilized by the people organized in cooperatives in order to achieve the autonomy and consolidate Venezuelan cooperativism as a social movement, capable of transforming the socio-economic reality."
"CENCOOP is the Executive Branch of the Cooperative Councils" he continued, "and this, of course, is subordinated to the Assembly in the same way that the State Cooperative Councils are subordinated to their State Assemblies. It is a relationship of an inverted pyramid. It is a process of networking and it has given a very particular characteristic to the integration of cooperativism in Venezuela."
The first National assembly of Cooperative Councils was held in the State of Cojedes in January, where more than 600 cooperative members from across the country met to discuss the first steps in the creation of the embryonic Venezuela cooperative movement.
Although SUNACOOP has, until now, been involved in the organization and promotion of the Cooperative Councils, Molina was explicit in explaining that each step of the way, they will be taking more of a hands-off approach, in order to give more autonomy to the cooperative movement.
"In this moment, the creation of CENCOOP is the transfer of the power to the people themselves" said Antonio Galiffa, representative from the state of Falcon, and member of a worker-cooperative, which is initiating the steps to manufacture corn-flour pasta which will be entirely produced in Venezuela. "This step that we are taking today is historic for the cooperative movement in Venezuela, because it is going to assume its own control, and its own destiny, and we are going to know who we are and where we are headed."
On the second day of the meetings, CENCOOP members broke into five "work commissions," through which various proposals were (at times intensely) debated. Among the proposals, were the possibility of a national cooperative bank, a national cooperative education plan, and further involvement in international conferences, such as the ICA reunion in Peru this summer. Members of the Commission on Institutional Relations expressed interest in building ties with foreign cooperative movements, particularly with cooperatives in the United States.
The CENCOOP meetings ended without a signed document, but with the election of a "provisional commission" that will meet next weekend in the state of Aragua to discuss the proposals from the various work commissions. It is still unknown when the next general CENCOOP meeting will be held, but according to various representatives it will most likely take place within the next three months.
"Look, we achieved something absolutely important, which is a national and international organizational structure," said Elba Torres, a representative from Lara state, who was elected to the provisional commission. "We are going to continue working with this proposal, and this 'intermediary commission,' which is going to work in function for the states."
The presence of two members from international organizations of cooperative integration highlighted the international importance of the event and the possibilities for building "bridges" between Venezuela and other cooperative movements.
"CENCOOP is the bridge of communication- of relation- with the rest of Latin America and the world," explained Molina, "that"s why the weight and the significance that we give to the National Executive Cooperative Council, is so important, because it is the extension of cooperativism in Venezuela with the rest of the world... and it is a structure that is formed by the cooperativistas themselves ... and we hope that Venezuelan cooperativism is a valuable force of integration of Latin America and in particular MERCOSUR."
Manuel Mariño is based out of Costa Rica and is the director of the Americas office of the International Cooperative Alliance, which reports to have "700 million individual members worldwide organized in hundreds of thousands of cooperatives in 95 countries." Mariño attended the meetings and expressed that he was impressed by the "great participation" from the cooperative members, but he still has a lot of questions and it appears that the councils still have a long way to go.
"What is going to be the role of the cooperative councils and CENCOOP" he asked, "How are you going to finance the cooperative councils? Are they going to be financed from the State, or are the cooperatives themselves going to finance this institution? If they are going to finance it, but they don't have any judicial standing, well what do you do with the money? And afterwards, it's important to define what are going to be the functions [of the councils] in order not to duplicate or interfere... so they still need to do a lot of work. It appears that the cooperatives councils can be good, but you have to define a lot more."
Mariño also expressed his doubts for the sustainability of the present Venezuelan Cooperative boom, because of the "huge capacity" necessary to attend to all of the cooperatives.
According to SUNACOOPs last official count, there are 108,000 cooperatives in Venezuela, and this number is growing by the hundreds per week. In fact, Venezuela can now boast of being the country with the most coops in the world and over 99% of these coops have been formed since President Hugo Chavez took office 7 years ago. SUNACOOP director, Carlos Molina, declared on Friday that because of this cooperative boom, 6% of the employment in the country is now within the cooperative sector, with an approximate 600,000 individuals.
The present cooperative boom is largely as a result of a very clear Venezuelan state policy of cooperative promotion in the form of financing, preferential taxation, state-contracting, and cooperative education and job-training programs.
"Why cooperativism?" asked Molina in an interview with Venezuelanalysis in March, "because cooperativism is a means of social and economic organization that posses some values and principles that interpret very adequately and very close to the spirit of this [Bolivarian] project."
However, with overwhelming government support mostly going to the new cooperatives and largely ignoring the traditional Venezuelan cooperative sector, this has created tension between the traditional and “Bolivarian” cooperatives. Fortunately, the CENCOOP members at this weekend's meetings constituted a fairly well represented cross-section of the Venezuelan cooperative movement (traditional and Bolivarian), in what appears to be a new era of cooperation among Venezuela's cooperatives.
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