Visiting Al-Amarah to boost the morale of troops fighting Shia rebels on Monday, Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki vowed that forces loyal to the government would continue their offensive in the southern province until anti-government armed groups are uprooted. The onslaught is an extension of military operations that began in Basra in March to end rebel control of Iraq's second largest city.
(...) The answer seems to lie in oil. The two southern provinces sit on a lake of 150 billion barrels, i.e. 95 per cent of Iraq's oil reserves. The northern province provides Iraq with its only oil export outlet to the Mediterranean. With oil prices nudging $140 per barrel and the US economy on the verge of freefall, Washington seems to have decided that it cannot wait any longer to use Iraq's huge reserve to increase output and lower the prices. On 19 June, The New York Times reported that Shell, BP and Exxon Mobil, Total and Chevron, heirs to the infamous seven sisters cartel that dominated world energy production in the latter half of the 20th century, were close to signing deals with Iraq to develop its oil and gas fields. The report came after Baghdad said it is about to sign agreements with international oil firms to revamp Iraq's oil fields, ravaged by the war and sabotaged by armed groups. Under the deals, worth around $500 million, the five firms will help overhaul Iraq's oil fields to boost the current production by 600,000 barrels a day, an increase of nearly 20 per cent.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
end of the petroleum age:
Though the world possesses tens of thousands of operating fields, a mere 116 of them – each producing more than 100,000 barrels per day – together account for nearly one-half of total global output. Of these, all but a handful were discovered more than a quarter of a century ago, and most are showing signs of diminished capacity. Indeed, some of the world’s largest fields – including Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, Burgan in Kuwait, Cantarell in Mexico, and Samotlor in Russia – appear to be now in decline or about to become so. The decline of these giant fields matters greatly. Compensating for their lost output will take increased yield at thousands of smaller fields, and there is no evidence that this is even remotely possible.
(...) We could live with the decline of these great reservoirs if we had some confidence that new reserves were being discovered all the time to replace all those now reaching the end of their productive life. But this is not the case. Despite a sharp increase in spending on exploration and development, the rate of new reserve discovery has been falling steadily for the past 30 years. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the last decade in which new discoveries exceeded the rate of extraction from existing fields was the 1980s. Since then we have been consuming more oil than we have been finding – a pattern that can only result, eventually, in the complete exhaustion of the world’s known petroleum reserves.
(...) But more and more analysts are coming to the conclusion that the output of conventional (i.e., liquid) petroleum will peak at about 95 million barrels per day in the 2010-2012 time-frame and then begin an irreversible decline. The addition of a few million added barrels from Kashagan or Tupi will not alter this trend.
(...) Consider: In 2030, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, world “liquids” demand is expected to reach 117.6 million barrels per day. Of this amount, unconventional fuels – synthetic liquids derived from tar sands, shale rock, and biofuels – may provide a total of 10.5 million barrels. That leaves 107.1 million to be supplied by conventional petroleum. But what if global oil output has fallen to 60-70% of that amount by 2030, as projected by many analysts? Under those circumstances, no amount of oil from Alaska or the outer continental shelf will be able to save this country (or the rest of the world) from a catastrophic energy crisis.
Though the world possesses tens of thousands of operating fields, a mere 116 of them – each producing more than 100,000 barrels per day – together account for nearly one-half of total global output. Of these, all but a handful were discovered more than a quarter of a century ago, and most are showing signs of diminished capacity. Indeed, some of the world’s largest fields – including Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, Burgan in Kuwait, Cantarell in Mexico, and Samotlor in Russia – appear to be now in decline or about to become so. The decline of these giant fields matters greatly. Compensating for their lost output will take increased yield at thousands of smaller fields, and there is no evidence that this is even remotely possible.
(...) We could live with the decline of these great reservoirs if we had some confidence that new reserves were being discovered all the time to replace all those now reaching the end of their productive life. But this is not the case. Despite a sharp increase in spending on exploration and development, the rate of new reserve discovery has been falling steadily for the past 30 years. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the last decade in which new discoveries exceeded the rate of extraction from existing fields was the 1980s. Since then we have been consuming more oil than we have been finding – a pattern that can only result, eventually, in the complete exhaustion of the world’s known petroleum reserves.
(...) But more and more analysts are coming to the conclusion that the output of conventional (i.e., liquid) petroleum will peak at about 95 million barrels per day in the 2010-2012 time-frame and then begin an irreversible decline. The addition of a few million added barrels from Kashagan or Tupi will not alter this trend.
(...) Consider: In 2030, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, world “liquids” demand is expected to reach 117.6 million barrels per day. Of this amount, unconventional fuels – synthetic liquids derived from tar sands, shale rock, and biofuels – may provide a total of 10.5 million barrels. That leaves 107.1 million to be supplied by conventional petroleum. But what if global oil output has fallen to 60-70% of that amount by 2030, as projected by many analysts? Under those circumstances, no amount of oil from Alaska or the outer continental shelf will be able to save this country (or the rest of the world) from a catastrophic energy crisis.
soaring inequality:
Worldwide sales of private jets have more than doubled since 2003, to $19.4 billion in 2007. The number of jets sold increased 28 percent between 2006 and 2007 alone, and sales are up sharply in the first quarter of 2008. Corporate jet ownership has increased by about 70 percent since the early 1990s. Demand for private jets is so high that a used jet bought in 2006 can now be sold at a handsome profit.
(...) Soaring private jet use reflects and is emblematic of skyrocketing wealth inequality, in the United States and globally. Private jet sales grew in parallel with commercial air travel until 1997. Then as wealth inequality began to ascend to stratospheric levels, so did private jet use. The rise of a global billionaire class has globalized the private jet market. The main manufacturers report that half or more of sales are coming from outside of North America.
(...) According to the Federal Aviation Administration, general aviation -- the segment of the industry that includes corporate jets, charters, air taxis, and recreational pilots -- uses 16 percent of the FAA's services, but pays just 3 percent of the cost. Very substantial amounts of federal funds spent on airport improvement between 2005 and 2007 -- $2.2 billion of $7 billion total -- went to small airports that primarily serve private jets. These are places like California's Napa Valley Airport.
(...) Four passengers flying in a private Cessna Citation X from Los Angeles to New York, for example, would each be responsible for more than five times as much CO2 emitted by a commercial air passenger making the same trip. And that's a very generous calculation, given estimates that 40 percent of private jet flights are empty -- as pilots return home rather than sit idle waiting for a return trip.
(...) To the extent that private jets are symbols of an economic system gone awry, remedying the problem will require big picture policy changes -- steep wealth and income taxes and other measures to redress inequality, and comprehensive policies to address global warming. But soaring private jet use also demands its own response. Tax breaks for buying and flying private jets should be ended. Private jets should pay, at least, their fair share of FAA costs. And a hefty luxury tax should be imposed on private jet sales and flying.
Worldwide sales of private jets have more than doubled since 2003, to $19.4 billion in 2007. The number of jets sold increased 28 percent between 2006 and 2007 alone, and sales are up sharply in the first quarter of 2008. Corporate jet ownership has increased by about 70 percent since the early 1990s. Demand for private jets is so high that a used jet bought in 2006 can now be sold at a handsome profit.
(...) Soaring private jet use reflects and is emblematic of skyrocketing wealth inequality, in the United States and globally. Private jet sales grew in parallel with commercial air travel until 1997. Then as wealth inequality began to ascend to stratospheric levels, so did private jet use. The rise of a global billionaire class has globalized the private jet market. The main manufacturers report that half or more of sales are coming from outside of North America.
(...) According to the Federal Aviation Administration, general aviation -- the segment of the industry that includes corporate jets, charters, air taxis, and recreational pilots -- uses 16 percent of the FAA's services, but pays just 3 percent of the cost. Very substantial amounts of federal funds spent on airport improvement between 2005 and 2007 -- $2.2 billion of $7 billion total -- went to small airports that primarily serve private jets. These are places like California's Napa Valley Airport.
(...) Four passengers flying in a private Cessna Citation X from Los Angeles to New York, for example, would each be responsible for more than five times as much CO2 emitted by a commercial air passenger making the same trip. And that's a very generous calculation, given estimates that 40 percent of private jet flights are empty -- as pilots return home rather than sit idle waiting for a return trip.
(...) To the extent that private jets are symbols of an economic system gone awry, remedying the problem will require big picture policy changes -- steep wealth and income taxes and other measures to redress inequality, and comprehensive policies to address global warming. But soaring private jet use also demands its own response. Tax breaks for buying and flying private jets should be ended. Private jets should pay, at least, their fair share of FAA costs. And a hefty luxury tax should be imposed on private jet sales and flying.
africa's unnatural disaster:
The World Bank's continued market fundamentalism is difficult to understand, especially in light of the fact that after more than 25 years of imposing these policies in Africa and Latin America, success stories are few and far between. Those countries that do have productive agricultural sectors (almost none of which are in Africa) either rely on huge landholders to be productive (Brazil, Argentina, Chile) or on massive subsidies (India) or both (U.S., EU). The countries that have eliminated their subsidies and privatized their grain boards, including many in Africa, are those that are doing the poorest.
(...) If one is willing to look at the events of the last 30 years without the quasi-religious belief that free markets lead to development and growth, one would undoubtedly find that the opposite is true. In his groundbreaking work Kicking Away the Ladder (2003), Ha Joon Chang documents the development of every industrialized country, showing that protectionist policies were a fundamental part of development strategy in almost every case. The process of development that emerges from this story is not maximizing comparative advantage (for if so, the U.S. would be a sparsely populated country of fur traders and fisher people) but rather shifting comparative advantage to high value goods through calculated market distortions. In the case of the U.K. and the United States, those market distortions originally came in the form of colonialism and slavery. But market distortions continue in the U.S. today in the form of agriculture and steel subsidies, not to mention the tremendous government spending on biotechnology and defense, which largely serves as a subsidy for those sectors.
(...) The report does point out that a few countries (Brazil and Chile are the examples given) have successfully used agriculture to increase growth, but in Brazil and (to a lesser extent) Chile, small farmers are all but extinct, and agriculture is big business. Given the preoccupation with small farmers and poverty alleviation in other parts of the document, the examples are odd.
(...) Since about 1970, the World Bank, other international financial institutions and the private sector have succeeded in completely transforming agriculture from a primarily local affair to a complex industrialized process. Monocropping, over-reliance on chemical pesticides and fertilizers and trans-genetic manipulation have in some cases increased yields; but these practices have not led to a significant reduction in the number of hungry people in the world. The recommendations of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and the World Bank amount to insanity - recommending more of the same and expecting better results.
(...) In the United States, Europe and elsewhere, many are beginning to understand that industrialized agriculture benefits neither those who produce nor those who consume food. In the current food crisis, more than 25 countries and the European Union have imposed tariffs, subsidies, price controls or other measures to protect consumers from the global free market. So why the double standard when it comes to Africa?
(...) For those interested in solutions, the organic and local movements aren't far off the mark. What producers and consumers in many parts of the world are beginning to understand is that the way that farmers have been growing food for millennia is more or less a good system. While there may be room for technology, (drip irrigation systems, for example) that innovation should not alter the food product nor add layers of cost. Many parts of Africa have an advantage in that they have never really lost their traditional relationships with the land. The problem has been that cheaper food from Europe and the United States is often dumped on African countries, undercutting the possibility for farmers to earn a living from their production. In the case of Africa, all that may be needed is a sensible trade policy to protect those who already grow enough food for all Africans.
The World Bank's continued market fundamentalism is difficult to understand, especially in light of the fact that after more than 25 years of imposing these policies in Africa and Latin America, success stories are few and far between. Those countries that do have productive agricultural sectors (almost none of which are in Africa) either rely on huge landholders to be productive (Brazil, Argentina, Chile) or on massive subsidies (India) or both (U.S., EU). The countries that have eliminated their subsidies and privatized their grain boards, including many in Africa, are those that are doing the poorest.
(...) If one is willing to look at the events of the last 30 years without the quasi-religious belief that free markets lead to development and growth, one would undoubtedly find that the opposite is true. In his groundbreaking work Kicking Away the Ladder (2003), Ha Joon Chang documents the development of every industrialized country, showing that protectionist policies were a fundamental part of development strategy in almost every case. The process of development that emerges from this story is not maximizing comparative advantage (for if so, the U.S. would be a sparsely populated country of fur traders and fisher people) but rather shifting comparative advantage to high value goods through calculated market distortions. In the case of the U.K. and the United States, those market distortions originally came in the form of colonialism and slavery. But market distortions continue in the U.S. today in the form of agriculture and steel subsidies, not to mention the tremendous government spending on biotechnology and defense, which largely serves as a subsidy for those sectors.
(...) The report does point out that a few countries (Brazil and Chile are the examples given) have successfully used agriculture to increase growth, but in Brazil and (to a lesser extent) Chile, small farmers are all but extinct, and agriculture is big business. Given the preoccupation with small farmers and poverty alleviation in other parts of the document, the examples are odd.
(...) Since about 1970, the World Bank, other international financial institutions and the private sector have succeeded in completely transforming agriculture from a primarily local affair to a complex industrialized process. Monocropping, over-reliance on chemical pesticides and fertilizers and trans-genetic manipulation have in some cases increased yields; but these practices have not led to a significant reduction in the number of hungry people in the world. The recommendations of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and the World Bank amount to insanity - recommending more of the same and expecting better results.
(...) In the United States, Europe and elsewhere, many are beginning to understand that industrialized agriculture benefits neither those who produce nor those who consume food. In the current food crisis, more than 25 countries and the European Union have imposed tariffs, subsidies, price controls or other measures to protect consumers from the global free market. So why the double standard when it comes to Africa?
(...) For those interested in solutions, the organic and local movements aren't far off the mark. What producers and consumers in many parts of the world are beginning to understand is that the way that farmers have been growing food for millennia is more or less a good system. While there may be room for technology, (drip irrigation systems, for example) that innovation should not alter the food product nor add layers of cost. Many parts of Africa have an advantage in that they have never really lost their traditional relationships with the land. The problem has been that cheaper food from Europe and the United States is often dumped on African countries, undercutting the possibility for farmers to earn a living from their production. In the case of Africa, all that may be needed is a sensible trade policy to protect those who already grow enough food for all Africans.
Friday, June 27, 2008
high growth, low development:
To begin with, the rank of 128 puts us in the bottom 50 of the 177 nations that the UNDP Human Development Report looks at. Treat Adivasis and Dalits as a separate nation and you will find that nation in the bottom 25. Or subtract our per capita GDP ranking from the process and watch India as a whole do a slide. Meanwhile, even nations that are far below us in the rankings - and which have nothing like our growth numbers - do much better than us on many counts. So even if our HDI value took a tiny step up from 0.611 last year to 0.619, it means other nations did much better than us. And hence we went down to rank 128 this year.
(...) Note that some of these nations rank up to 30 slots above us. Others fall within 30 nations below us. Not one of them has had our nine per cent growth. Few of them have been touted an emerging economic superpower. Nor even as a software superpower. Not even as a blossoming nuclear power. Together, they probably do not have as many billionaires as India does. In short, even nations much poorer than us in Asia, Africa and Latin America have done a lot better than we have. India rose in the dollar billionaire rankings, though. From rank 8 in 2006 to number 4 in the Forbes list this year, but we slipped from 126 to 128 in human development.
(...) Cuba has zero standing in the roll call of billionaires. In terms of per capita income, it ranks low in the world. But when it comes to human development, it ranks 51 - that is, 77 places ahead of us. It figures in the HDI's 'High Human Development' group. This is a nation which has faced a huge economic blockade since its birth. U.S. sanctions ensure that almost everything is costlier in Cuba than in many other nations. In per capita terms, it spends four per cent of what the U.S. does on health but achieves better outcomes on most of the vital parameters of that sector. Despite its many disadvantages, it achieves a better HDI rank than Mexico, Russia or China. (All of which have gained more billionaires in recent times.)
(...) Meanwhile, the UNHDR records that almost a third of India's children, or 30 per cent, are below average weight at birth. In Sierra Leone, ranked at 177, rock bottom of the Human Development Index, it is 23 per cent. In Guinea Bissau and Burkina Faso, ranked 175 and 176, children with low birth weight account for 22 and 19 per cent. Even in Ethiopia, ranked 169, the figure is 15 per cent. So we're down there with the bottom five on that count. Amongst children under the age of five, 47 per cent in India are underweight. In Ethiopia, that is 38 per cent. And in Sierra Leone, 27 per cent. We are home to the largest number of malnourished children in the world. When it comes to child nutrition and literacy, we jostle for space with the nations ranked lowest in HDI in the planet. And mostly we even beat them.
(...) They report a World Bank study as saying that the Indian and Chinese economies might be smaller in size than we believe. Maybe almost 40 per cent smaller, says The International Herald Tribune (December 9, 2007). "What happened was a large statistical glitch," says the IHT. But it's a glitch that matters. "Suddenly the number of Chinese who live below the World Bank's poverty line of a dollar a day jumped from about 100 million to 300 million." It turns out the overpaid elite number crunchers have been using obsolete data for a very long time.
(...) The Bank's own survey lists new purchasing power parities for 100 countries benchmarked for the year 2006. Well, India figured in the study for the first time since 1985 and China for the first time ever. And so, India's GDP in PPP terms, the TOI notes, was $3.8 trillion in 2005 before the new study. Going by the new data after the revision, it stands at $2.34 trillion. (In nominal dollar terms, roughly $800 billion.) Boy! These updated data are a nuisance. First it turns out we should have been HDI rank 128 last year, too. Now we learn that our economy is a lot smaller than we imagined. As the IHT says, "This is not a mere technicality." It shrinks the relative size of developing economies by quite a bit. India's GDP per capita (PPP) falls from $3,779 to $2,341 with the new data. Also, as the TOI sadly notes: "We ain't a trillion dollar economy yet."
To begin with, the rank of 128 puts us in the bottom 50 of the 177 nations that the UNDP Human Development Report looks at. Treat Adivasis and Dalits as a separate nation and you will find that nation in the bottom 25. Or subtract our per capita GDP ranking from the process and watch India as a whole do a slide. Meanwhile, even nations that are far below us in the rankings - and which have nothing like our growth numbers - do much better than us on many counts. So even if our HDI value took a tiny step up from 0.611 last year to 0.619, it means other nations did much better than us. And hence we went down to rank 128 this year.
(...) Note that some of these nations rank up to 30 slots above us. Others fall within 30 nations below us. Not one of them has had our nine per cent growth. Few of them have been touted an emerging economic superpower. Nor even as a software superpower. Not even as a blossoming nuclear power. Together, they probably do not have as many billionaires as India does. In short, even nations much poorer than us in Asia, Africa and Latin America have done a lot better than we have. India rose in the dollar billionaire rankings, though. From rank 8 in 2006 to number 4 in the Forbes list this year, but we slipped from 126 to 128 in human development.
(...) Cuba has zero standing in the roll call of billionaires. In terms of per capita income, it ranks low in the world. But when it comes to human development, it ranks 51 - that is, 77 places ahead of us. It figures in the HDI's 'High Human Development' group. This is a nation which has faced a huge economic blockade since its birth. U.S. sanctions ensure that almost everything is costlier in Cuba than in many other nations. In per capita terms, it spends four per cent of what the U.S. does on health but achieves better outcomes on most of the vital parameters of that sector. Despite its many disadvantages, it achieves a better HDI rank than Mexico, Russia or China. (All of which have gained more billionaires in recent times.)
(...) Meanwhile, the UNHDR records that almost a third of India's children, or 30 per cent, are below average weight at birth. In Sierra Leone, ranked at 177, rock bottom of the Human Development Index, it is 23 per cent. In Guinea Bissau and Burkina Faso, ranked 175 and 176, children with low birth weight account for 22 and 19 per cent. Even in Ethiopia, ranked 169, the figure is 15 per cent. So we're down there with the bottom five on that count. Amongst children under the age of five, 47 per cent in India are underweight. In Ethiopia, that is 38 per cent. And in Sierra Leone, 27 per cent. We are home to the largest number of malnourished children in the world. When it comes to child nutrition and literacy, we jostle for space with the nations ranked lowest in HDI in the planet. And mostly we even beat them.
(...) They report a World Bank study as saying that the Indian and Chinese economies might be smaller in size than we believe. Maybe almost 40 per cent smaller, says The International Herald Tribune (December 9, 2007). "What happened was a large statistical glitch," says the IHT. But it's a glitch that matters. "Suddenly the number of Chinese who live below the World Bank's poverty line of a dollar a day jumped from about 100 million to 300 million." It turns out the overpaid elite number crunchers have been using obsolete data for a very long time.
(...) The Bank's own survey lists new purchasing power parities for 100 countries benchmarked for the year 2006. Well, India figured in the study for the first time since 1985 and China for the first time ever. And so, India's GDP in PPP terms, the TOI notes, was $3.8 trillion in 2005 before the new study. Going by the new data after the revision, it stands at $2.34 trillion. (In nominal dollar terms, roughly $800 billion.) Boy! These updated data are a nuisance. First it turns out we should have been HDI rank 128 last year, too. Now we learn that our economy is a lot smaller than we imagined. As the IHT says, "This is not a mere technicality." It shrinks the relative size of developing economies by quite a bit. India's GDP per capita (PPP) falls from $3,779 to $2,341 with the new data. Also, as the TOI sadly notes: "We ain't a trillion dollar economy yet."
between a rock and a hard place:
So much so that Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings and a staunch free marketer, calls it "Socialism for the rich." In his words "the Federal Reserve is using taxpayer money to buy a bunch of Bear Stearns traders' Maseratis." He points out that hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent to bail out Wall Street as a whole. The theologians of the global market are between a rock and a hard place. Hypocrisy has rammed into reality.
(...) Three of the basic principles the believers of corporate-led globalisation swear by have been so eloquently summed by Professor James Galbraith Jr. of the University of Texas at Austin. One: all successes are global. Two: all failures are national. Three: the market is beyond reproach.
(...) Through the reforms period, we have pushed millions of small farmers to shift from foodcrop to cash crops. The acreage under foodcrop has reduced across these years. And we also exported millions of tonnes of grain - as in 2002 and 2003. What's more, we exported at prices cheaper than those we charged poor people in this country for the same grain. The idea was that we had a "huge surplus" of grain and could well afford to export. The truth was that the massive pileup of unsold stock arose from a surplus of hunger rather than of grain. The purchasing power of the poor had collapsed. But the fake "surplus" story came in handy. It allowed the export of grain - heavily subsidised by us - to be consumed by European cattle.
(...) From 510 grams per Indian in 1991 to 422 grams by 2005. With the top fifth of Indians doing better than ever before, this meant that those below were eating far less than they did just a few years ago.
So much so that Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings and a staunch free marketer, calls it "Socialism for the rich." In his words "the Federal Reserve is using taxpayer money to buy a bunch of Bear Stearns traders' Maseratis." He points out that hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent to bail out Wall Street as a whole. The theologians of the global market are between a rock and a hard place. Hypocrisy has rammed into reality.
(...) Three of the basic principles the believers of corporate-led globalisation swear by have been so eloquently summed by Professor James Galbraith Jr. of the University of Texas at Austin. One: all successes are global. Two: all failures are national. Three: the market is beyond reproach.
(...) Through the reforms period, we have pushed millions of small farmers to shift from foodcrop to cash crops. The acreage under foodcrop has reduced across these years. And we also exported millions of tonnes of grain - as in 2002 and 2003. What's more, we exported at prices cheaper than those we charged poor people in this country for the same grain. The idea was that we had a "huge surplus" of grain and could well afford to export. The truth was that the massive pileup of unsold stock arose from a surplus of hunger rather than of grain. The purchasing power of the poor had collapsed. But the fake "surplus" story came in handy. It allowed the export of grain - heavily subsidised by us - to be consumed by European cattle.
(...) From 510 grams per Indian in 1991 to 422 grams by 2005. With the top fifth of Indians doing better than ever before, this meant that those below were eating far less than they did just a few years ago.
survival of the fattest:
"The United States had doled out $27 billion in federal subsidies to its `farmers' in the last fiscal year. That's Rs. 135,000 crores." Just the top 10 per cent of America's farm owners collared close to two-thirds of this largesse. That includes "multi-million dollar corporations".
(...) The needy farmers thus rescued include media baron Ted Turner, a Rockefeller and other assorted struggling billionaires. Turner is "one of the largest landowners" in the U.S.. He owns ranches in Montana, South Dakota and Florida. And his companies raked in $1,90,000. That's Rs. 95 lakhs. David Rockefeller, who owns a 3,000-acre farm, got $146,000. A modest Rs. 73 lakhs. He is a former Chase Manhattan Bank chairman and grandson of John D.
(...) There were at least 20 "Fortune 500" companies among yet other poor farmers pulled back from the brink. Including Chevron, Caterpillar, IBP and Archer Daniels Midland.
(...) These included, as the AP report written by John Kelly put it: "more than 1,200 universities and government farms, including state prisons". They got cash from programmes "touted by politicians as a way to prop up needy farmers. Subsidies also went to real estate developers and absentee landowners in big cities from Chicago to New York".
(...) Well, "63 per cent of the money went to the top 10 per cent of recipients". Many of whom "don't fit the image of the struggling family farm". In Iowa in 1998, I saw small holdings go bust that did fit the image of the struggling family farm. How did those families read their misfortune? Many felt they were victims of wasteful spending on welfare, affirmative action and immigrants. In truth, they were just squeezed out by big corporate farmers. Farm corporations who also held great control over input prices. And government subsidies. In fact, it all sounds a bit like home — only on a scale unthinkable in India. Top Indian business houses have plundered fertiliser subsidies worth thousands of crores of rupees for years. Of course, their amounts, crushing by Indian standards, look trifling next to the largesse doled out in the citadel of neo-liberal market economics.
(...) At the bottom end of this food chain, the average "real" farmer got about $16,000 each. These are perhaps the "needy" ones in the U.S.. And that's still Rs. 8 lakh per farmer. Compare that with the Indian small holder, relieved to have seen off another year when he's earned $80 from an acre.
(...) What happens if Africa, Latin America and Asia increase their share of world markets by just one percent? An Oxfam report says that 120 million people could beat the poverty trap. But that won't happen in the field of agriculture. Not while corporations — with billions of dollars of subsidies behind them — rule theworld.
(...) Lawmakers want to restrict "information about who receives federal farm subsidies". Why? Beats me.
"The United States had doled out $27 billion in federal subsidies to its `farmers' in the last fiscal year. That's Rs. 135,000 crores." Just the top 10 per cent of America's farm owners collared close to two-thirds of this largesse. That includes "multi-million dollar corporations".
(...) The needy farmers thus rescued include media baron Ted Turner, a Rockefeller and other assorted struggling billionaires. Turner is "one of the largest landowners" in the U.S.. He owns ranches in Montana, South Dakota and Florida. And his companies raked in $1,90,000. That's Rs. 95 lakhs. David Rockefeller, who owns a 3,000-acre farm, got $146,000. A modest Rs. 73 lakhs. He is a former Chase Manhattan Bank chairman and grandson of John D.
(...) There were at least 20 "Fortune 500" companies among yet other poor farmers pulled back from the brink. Including Chevron, Caterpillar, IBP and Archer Daniels Midland.
(...) These included, as the AP report written by John Kelly put it: "more than 1,200 universities and government farms, including state prisons". They got cash from programmes "touted by politicians as a way to prop up needy farmers. Subsidies also went to real estate developers and absentee landowners in big cities from Chicago to New York".
(...) Well, "63 per cent of the money went to the top 10 per cent of recipients". Many of whom "don't fit the image of the struggling family farm". In Iowa in 1998, I saw small holdings go bust that did fit the image of the struggling family farm. How did those families read their misfortune? Many felt they were victims of wasteful spending on welfare, affirmative action and immigrants. In truth, they were just squeezed out by big corporate farmers. Farm corporations who also held great control over input prices. And government subsidies. In fact, it all sounds a bit like home — only on a scale unthinkable in India. Top Indian business houses have plundered fertiliser subsidies worth thousands of crores of rupees for years. Of course, their amounts, crushing by Indian standards, look trifling next to the largesse doled out in the citadel of neo-liberal market economics.
(...) At the bottom end of this food chain, the average "real" farmer got about $16,000 each. These are perhaps the "needy" ones in the U.S.. And that's still Rs. 8 lakh per farmer. Compare that with the Indian small holder, relieved to have seen off another year when he's earned $80 from an acre.
(...) What happens if Africa, Latin America and Asia increase their share of world markets by just one percent? An Oxfam report says that 120 million people could beat the poverty trap. But that won't happen in the field of agriculture. Not while corporations — with billions of dollars of subsidies behind them — rule theworld.
(...) Lawmakers want to restrict "information about who receives federal farm subsidies". Why? Beats me.
see, neoliberalism works!
Even for the landed, if such a great share is grabbed by food, clothing, and health, it leaves little for anything else. That is why (also NSSO data) just six per cent of rural homes have telephones. And that is mainly amongst those with an MPCE of over Rs.950, a lot of which are non-farm households. It is also why we need to postpone the joy over the spread of the Net for a bit. PCs with Net connections almost do not exist in rural India. Just about 0.6 per cent of rural households have a computer.
(...) The NSSO seems to underestimate private moneylender debt. Yet it shows that nearly half of all farm households are in debt. In 1991, that figure was 26 per cent.
(...) Mostly crawling out of the bottomless data-on-demand pit of the capital's "think tanks." These surveys in turn get the rah rah treatment from a media dying to show how good the "reform years" have been. In one case, a daily crowed that "Bharat-matches-India-in-bang-for-buck." This was so over the top that even the gung-ho authors of the survey the daily was quoting felt compelled to write a piece saying "Don't romanticize the village." Well, also do not romanticize the growing gap between rich and poor. And do not celebrate gross inequality either.
(...) Mr. Pawar also tells his interviewer: "You will be surprised. In the budgetary provision, not more than two per cent money has been allocated for agriculture. [Though that is] where more than 65 per cent of the population works."
Even for the landed, if such a great share is grabbed by food, clothing, and health, it leaves little for anything else. That is why (also NSSO data) just six per cent of rural homes have telephones. And that is mainly amongst those with an MPCE of over Rs.950, a lot of which are non-farm households. It is also why we need to postpone the joy over the spread of the Net for a bit. PCs with Net connections almost do not exist in rural India. Just about 0.6 per cent of rural households have a computer.
(...) The NSSO seems to underestimate private moneylender debt. Yet it shows that nearly half of all farm households are in debt. In 1991, that figure was 26 per cent.
(...) Mostly crawling out of the bottomless data-on-demand pit of the capital's "think tanks." These surveys in turn get the rah rah treatment from a media dying to show how good the "reform years" have been. In one case, a daily crowed that "Bharat-matches-India-in-bang-for-buck." This was so over the top that even the gung-ho authors of the survey the daily was quoting felt compelled to write a piece saying "Don't romanticize the village." Well, also do not romanticize the growing gap between rich and poor. And do not celebrate gross inequality either.
(...) Mr. Pawar also tells his interviewer: "You will be surprised. In the budgetary provision, not more than two per cent money has been allocated for agriculture. [Though that is] where more than 65 per cent of the population works."
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
they've got the world by the belly:
As the Wall Street Journal (April 30, 2008) notes: “At a time when parts of the world are facing food riots, Big Agriculture is dealing with a different sort of challenge: huge profits.” The WSJ points to the grain-processing giant Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., which saw a 42 per cent leap in its fiscal third quarter profits. “Including a sevenfold increase in net income in its unit that stores, transports and trades grains such as wheat and corn, as well as soybeans.”
(...) “Some observers think financial speculation has helped push up prices as wealthy investors in the past year have flooded the agriculture commodity markets in search of better returns.” So much so that “The Commodity Futures Trading Commission last week held a hearing in Washington to examine the role index funds and other speculators are playing in driving up grain prices.” The WSJ cites research showing that total index fund investment in corn, soybean, wheat, cattle and hogs has risen by 37 billion dollars (which is well over double India’s farm loan waiver for millions of farmers) since 2006.
(...) But you cannot live without food and water. The latter “commodity” is the focus of the biggest thrust of some huge multinational companies. And we are well into the process of privatising water in India (for them) in a process that promises chaos, misery and conflict on a scale we cannot begin to grasp at this point.
(...) Across the globe, the entire chain of resources and inputs is now getting cornered by corporations. Farm land, water, fertilizer, seed, pesticide and many more. Grab these together and you’ve got the world by its belly. The giant companies are now putting out papers on how they will solve the world’s food problem. Never mind they are at the heart of it.
(...) Meanwhile, making chemical fertilizer requires large use of fossil fuels. So rising oil prices further spur the fertilizer crisis. The rip-off by the top corporations in that sector has been so great that even the United States Senate saw moves to impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies. (In India, the government responded to such calls by transferring the burden to the people and asking for “patience on the inflationary trend.”) Of course, it was scotched in the Senate, too.
(...) For well over a decade now, we have invested less and less in agriculture. Following the World Bank-IMF menu, we discouraged food crop and focused on cash crop and sang the hymns of export-led growth. Mindless de-regulation saw corporate control grip more sectors of agriculture. Seed, fertilizer, markets, you name it. We reduced our agricultural universities to labs for private corporations. We stepped up our use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Millions of farmers were shifted to a much higher-cost economy where input costs are crippling. A (non-organic) farmer in 1991 could cultivate an acre of cotton in Vidharbha for Rs. 2,500. [Just over $60.] Today that would cost him or her Rs. 13,000 or more, given the “miracles” of chemicals, pesticides and Bt.
(...) And then we withdrew credit. Even if the fertilizer comes through this season, countless farmers in the post-loan waiver world find themselves without fresh credit. “We’re not mad,” say bank managers in crisis regions. “The farmer has no new income. Nor better prices. How will someone who could not repay Rs. 10,000 repay thrice that sum?” So who do farmers seeking credit turn to? The very input dealers who are emerging the major source of informal credit in the countryside. And who are implicated in the black marketing of vital inputs in every crisis.
As the Wall Street Journal (April 30, 2008) notes: “At a time when parts of the world are facing food riots, Big Agriculture is dealing with a different sort of challenge: huge profits.” The WSJ points to the grain-processing giant Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., which saw a 42 per cent leap in its fiscal third quarter profits. “Including a sevenfold increase in net income in its unit that stores, transports and trades grains such as wheat and corn, as well as soybeans.”
(...) “Some observers think financial speculation has helped push up prices as wealthy investors in the past year have flooded the agriculture commodity markets in search of better returns.” So much so that “The Commodity Futures Trading Commission last week held a hearing in Washington to examine the role index funds and other speculators are playing in driving up grain prices.” The WSJ cites research showing that total index fund investment in corn, soybean, wheat, cattle and hogs has risen by 37 billion dollars (which is well over double India’s farm loan waiver for millions of farmers) since 2006.
(...) But you cannot live without food and water. The latter “commodity” is the focus of the biggest thrust of some huge multinational companies. And we are well into the process of privatising water in India (for them) in a process that promises chaos, misery and conflict on a scale we cannot begin to grasp at this point.
(...) Across the globe, the entire chain of resources and inputs is now getting cornered by corporations. Farm land, water, fertilizer, seed, pesticide and many more. Grab these together and you’ve got the world by its belly. The giant companies are now putting out papers on how they will solve the world’s food problem. Never mind they are at the heart of it.
(...) Meanwhile, making chemical fertilizer requires large use of fossil fuels. So rising oil prices further spur the fertilizer crisis. The rip-off by the top corporations in that sector has been so great that even the United States Senate saw moves to impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies. (In India, the government responded to such calls by transferring the burden to the people and asking for “patience on the inflationary trend.”) Of course, it was scotched in the Senate, too.
(...) For well over a decade now, we have invested less and less in agriculture. Following the World Bank-IMF menu, we discouraged food crop and focused on cash crop and sang the hymns of export-led growth. Mindless de-regulation saw corporate control grip more sectors of agriculture. Seed, fertilizer, markets, you name it. We reduced our agricultural universities to labs for private corporations. We stepped up our use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Millions of farmers were shifted to a much higher-cost economy where input costs are crippling. A (non-organic) farmer in 1991 could cultivate an acre of cotton in Vidharbha for Rs. 2,500. [Just over $60.] Today that would cost him or her Rs. 13,000 or more, given the “miracles” of chemicals, pesticides and Bt.
(...) And then we withdrew credit. Even if the fertilizer comes through this season, countless farmers in the post-loan waiver world find themselves without fresh credit. “We’re not mad,” say bank managers in crisis regions. “The farmer has no new income. Nor better prices. How will someone who could not repay Rs. 10,000 repay thrice that sum?” So who do farmers seeking credit turn to? The very input dealers who are emerging the major source of informal credit in the countryside. And who are implicated in the black marketing of vital inputs in every crisis.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
lebanon intrusion:
The uprising took place during a general strike to protest the Siniora cabinet's refusal to raise the minimum wage and increase fuel subsidies in the face of rising prices in food and other basic commodities. The tense atmosphere was exacerbated by the politicized firing of a popular brigadier general in charge of security at the Beirut Airport and efforts to close down Hezbollah's telecommunication network, which had played an important role in mobilizing defenses and relief operations during the massive Israeli bombing campaign against Lebanon in 2006. The Bush administration had been strongly encouraging the prime minister to enact such policies.
(...) Lebanon's "duly elected government," a legacy of a complex system of confessional representation imposed by French colonialists as a means of divide-and-rule, consists of a slim majority made up by the May 14th Alliance, a broad coalition consisting of 17 parties dominated by center-right parties led by Sunni Muslims, a center-left party led by Druze, and far-right parties led by Christian Maronites. The opposition March 8th Alliance consists of 41 parties, led by the radical Shia Hezbollah, the more moderate Shia Amal, the centrist Maronite-led Free Patriotic Movement, as well as a various leftist and Arab nationalist parties.
(...) The resolution also over-simplifies the complicated dimensions of the conflict by putting the onus for the violence exclusively on Hezbollah. For example, the resolution accuses Hezbollah of sacking and burning the buildings housing the television studios and newspaper of a pro-government party, when it fact it was SSNP partisans that did so. Similarly, the resolution also blames Hezbollah for "fomenting riots" and "blocking roads," when in fact these were actions by trade unionists and others as part of a general strike pressing demands for greater economic justice, an agenda supported by those from across the political and sectarian divide.
(...) Though the military actions by the militias of Hezbollah and its allies were clearly illegitimate, the hyperbolic language of the resolution went to rather absurd extremes. For example, the resolution referred to Hezbollah's armed mobilization, in which its forces briefly controlled key neighborhoods in West Beirut, as an "illegal occupation of territory under the sovereignty of the Government of Lebanon." By contrast, not once in Israel's 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon between 1978 and 2000, which took place in defiance of no less than 10 UN Security Council resolutions, did Congress ever go on record condemning Israel's actions or even referring to it as the illegal occupation that it was.
(...) In reality, there is little evidence to suggest that Syrian and Iranian influence on this populist Shia party and its allies is any greater than U.S. influence on some of Lebanon's other political factions. Indeed, many Lebanese blame the United States for much of the political crisis which has paralyzed the government during the past year and which culminated in last month's violence as a result of the Bush administration's pressure on Siniora and his allies to resist any compromise with the opposition on economic, political or security issues.
(...) The resolution went as far as calling upon the United Nations Security Council to "prohibit all air traffic between Iran and Lebanon and between Iran and Syria" on the grounds that it might be used to bring in arms to the Hezbollah militia, thereby placing a large bipartisan majority in Congress on record calling for the disruption of legitimate commercial activities between foreign countries due to the possibility that a few of the thousands of annual flights may include contraband armaments. This demand is particularly ironic given that the U.S. government transports tens of billions of dollars worth of armaments to repressive governments in the greater Middle East region every year, as well as arming private militias in Iraq and separatist guerrillas in Iran.
(...) Other observers, including Paul, warned of the consequences of further U.S. meddling in Lebanon's internal conflicts. "This resolution leads us closer to a wider war in the Middle East," Paul said. "It involves the United States unnecessarily in an internal conflict between competing Lebanese political factions and will increase rather than decrease the chance for an increase in violence. The Lebanese should work out political disputes on their own or with the assistance of regional organizations like the Arab League."
(...) The resolution correctly observes how "United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1559, 1680, and 1701 call for the disbanding and disarming of all militias in Lebanon" but that "Hezbollah has contemptuously dismissed the requirements of the United Nations Security Council by refusing to disarm." However, there is nothing in the resolution regarding militias allied with the U.S.-backed prime minister, which are also required to disarm. Siniora's Future Movement militia, which Hezbollah fighters battled on the streets of West Beirut, has emerged since these UN resolutions passed without any apparent disapproval from Washington.
(...) Yet, for the Democratic-controlled Congress, as with the Bush administration, the complex cleavages of the contemporary Middle East can be simply understood as a matter of good versus evil. "We have a situation here where a democratic, freedom-loving, sovereign people are insisting on the results of their own self-determined election that they came to through democratic processes and are doing that in the face of outside interference in the form of armed opposition, murders, assassinations that are being sponsored by Hezbollah, financed by the Iranian and Syrian regimes," Ackerman said.
(...) Hezbollah's provocative military action in May, which violated its pledge to use its armed militia only in defense of the country from Israel and not against its fellow Lebanese, has hurt its standing among the country's non-Shia majority, who now see them more as advancing their own parochial interests than serving the role they had previously embraced as a national resistance movement against foreign occupation forces. Washington's support for Israel's military attacks on civilian targets in Lebanon and this latest resolution backing rival armed factions, however, does little to encourage Hezbollah to disarm or promote efforts to advance nonviolent conflict resolution and national reconciliation.
The uprising took place during a general strike to protest the Siniora cabinet's refusal to raise the minimum wage and increase fuel subsidies in the face of rising prices in food and other basic commodities. The tense atmosphere was exacerbated by the politicized firing of a popular brigadier general in charge of security at the Beirut Airport and efforts to close down Hezbollah's telecommunication network, which had played an important role in mobilizing defenses and relief operations during the massive Israeli bombing campaign against Lebanon in 2006. The Bush administration had been strongly encouraging the prime minister to enact such policies.
(...) Lebanon's "duly elected government," a legacy of a complex system of confessional representation imposed by French colonialists as a means of divide-and-rule, consists of a slim majority made up by the May 14th Alliance, a broad coalition consisting of 17 parties dominated by center-right parties led by Sunni Muslims, a center-left party led by Druze, and far-right parties led by Christian Maronites. The opposition March 8th Alliance consists of 41 parties, led by the radical Shia Hezbollah, the more moderate Shia Amal, the centrist Maronite-led Free Patriotic Movement, as well as a various leftist and Arab nationalist parties.
(...) The resolution also over-simplifies the complicated dimensions of the conflict by putting the onus for the violence exclusively on Hezbollah. For example, the resolution accuses Hezbollah of sacking and burning the buildings housing the television studios and newspaper of a pro-government party, when it fact it was SSNP partisans that did so. Similarly, the resolution also blames Hezbollah for "fomenting riots" and "blocking roads," when in fact these were actions by trade unionists and others as part of a general strike pressing demands for greater economic justice, an agenda supported by those from across the political and sectarian divide.
(...) Though the military actions by the militias of Hezbollah and its allies were clearly illegitimate, the hyperbolic language of the resolution went to rather absurd extremes. For example, the resolution referred to Hezbollah's armed mobilization, in which its forces briefly controlled key neighborhoods in West Beirut, as an "illegal occupation of territory under the sovereignty of the Government of Lebanon." By contrast, not once in Israel's 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon between 1978 and 2000, which took place in defiance of no less than 10 UN Security Council resolutions, did Congress ever go on record condemning Israel's actions or even referring to it as the illegal occupation that it was.
(...) In reality, there is little evidence to suggest that Syrian and Iranian influence on this populist Shia party and its allies is any greater than U.S. influence on some of Lebanon's other political factions. Indeed, many Lebanese blame the United States for much of the political crisis which has paralyzed the government during the past year and which culminated in last month's violence as a result of the Bush administration's pressure on Siniora and his allies to resist any compromise with the opposition on economic, political or security issues.
(...) The resolution went as far as calling upon the United Nations Security Council to "prohibit all air traffic between Iran and Lebanon and between Iran and Syria" on the grounds that it might be used to bring in arms to the Hezbollah militia, thereby placing a large bipartisan majority in Congress on record calling for the disruption of legitimate commercial activities between foreign countries due to the possibility that a few of the thousands of annual flights may include contraband armaments. This demand is particularly ironic given that the U.S. government transports tens of billions of dollars worth of armaments to repressive governments in the greater Middle East region every year, as well as arming private militias in Iraq and separatist guerrillas in Iran.
(...) Other observers, including Paul, warned of the consequences of further U.S. meddling in Lebanon's internal conflicts. "This resolution leads us closer to a wider war in the Middle East," Paul said. "It involves the United States unnecessarily in an internal conflict between competing Lebanese political factions and will increase rather than decrease the chance for an increase in violence. The Lebanese should work out political disputes on their own or with the assistance of regional organizations like the Arab League."
(...) The resolution correctly observes how "United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1559, 1680, and 1701 call for the disbanding and disarming of all militias in Lebanon" but that "Hezbollah has contemptuously dismissed the requirements of the United Nations Security Council by refusing to disarm." However, there is nothing in the resolution regarding militias allied with the U.S.-backed prime minister, which are also required to disarm. Siniora's Future Movement militia, which Hezbollah fighters battled on the streets of West Beirut, has emerged since these UN resolutions passed without any apparent disapproval from Washington.
(...) Yet, for the Democratic-controlled Congress, as with the Bush administration, the complex cleavages of the contemporary Middle East can be simply understood as a matter of good versus evil. "We have a situation here where a democratic, freedom-loving, sovereign people are insisting on the results of their own self-determined election that they came to through democratic processes and are doing that in the face of outside interference in the form of armed opposition, murders, assassinations that are being sponsored by Hezbollah, financed by the Iranian and Syrian regimes," Ackerman said.
(...) Hezbollah's provocative military action in May, which violated its pledge to use its armed militia only in defense of the country from Israel and not against its fellow Lebanese, has hurt its standing among the country's non-Shia majority, who now see them more as advancing their own parochial interests than serving the role they had previously embraced as a national resistance movement against foreign occupation forces. Washington's support for Israel's military attacks on civilian targets in Lebanon and this latest resolution backing rival armed factions, however, does little to encourage Hezbollah to disarm or promote efforts to advance nonviolent conflict resolution and national reconciliation.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
In a brazen attack, Taliban fighters assaulted the main prison in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Friday night, blowing up the mud walls, killing 15 guards and freeing around 1,200 inmates. Among the escapees were about 350 Taliban members, including commanders, would-be suicide bombers and assassins, said Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of Kandahar’s provincial council and a brother of President Hamid Karzai.
(...) The prison was recently the scene of unrest, with some 400 prisoners staging a hunger strike in May to protest their long detention without trial. Some had been held for as long as two years without trial, and some were being refused the right to appeal very harsh sentences, they said. More than 40 of the prisoners stitched their lips together with needle and thread to demonstrate their determination. Some 300 women who came to protest outside the prison at the time said their relatives inside had been picked up by NATO and American military sweeps and were innocent but nevertheless held without trial for months and even years. Local elders and government officials negotiated an end to the protest and promised better conditions and justice. Yet, the jailbreak is likely to prove popular with many local families.
(...) The prison was recently the scene of unrest, with some 400 prisoners staging a hunger strike in May to protest their long detention without trial. Some had been held for as long as two years without trial, and some were being refused the right to appeal very harsh sentences, they said. More than 40 of the prisoners stitched their lips together with needle and thread to demonstrate their determination. Some 300 women who came to protest outside the prison at the time said their relatives inside had been picked up by NATO and American military sweeps and were innocent but nevertheless held without trial for months and even years. Local elders and government officials negotiated an end to the protest and promised better conditions and justice. Yet, the jailbreak is likely to prove popular with many local families.
Friday, June 13, 2008
afghanistan: mirage of the good war
(...) Two principal arguments, often overlapping, are put forward as to ‘what went wrong’ in Afghanistan. For liberal imperialists, the answer can be summarized in two words: ‘not enough’. The invasion organized by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld was done on the cheap. The ‘light footprint’ demanded by the Pentagon meant that there were too few troops on the ground in 2001–02. Financial commitment to ‘state-building’ was insufficient. Though it may now be too late, the answer is to pour in more troops, more money—‘multiple billions’ over ‘multiple years’, according to the us Ambassador in Kabul. [4] The second answer—advanced by Karzai and the White House, but propagated by the Western media generally—can be summed up in one word: Pakistan. Neither of these arguments holds water.
(...) Yet never have such gaping inequalities featured on this scale before. Little of the supposed $19 billion ‘aid and reconstruction’ money has reached the majority of Afghans. The mains electricity supply is worse now than five years ago, and while the rich can use private generators to power their air conditioners, hot-water heaters, computers and satellite tvs, average Kabulis ‘suffered a summer without fans and face a winter without heaters.’ [15] As a result, hundreds of shelterless Afghans are literally freezing to death each winter.
(...) Then there are the ngos who descended on the country like locusts after the occupation.
(...) The argument that more nato troops are the solution is equally unsustainable. All the evidence suggests that the brutality of the occupying forces has been one of the main sources of recruits for the Taliban. American air power, lovingly referred to as ‘Big Daddy’ by frightened us soldiers on unwelcome terrain, is far from paternal when it comes to targeting Pashtun villages. There is widespread fury among Afghans at the number of civilian casualties, many of them children. There have been numerous incidents of rape and rough treatment of women by isaf soldiers, as well as indiscriminate bombing of villages and house-to-house search-and-arrest missions. The behaviour of the foreign mercenaries backing up the nato forces is just as bad. Even sympathetic observers admit that ‘their alcohol consumption and patronage of a growing number of brothels in Kabul . . . is arousing public anger and resentment.’ [18] To this could be added the deaths by torture at the us-run Bagram prison and the resuscitation of a Soviet-era security law under which detainees are being sentenced to 20-year jail terms on the basis of summary allegations by us military authorities. All this creates a thirst for dignity that can only be assuaged by genuine independence.
(...) One reason suggested for their increasing support in towns is that the new-model Taliban have relaxed their religious strictures, for males at least—no longer demanding beards or banning music—and improved their propaganda: producing cassette tapes and cds of popular singers, and dvds of us and Israeli atrocities in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine.
(...) It is virtually impossible to build a Texan fence or an Israeli wall across the mountainous and largely unmarked 1,500-mile frontier that separates the two countries.
(...) Some 90 per cent of the world opium supply emanates from Afghanistan. Since 2003 the nato mission has made no serious attempt to bring about a reduction in this lucrative trade. Karzai’s own supporters would rapidly desert if their activities in this sphere were disrupted, and the amount of state help needed over many years to boost agriculture and cottage industries and reduce dependence on poppy farming would require an entirely different set of priorities. Only a surreal utopian could expect nato countries, busy privatizing and deregulating their own economies, to embark upon full-scale national-development projects abroad.
(...) It need hardly be added that the bombardment and occupation of Afghanistan has been a disastrous—and predictable—failure in capturing the perpetrators of 9.11. This could only have been the result of effective police work; not of international war and military occupation. Everything that has happened in Afghanistan since 2001—not to mention Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon—has had the opposite effect, as the West’s own intelligence reports have repeatedly confirmed. According to the official 9.11 Commission report, Mullah Omar’s initial response to Washington’s demands that Osama Bin Laden be handed over and al-Qaeda deprived of a safe haven was ‘not negative’; he himself had opposed any al-Qaeda attack on us targets. [23] But while the Mullah was playing for time, the White House closed down negotiations. It required a swift war of revenge. Afghanistan had been denominated the first port of call in the ‘global war on terror’, with Iraq already the Administration’s main target. The shock-and-awe six-week aerial onslaught that followed was merely a drumroll for the forthcoming intervention in Iraq, with no military rationale in Afghanistan. Predictably, it only gave al-Qaeda leaders the chance to vanish into the hills. To portray the invasion as a ‘war of self-defence’ for nato makes a mockery of international law, which was perverted to twist a flukishly successful attack by a tiny, terrorist Arab groupuscule into an excuse for an open-ended American military thrust into the Middle East and Central Eurasia.
(...) As ever, geopolitics prevails over Afghan interests in the calculus of the big powers. The basing agreement signed by the us with its appointee in Kabul in May 2005 gives the Pentagon the right to maintain a massive military presence in Afghanistan in perpetuity, potentially including nuclear missiles. That Washington is not seeking permanent bases in this fraught and inhospitable terrain simply for the sake of ‘democratization and good governance’ was made clear by nato’s Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at the Brookings Institution in February this year: a permanent nato presence in a country that borders the ex-Soviet republics, China, Iran and Pakistan was too good to miss.
(...) Two principal arguments, often overlapping, are put forward as to ‘what went wrong’ in Afghanistan. For liberal imperialists, the answer can be summarized in two words: ‘not enough’. The invasion organized by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld was done on the cheap. The ‘light footprint’ demanded by the Pentagon meant that there were too few troops on the ground in 2001–02. Financial commitment to ‘state-building’ was insufficient. Though it may now be too late, the answer is to pour in more troops, more money—‘multiple billions’ over ‘multiple years’, according to the us Ambassador in Kabul. [4] The second answer—advanced by Karzai and the White House, but propagated by the Western media generally—can be summed up in one word: Pakistan. Neither of these arguments holds water.
(...) Yet never have such gaping inequalities featured on this scale before. Little of the supposed $19 billion ‘aid and reconstruction’ money has reached the majority of Afghans. The mains electricity supply is worse now than five years ago, and while the rich can use private generators to power their air conditioners, hot-water heaters, computers and satellite tvs, average Kabulis ‘suffered a summer without fans and face a winter without heaters.’ [15] As a result, hundreds of shelterless Afghans are literally freezing to death each winter.
(...) Then there are the ngos who descended on the country like locusts after the occupation.
(...) The argument that more nato troops are the solution is equally unsustainable. All the evidence suggests that the brutality of the occupying forces has been one of the main sources of recruits for the Taliban. American air power, lovingly referred to as ‘Big Daddy’ by frightened us soldiers on unwelcome terrain, is far from paternal when it comes to targeting Pashtun villages. There is widespread fury among Afghans at the number of civilian casualties, many of them children. There have been numerous incidents of rape and rough treatment of women by isaf soldiers, as well as indiscriminate bombing of villages and house-to-house search-and-arrest missions. The behaviour of the foreign mercenaries backing up the nato forces is just as bad. Even sympathetic observers admit that ‘their alcohol consumption and patronage of a growing number of brothels in Kabul . . . is arousing public anger and resentment.’ [18] To this could be added the deaths by torture at the us-run Bagram prison and the resuscitation of a Soviet-era security law under which detainees are being sentenced to 20-year jail terms on the basis of summary allegations by us military authorities. All this creates a thirst for dignity that can only be assuaged by genuine independence.
(...) One reason suggested for their increasing support in towns is that the new-model Taliban have relaxed their religious strictures, for males at least—no longer demanding beards or banning music—and improved their propaganda: producing cassette tapes and cds of popular singers, and dvds of us and Israeli atrocities in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine.
(...) It is virtually impossible to build a Texan fence or an Israeli wall across the mountainous and largely unmarked 1,500-mile frontier that separates the two countries.
(...) Some 90 per cent of the world opium supply emanates from Afghanistan. Since 2003 the nato mission has made no serious attempt to bring about a reduction in this lucrative trade. Karzai’s own supporters would rapidly desert if their activities in this sphere were disrupted, and the amount of state help needed over many years to boost agriculture and cottage industries and reduce dependence on poppy farming would require an entirely different set of priorities. Only a surreal utopian could expect nato countries, busy privatizing and deregulating their own economies, to embark upon full-scale national-development projects abroad.
(...) It need hardly be added that the bombardment and occupation of Afghanistan has been a disastrous—and predictable—failure in capturing the perpetrators of 9.11. This could only have been the result of effective police work; not of international war and military occupation. Everything that has happened in Afghanistan since 2001—not to mention Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon—has had the opposite effect, as the West’s own intelligence reports have repeatedly confirmed. According to the official 9.11 Commission report, Mullah Omar’s initial response to Washington’s demands that Osama Bin Laden be handed over and al-Qaeda deprived of a safe haven was ‘not negative’; he himself had opposed any al-Qaeda attack on us targets. [23] But while the Mullah was playing for time, the White House closed down negotiations. It required a swift war of revenge. Afghanistan had been denominated the first port of call in the ‘global war on terror’, with Iraq already the Administration’s main target. The shock-and-awe six-week aerial onslaught that followed was merely a drumroll for the forthcoming intervention in Iraq, with no military rationale in Afghanistan. Predictably, it only gave al-Qaeda leaders the chance to vanish into the hills. To portray the invasion as a ‘war of self-defence’ for nato makes a mockery of international law, which was perverted to twist a flukishly successful attack by a tiny, terrorist Arab groupuscule into an excuse for an open-ended American military thrust into the Middle East and Central Eurasia.
(...) As ever, geopolitics prevails over Afghan interests in the calculus of the big powers. The basing agreement signed by the us with its appointee in Kabul in May 2005 gives the Pentagon the right to maintain a massive military presence in Afghanistan in perpetuity, potentially including nuclear missiles. That Washington is not seeking permanent bases in this fraught and inhospitable terrain simply for the sake of ‘democratization and good governance’ was made clear by nato’s Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at the Brookings Institution in February this year: a permanent nato presence in a country that borders the ex-Soviet republics, China, Iran and Pakistan was too good to miss.
obama is a truly democratic expansionist:
The nomination of Barack Obama, which, according to one breathless commentator, "marks a truly exciting and historic moment in US history", is a product of the new delusion. Actually, it just seems new. Truly exciting and historic moments have been fabricated around US presidential campaigns for as long as I can recall, generating what can only be described as bullsh*t on a grand scale. Race, gender, appearance, body language, rictal spouses and offspring, even bursts of tragic grandeur, are all subsumed by marketing and "image-making", now magnified by "virtual" technology. Thanks to an undemocratic electoral college system (or, in Bush's case, tampered voting machines) only those who both control and obey the system can win.
(...) His second statement, largely ignored, was made in Miami on 23 May. Speaking to the expatriate Cuban community – which over the years has faithfully produced terrorists, assassins and drug runners for US administrations – Obama promised to continue a 47-year crippling embargo on Cuba that has been declared illegal by the UN year after year.
(...) Again, Obama went further than Bush. He said the United States had "lost Latin America". He described the democratically elected governments in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua as a "vacuum" to be filled. He raised the nonsense of Iranian influence in Latin America, and he endorsed Colombia's "right to strike terrorists who seek safe-havens across its borders". Translated, this means the "right" of a regime, whose president and leading politicians are linked to death squads, to invade its neighbours on behalf of Washington. He also endorsed the so-called Merida Initiative, which Amnesty International and others have condemned as the US bringing the "Colombian solution" to Mexico. He did not stop there. "We must press further south as well," he said. Not even Bush has said that.
The nomination of Barack Obama, which, according to one breathless commentator, "marks a truly exciting and historic moment in US history", is a product of the new delusion. Actually, it just seems new. Truly exciting and historic moments have been fabricated around US presidential campaigns for as long as I can recall, generating what can only be described as bullsh*t on a grand scale. Race, gender, appearance, body language, rictal spouses and offspring, even bursts of tragic grandeur, are all subsumed by marketing and "image-making", now magnified by "virtual" technology. Thanks to an undemocratic electoral college system (or, in Bush's case, tampered voting machines) only those who both control and obey the system can win.
(...) His second statement, largely ignored, was made in Miami on 23 May. Speaking to the expatriate Cuban community – which over the years has faithfully produced terrorists, assassins and drug runners for US administrations – Obama promised to continue a 47-year crippling embargo on Cuba that has been declared illegal by the UN year after year.
(...) Again, Obama went further than Bush. He said the United States had "lost Latin America". He described the democratically elected governments in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua as a "vacuum" to be filled. He raised the nonsense of Iranian influence in Latin America, and he endorsed Colombia's "right to strike terrorists who seek safe-havens across its borders". Translated, this means the "right" of a regime, whose president and leading politicians are linked to death squads, to invade its neighbours on behalf of Washington. He also endorsed the so-called Merida Initiative, which Amnesty International and others have condemned as the US bringing the "Colombian solution" to Mexico. He did not stop there. "We must press further south as well," he said. Not even Bush has said that.
the war in iraq is pure murder:
The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. The savagery and brutality of the occupation is tearing apart those who have been deployed to Iraq. As news reports have just informed us, 115 American soldiers committed suicide in 2007. This is a 13% increase in suicides over 2006. And the suicides, as they did in the Vietnam War years, will only rise as distraught veterans come home, unwrap the self-protective layers of cotton wool that keep them from feeling, and face the awful reality of what they did to innocents in Iraq
(...) American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The killing project is not described in these terms to a distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed within the confines of this rhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself will vanish.
(...) "This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18 year-old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," remembered Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts two hundred rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father, and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three. "And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If these f---ing hajis learned to drive, this sh-t wouldn't happen.'"
(...) "A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want," said Spc. Josh Middleton, who served in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. "And you know, 20 year-old kids are yelled at back and forth at Bragg, and we're picking up cigarette butts and getting yelled at every day for having a dirty weapon. But over here, it's like life and death. And 40 year-old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can -- do you know what I mean? -- we have this power that you can't have. That's really liberating. Life is just knocked down to this primal level of, you know, you worry about where the next food's going to come from, the next sleep or the next patrol, and to stay alive. "It's like, you feel like, I don't know, if you're a caveman," he added. "Do you know what I mean? Just, you know, I mean, this is how life is supposed to be. Life and death, essentially. No TV. None of that bullsh-t."
(...) The historian Christopher Browning chronicled the willingness to kill in Ordinary Men, his study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland during World War II. On the morning of July 12, 1942, the battalion, made up of middle-aged recruits, was ordered to shoot 1,800 Jews in the village of Jzefw in a daylong action. The men in the unit had to round up the Jews, march them into the forest, and one by one order them to lie down in a row. The victims, including women, infants, children, and the elderly, were shot dead at close range. Battalion members were offered the option to refuse, an option only about a dozen men took, although a few more asked to be relieved once the killing began. Those who did not want to continue, Browning says, were disgusted rather than plagued by conscience. When the men returned to the barracks they "were depressed, angered, embittered and shaken." They drank heavily. They were told not to talk about the event, "but they needed no encouragement in that direction."
(...) The word "haji" swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in much the same way "gook" was used to debase the Vietnamese and "raghead" is used to belittle those in Afghanistan. Soon those around him ridiculed "haji food," "haji homes," and "haji music." Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked and left to stand terrified for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse. "I experienced horrible confusion," Meja remembered, "not knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what would happen to me if I did anything to help them."
(...) "The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us," Meja said, "led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them."
(...) The failure in Iraq is the same failure that bedeviled the French in Algeria; the United States in Vietnam; and the British, who for 800 years beat, imprisoned, transported, shot, and hanged hundreds of thousands of Irish patriots. Occupation, in each case, turned the occupiers into beasts and fed the insurrection. It created patterns where innocents, as in Iraq, were terrorized and killed. The campaign against a mostly invisible enemy, many veterans said, has given rise to a culture of terror and hatred among U.S. forces, many of whom, losing ground, have in effect declared war on all Iraqis.
(...) Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits -- few people in pulpits have much worth listening to -- but are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must listen to and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a soulless void. They have seen and tasted how war plunges us into perversion, trauma, and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies that have the redemptive power to save us from ourselves.
The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. The savagery and brutality of the occupation is tearing apart those who have been deployed to Iraq. As news reports have just informed us, 115 American soldiers committed suicide in 2007. This is a 13% increase in suicides over 2006. And the suicides, as they did in the Vietnam War years, will only rise as distraught veterans come home, unwrap the self-protective layers of cotton wool that keep them from feeling, and face the awful reality of what they did to innocents in Iraq
(...) American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The killing project is not described in these terms to a distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed within the confines of this rhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself will vanish.
(...) "This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18 year-old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," remembered Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts two hundred rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father, and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three. "And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If these f---ing hajis learned to drive, this sh-t wouldn't happen.'"
(...) "A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want," said Spc. Josh Middleton, who served in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. "And you know, 20 year-old kids are yelled at back and forth at Bragg, and we're picking up cigarette butts and getting yelled at every day for having a dirty weapon. But over here, it's like life and death. And 40 year-old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can -- do you know what I mean? -- we have this power that you can't have. That's really liberating. Life is just knocked down to this primal level of, you know, you worry about where the next food's going to come from, the next sleep or the next patrol, and to stay alive. "It's like, you feel like, I don't know, if you're a caveman," he added. "Do you know what I mean? Just, you know, I mean, this is how life is supposed to be. Life and death, essentially. No TV. None of that bullsh-t."
(...) The historian Christopher Browning chronicled the willingness to kill in Ordinary Men, his study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland during World War II. On the morning of July 12, 1942, the battalion, made up of middle-aged recruits, was ordered to shoot 1,800 Jews in the village of Jzefw in a daylong action. The men in the unit had to round up the Jews, march them into the forest, and one by one order them to lie down in a row. The victims, including women, infants, children, and the elderly, were shot dead at close range. Battalion members were offered the option to refuse, an option only about a dozen men took, although a few more asked to be relieved once the killing began. Those who did not want to continue, Browning says, were disgusted rather than plagued by conscience. When the men returned to the barracks they "were depressed, angered, embittered and shaken." They drank heavily. They were told not to talk about the event, "but they needed no encouragement in that direction."
(...) The word "haji" swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in much the same way "gook" was used to debase the Vietnamese and "raghead" is used to belittle those in Afghanistan. Soon those around him ridiculed "haji food," "haji homes," and "haji music." Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked and left to stand terrified for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse. "I experienced horrible confusion," Meja remembered, "not knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what would happen to me if I did anything to help them."
(...) "The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us," Meja said, "led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them."
(...) The failure in Iraq is the same failure that bedeviled the French in Algeria; the United States in Vietnam; and the British, who for 800 years beat, imprisoned, transported, shot, and hanged hundreds of thousands of Irish patriots. Occupation, in each case, turned the occupiers into beasts and fed the insurrection. It created patterns where innocents, as in Iraq, were terrorized and killed. The campaign against a mostly invisible enemy, many veterans said, has given rise to a culture of terror and hatred among U.S. forces, many of whom, losing ground, have in effect declared war on all Iraqis.
(...) Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits -- few people in pulpits have much worth listening to -- but are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must listen to and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a soulless void. They have seen and tasted how war plunges us into perversion, trauma, and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies that have the redemptive power to save us from ourselves.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
de beers diamond cartel:
Namibia was illegally occupied by apartheid South Africa throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The UN passed a special decree forbidding mining companies from extracting minerals unless they had specific permission. De Beers and its sister company, Anglo-American, defied this decree and made secret arrangements to overmine the diamonds ahead of Namibian independence. As the technical assistant to the mine manager, Gordon Brown felt it was his simple duty to blow the whistle and came forward to give hard evidence of this illegal behaviour to a judicial enquiry. Since then he has been targeted by members of De Beers' security and their colleagues in the Police Diamond Branch.
(...) 10 things we know about De Beers diamond cartel because of Gordon Brown
1. The Anglo-American corporation obtained control of the Namibian diamond deposit in highly dubious circumstances during and after World War I and ran it as a monopoly business even though the League of Nations/United Nations mandate expressly outlawed all monopolies.
2. De Beers took control of a diamond deposit the size of Wales in return for an annual ground remit of £130 per annum. This rent never changed between 1920 and 1970.
3. The Namibian Police Diamond and Gold branch was a De Beers front - with offices provided and furnished by the cartel.
4. The South West Africa Diamond Board was a joke watchdog with its offices situated in and paid for by De Beers.
5. The Diamond Board secretary, Stanley Jackson, was seconded to the post by his employers, De Beers and all controls over the movement of diamonds in and out of Namibia were in the hands of cartel officials.
6. The De Beers group opposed all cutting of diamonds in Namibia and structured itself to avoid tax and move minerals though a worldwide web of companies each of which added costs and subtracted profits in order to maximise De Beers returns abroad. This scam is known as transfer pricing.
7. The company had so effectively colonised the government mining department supposedly responsible for regulating it, that the top government mining officials didn't even know the name, never mind the detailed terms of the law they were supposed to enforce.
8. This put De Beers in prime position to abuse the mine, overexploit the diamonds by grade and stone size for many years while the cartel's friends in politics in Britain, America and South Africa delayed independence for Africa's last colony.
9. In this way De Beers shortened the life of the mine and took away an extra billion pounds worth of diamonds ahead of Namibian independence. With working costs at 25% of revenue this means that the company plundered £750 million in excess profit and unjust enrichment from a poor country heading for independence.
10. De Beers diamonds will be remembered as tokens of some people's wealth and other people's poverty because conditions at the world's richest mine were ferociously exploitative with black miners condemned to inhuman conditions, the shocking details of which Gordon Brown, among others, exposed.
Namibia was illegally occupied by apartheid South Africa throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The UN passed a special decree forbidding mining companies from extracting minerals unless they had specific permission. De Beers and its sister company, Anglo-American, defied this decree and made secret arrangements to overmine the diamonds ahead of Namibian independence. As the technical assistant to the mine manager, Gordon Brown felt it was his simple duty to blow the whistle and came forward to give hard evidence of this illegal behaviour to a judicial enquiry. Since then he has been targeted by members of De Beers' security and their colleagues in the Police Diamond Branch.
(...) 10 things we know about De Beers diamond cartel because of Gordon Brown
1. The Anglo-American corporation obtained control of the Namibian diamond deposit in highly dubious circumstances during and after World War I and ran it as a monopoly business even though the League of Nations/United Nations mandate expressly outlawed all monopolies.
2. De Beers took control of a diamond deposit the size of Wales in return for an annual ground remit of £130 per annum. This rent never changed between 1920 and 1970.
3. The Namibian Police Diamond and Gold branch was a De Beers front - with offices provided and furnished by the cartel.
4. The South West Africa Diamond Board was a joke watchdog with its offices situated in and paid for by De Beers.
5. The Diamond Board secretary, Stanley Jackson, was seconded to the post by his employers, De Beers and all controls over the movement of diamonds in and out of Namibia were in the hands of cartel officials.
6. The De Beers group opposed all cutting of diamonds in Namibia and structured itself to avoid tax and move minerals though a worldwide web of companies each of which added costs and subtracted profits in order to maximise De Beers returns abroad. This scam is known as transfer pricing.
7. The company had so effectively colonised the government mining department supposedly responsible for regulating it, that the top government mining officials didn't even know the name, never mind the detailed terms of the law they were supposed to enforce.
8. This put De Beers in prime position to abuse the mine, overexploit the diamonds by grade and stone size for many years while the cartel's friends in politics in Britain, America and South Africa delayed independence for Africa's last colony.
9. In this way De Beers shortened the life of the mine and took away an extra billion pounds worth of diamonds ahead of Namibian independence. With working costs at 25% of revenue this means that the company plundered £750 million in excess profit and unjust enrichment from a poor country heading for independence.
10. De Beers diamonds will be remembered as tokens of some people's wealth and other people's poverty because conditions at the world's richest mine were ferociously exploitative with black miners condemned to inhuman conditions, the shocking details of which Gordon Brown, among others, exposed.
can soccer stop the violence?
"In November last year, the South African Institute of Race Relations estimated 4.2 million South Africans were living on $1 a day in 2005, up from 1.9 million in 1996, two years after the end of apartheid. Globalization was supposed to be the tide to lift all boats, but the evidence in South Africa suggests that millions of boats are not merely missing the tide, they're in an entirely different ocean."
(...) "Construction--and corruption--is booming. But almost none of the building or the money can be accessed by the poor who live in shantytowns without proper water, sanitation or electricity." Housing prices in the twenty-first century have gone up 92 percent, while wages have risen a mere 8 percent. As slums are cleared, tensions will surely rise.
"In November last year, the South African Institute of Race Relations estimated 4.2 million South Africans were living on $1 a day in 2005, up from 1.9 million in 1996, two years after the end of apartheid. Globalization was supposed to be the tide to lift all boats, but the evidence in South Africa suggests that millions of boats are not merely missing the tide, they're in an entirely different ocean."
(...) "Construction--and corruption--is booming. But almost none of the building or the money can be accessed by the poor who live in shantytowns without proper water, sanitation or electricity." Housing prices in the twenty-first century have gone up 92 percent, while wages have risen a mere 8 percent. As slums are cleared, tensions will surely rise.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
mental health of inmates at guantanamo bay:
"I feel like I'm being buried alive," said Ahmed Belbacha, a 39-year-old Algerian who has been in Guantánamo since March 2002. He has been cleared to leave the prison camp for over a year, but he can't. Algeria isn't accepting detainees back home, but even it were, Belbacha is so fearful of being tortured there that he has asked the U.S. federal courts to block his return. But there is no other country willing to take him, and he remains stuck in Guantánamo -- locked in his windowless cell 22 hours a day, with little more than a Koran and single other book to occupy his time.
(...) More than half of the 270 detainees currently at Guantánamo -- including many who are slated for release or transfer -- are housed in high-security facilities akin to U.S. "supermax" prisons. They spend all but two hours a day in small cells with no natural light or fresh air. Their meals are slipped through a slot in the door, and they are given little more than a single book and the Koran to occupy their time. Even their limited "recreation" time -- which is sometimes provided in the middle of the night -- generally takes place in single cell cages so that detainees can't physically interact with one another. None of these detainees have been allowed visits by family members, and very few have been able to make phone calls home.
(...) Gharani's lawyers say he has tried to commit suicide at least seven times. He has slit his wrist, run repeatedly headfirst into the sides of his cell, and tried to hang himself. On several occasions, he has been put on suicide watch in the mental health unit, given the green suicide smock, and placed in a single cell with no other items other than toilet paper. Each time, he has been moved out of the suicide unit and back into high-security detention.
(...) He has never been provided any educational or additional recreation opportunities in accordance with his juvenile status at the time of capture. He has never been allowed to speak with -- let alone see -- any of his family members during his more than six years in U.S. custody. Like the majority of detainees at Guantánamo, he has not been charged with any crime.
(...) Most of these men have been cleared for release since 2003, yet remain in Guantánamo because they can't return to China, and neither the United States nor any other country has been willing to take them in. While five of the Uighurs were resettled in Albania in 2005, 16 others remain housed in one of the most draconian facilities in Guantánamo, reportedly because they threw feces and urine at prison guards following a dispute about the Koran in May 2007. But instead of receiving a 30- or 90-day punishment, as is common in U.S. prisons for disruptive behavior, the Uighurs were moved into one of the highest-security, most restrictive parts of the facility -- indefinitely. As of April 2008 -- almost a year later -- these men were moved to their own wing of the camp, where they are reportedly allowed to keep the meal slots in the door open most of the day, so that they can more easily speak to each other without shouting. Military officials also claim that they are now being granted additional recreation time, including the chance to go into a single recreation pen with another detainee, and that ultimately they will be able to leave their cells during the day and mingle in the common space in the pods. For now, however, they still spend the majority of their days locked in their totally enclosed, windowless cells, unable to congregate for meals or prayer time, and unable to see each other as they talk through the meal slots.
(...) Another Uighur, named Abdusemet, described days on end of doing nothing other than eating, praying, pacing and sitting on his bed. "I am starting to hear voices, sometimes," Abdusemet told his attorney, worriedly. "There is no one to talk to all day in my cell and I hear these voices." He continued: "What did we do? Why do they hate us so much?"
(...) Indeed, it was after a riot in May 2006 -- when detainees attacked guards with improvised weapons, including broken pieces of light bulbs -- followed by three suicides the following month, that the military significantly increased security to prevent further disturbances. Detainees' repeated hunger strikes and suicide attempts, which many outside observers perceive as cries for help, are seen by the military as challenges to its authority. Still, while security concerns may explain some of the controls at Guantánamo, it's hard to justify the extent of such extreme isolation. Although officials try to rationalize harsh conditions, it may be that the regime of prolonged, extreme isolation is contributing to the despair and insubordination among even the innocent or unlucky.
(...) Continuing to house detainees in single-cell units 22 hours a day with virtually nothing to do all day long and no access to natural light or fresh air is not just cruel but may also be counterproductive. None of the detainees at Guantánamo has yet been convicted of a crime, and many are ultimately likely to be released. Warehousing them in such conditions may have a long-term damaging psychological impact. It could further compound legal problems with attempting to repatriate or bring detainees to justice. (Efforts to put some detainees on trial, as we've covered in Salon over the last several weeks, are buckling under the U.S. government's policies at Guantánamo.) And the ongoing treatment of these detainees over the long term is very likely to breed hatred and resentment of the United States.
"I feel like I'm being buried alive," said Ahmed Belbacha, a 39-year-old Algerian who has been in Guantánamo since March 2002. He has been cleared to leave the prison camp for over a year, but he can't. Algeria isn't accepting detainees back home, but even it were, Belbacha is so fearful of being tortured there that he has asked the U.S. federal courts to block his return. But there is no other country willing to take him, and he remains stuck in Guantánamo -- locked in his windowless cell 22 hours a day, with little more than a Koran and single other book to occupy his time.
(...) More than half of the 270 detainees currently at Guantánamo -- including many who are slated for release or transfer -- are housed in high-security facilities akin to U.S. "supermax" prisons. They spend all but two hours a day in small cells with no natural light or fresh air. Their meals are slipped through a slot in the door, and they are given little more than a single book and the Koran to occupy their time. Even their limited "recreation" time -- which is sometimes provided in the middle of the night -- generally takes place in single cell cages so that detainees can't physically interact with one another. None of these detainees have been allowed visits by family members, and very few have been able to make phone calls home.
(...) Gharani's lawyers say he has tried to commit suicide at least seven times. He has slit his wrist, run repeatedly headfirst into the sides of his cell, and tried to hang himself. On several occasions, he has been put on suicide watch in the mental health unit, given the green suicide smock, and placed in a single cell with no other items other than toilet paper. Each time, he has been moved out of the suicide unit and back into high-security detention.
(...) He has never been provided any educational or additional recreation opportunities in accordance with his juvenile status at the time of capture. He has never been allowed to speak with -- let alone see -- any of his family members during his more than six years in U.S. custody. Like the majority of detainees at Guantánamo, he has not been charged with any crime.
(...) Most of these men have been cleared for release since 2003, yet remain in Guantánamo because they can't return to China, and neither the United States nor any other country has been willing to take them in. While five of the Uighurs were resettled in Albania in 2005, 16 others remain housed in one of the most draconian facilities in Guantánamo, reportedly because they threw feces and urine at prison guards following a dispute about the Koran in May 2007. But instead of receiving a 30- or 90-day punishment, as is common in U.S. prisons for disruptive behavior, the Uighurs were moved into one of the highest-security, most restrictive parts of the facility -- indefinitely. As of April 2008 -- almost a year later -- these men were moved to their own wing of the camp, where they are reportedly allowed to keep the meal slots in the door open most of the day, so that they can more easily speak to each other without shouting. Military officials also claim that they are now being granted additional recreation time, including the chance to go into a single recreation pen with another detainee, and that ultimately they will be able to leave their cells during the day and mingle in the common space in the pods. For now, however, they still spend the majority of their days locked in their totally enclosed, windowless cells, unable to congregate for meals or prayer time, and unable to see each other as they talk through the meal slots.
(...) Another Uighur, named Abdusemet, described days on end of doing nothing other than eating, praying, pacing and sitting on his bed. "I am starting to hear voices, sometimes," Abdusemet told his attorney, worriedly. "There is no one to talk to all day in my cell and I hear these voices." He continued: "What did we do? Why do they hate us so much?"
(...) Indeed, it was after a riot in May 2006 -- when detainees attacked guards with improvised weapons, including broken pieces of light bulbs -- followed by three suicides the following month, that the military significantly increased security to prevent further disturbances. Detainees' repeated hunger strikes and suicide attempts, which many outside observers perceive as cries for help, are seen by the military as challenges to its authority. Still, while security concerns may explain some of the controls at Guantánamo, it's hard to justify the extent of such extreme isolation. Although officials try to rationalize harsh conditions, it may be that the regime of prolonged, extreme isolation is contributing to the despair and insubordination among even the innocent or unlucky.
(...) Continuing to house detainees in single-cell units 22 hours a day with virtually nothing to do all day long and no access to natural light or fresh air is not just cruel but may also be counterproductive. None of the detainees at Guantánamo has yet been convicted of a crime, and many are ultimately likely to be released. Warehousing them in such conditions may have a long-term damaging psychological impact. It could further compound legal problems with attempting to repatriate or bring detainees to justice. (Efforts to put some detainees on trial, as we've covered in Salon over the last several weeks, are buckling under the U.S. government's policies at Guantánamo.) And the ongoing treatment of these detainees over the long term is very likely to breed hatred and resentment of the United States.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
interview with ahmed rashid:
Well, the US has given something like $11 billion since 9/11 to Pakistan. About 80 percent of that has gone directly to the military. And with that money, Pakistan has bought over $7 billion to $8 billion worth of arms. Most of those arms have been bought for the Indian border. They’re heavy item numbers like jet fighters and artillery and stuff like that, not items that you need to fight a counterinsurgency that we are facing right now on our western borders. And so, a lot of this money has been wasted. There’s been growing resentment in Pakistan about this.
(...) But still, Pakistan is very much a basket case. It still needs a lot of money. Its economy is in a very bad way. And the problem is that, you know, with this military regime we’ve had for the last nine years, there’s really been very little serious investment in infrastructure, in new industry, new exports which would gain foreign exchange for the country, reducing poverty levels, providing more education which is desperately needed in order to counter this Islamic school madrasah culture that has taken root now in Pakistan. None of these issues are being met by US aid. Most of the US aid, unfortunately, is going to the military.
(...) And then the Americans ask you, “Well, you know, why are Pakistanis anti-American?” Well, what do you expect them to be? I mean, it’s complete—nobody can understand this, why Negroponte is going up every few weeks. He’s been in Pakistan literally about three or four times this year. His main aim has been to shore up Musharraf and to tell the civilian government, “Don’t impeach him. Don’t sack him. Don’t do anything to harm him.” And the Pakistanis can’t understand this. Don’t the Americans have any other agenda with the elected government, to strengthen the elected government and make it more functionable?
(...) the main thesis of my book is that the US failed to carry out effective reconstruction of Afghanistan after 2001. And having done—having been—and Iraq, of course, was the main reason for that. US money and resources were all moved to Iraq. Afghanistan was put on standby, as it were, literally. Nothing was done for over three to four years. And in that time, because there was no investment in agriculture, some two-and-a-half million refugees came back to Afghanistan from neighboring countries, poverty was endemic, farmers went back to growing the crop which didn’t need investment—it didn’t need water, it didn’t need fertilizer—and that was the poppy crop. If there had been investment in agriculture, even minimal investment in agriculture, I think we could have avoided this crisis.
(...) McCain, on the other hand, has said absolutely nothing about Afghanistan, and clearly he can’t, because if he criticizes Afghanistan, he’s criticizing the performance of his own Republican Party. And even though—if you saw this visit just recently—Laura Bush went to Afghanistan a couple of days ago painting a very rosy picture of development and women going to school and all the rest of it, the fact is that one-third of the country is in the grip of an insurgency. So, clearly the Bush administration will be trying to paint Afghanistan as a major success story. We’ve had Condi Rice writing in Foreign Affairs this week about how US policy towards Pakistan is a major success story for the Bush administration. So if McCain is going to be following that line, that Pakistan and Afghanistan are big success stories, frankly, I don’t see anyone buying it. The American people will find it difficult to swallow, when you’ve got reports out today like the RAND Corporation report, which is saying just the opposite.
(...) the Taliban fought back, and the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban fought back and gave the Pakistan army a bloody nose, prompting large-scale desertions from these paramilitary forces who were made up of Pashtun tribesmen. The Pashtun is the main ethnic group in Afghanistan and on the other side of the border in Pakistan. The tribes are divided by an artificial border created by the British. And the Pashtuns are the main recruiting base for the Taliban, and they’re also the main recruiting base for these paramilitary forces. So you had cousin fighting cousin, cousin on the Taliban side, another cousin on the Pakistan army side. And so, what happened was an enormous demoralization within these Pakistani paramilitary forces, desertions. They took heavy casualties. Up to a thousand Pakistanis have been killed in these offensives that they’ve launched in the tribal areas.
Well, the US has given something like $11 billion since 9/11 to Pakistan. About 80 percent of that has gone directly to the military. And with that money, Pakistan has bought over $7 billion to $8 billion worth of arms. Most of those arms have been bought for the Indian border. They’re heavy item numbers like jet fighters and artillery and stuff like that, not items that you need to fight a counterinsurgency that we are facing right now on our western borders. And so, a lot of this money has been wasted. There’s been growing resentment in Pakistan about this.
(...) But still, Pakistan is very much a basket case. It still needs a lot of money. Its economy is in a very bad way. And the problem is that, you know, with this military regime we’ve had for the last nine years, there’s really been very little serious investment in infrastructure, in new industry, new exports which would gain foreign exchange for the country, reducing poverty levels, providing more education which is desperately needed in order to counter this Islamic school madrasah culture that has taken root now in Pakistan. None of these issues are being met by US aid. Most of the US aid, unfortunately, is going to the military.
(...) And then the Americans ask you, “Well, you know, why are Pakistanis anti-American?” Well, what do you expect them to be? I mean, it’s complete—nobody can understand this, why Negroponte is going up every few weeks. He’s been in Pakistan literally about three or four times this year. His main aim has been to shore up Musharraf and to tell the civilian government, “Don’t impeach him. Don’t sack him. Don’t do anything to harm him.” And the Pakistanis can’t understand this. Don’t the Americans have any other agenda with the elected government, to strengthen the elected government and make it more functionable?
(...) the main thesis of my book is that the US failed to carry out effective reconstruction of Afghanistan after 2001. And having done—having been—and Iraq, of course, was the main reason for that. US money and resources were all moved to Iraq. Afghanistan was put on standby, as it were, literally. Nothing was done for over three to four years. And in that time, because there was no investment in agriculture, some two-and-a-half million refugees came back to Afghanistan from neighboring countries, poverty was endemic, farmers went back to growing the crop which didn’t need investment—it didn’t need water, it didn’t need fertilizer—and that was the poppy crop. If there had been investment in agriculture, even minimal investment in agriculture, I think we could have avoided this crisis.
(...) McCain, on the other hand, has said absolutely nothing about Afghanistan, and clearly he can’t, because if he criticizes Afghanistan, he’s criticizing the performance of his own Republican Party. And even though—if you saw this visit just recently—Laura Bush went to Afghanistan a couple of days ago painting a very rosy picture of development and women going to school and all the rest of it, the fact is that one-third of the country is in the grip of an insurgency. So, clearly the Bush administration will be trying to paint Afghanistan as a major success story. We’ve had Condi Rice writing in Foreign Affairs this week about how US policy towards Pakistan is a major success story for the Bush administration. So if McCain is going to be following that line, that Pakistan and Afghanistan are big success stories, frankly, I don’t see anyone buying it. The American people will find it difficult to swallow, when you’ve got reports out today like the RAND Corporation report, which is saying just the opposite.
(...) the Taliban fought back, and the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban fought back and gave the Pakistan army a bloody nose, prompting large-scale desertions from these paramilitary forces who were made up of Pashtun tribesmen. The Pashtun is the main ethnic group in Afghanistan and on the other side of the border in Pakistan. The tribes are divided by an artificial border created by the British. And the Pashtuns are the main recruiting base for the Taliban, and they’re also the main recruiting base for these paramilitary forces. So you had cousin fighting cousin, cousin on the Taliban side, another cousin on the Pakistan army side. And so, what happened was an enormous demoralization within these Pakistani paramilitary forces, desertions. They took heavy casualties. Up to a thousand Pakistanis have been killed in these offensives that they’ve launched in the tribal areas.
chris hedges and lalia al-arian:
The terror that I saw on the patriarch’s face, like I said, that really was the turning point for me. I imagined in my mind what he must have been thinking, understanding that he had lived under Saddam’s brutal regime for many years, worried about—you know, hearing stories about Iraqis being carried away in the middle of the night by the Iraqi secret service and so forth, to see all those lights, all those soldiers with guns, all the uniform things that we wear, as far as the helmet, the night vision goggles, very intimidating, very terrifying for the man. He screamed a very guttural cry that I can still hear it every day. You know, it was just the most awful, horrible sound I’ve ever heard in my life. He was so terrified and so afraid for his family. And I thought of my family at that time, and I thought to myself, boy, if I was the patriarch of a family, if soldiers came from another country, came in and did this to my family, I would be an insurgent, too.
(...) And when they do join the resistance, President Bush says, “They’re al-Qaeda. They’re al-Qaeda.” But they’re not. They’re just regular Iraqi people who feel occupied, and they’re reacting to an occupation.
(...) Well, Amy, the numbers are that less than one percent of the Iraqis actually support a US presence in Iraq, and this has been demonstrated time and time again in polls and also in the result when troops do withdraw from the region. For example, last December, British troops withdrew from Basra, and we saw a calm in the area and a rapid decrease in violence. Some estimates are that it was a 99 percent decrease in violence. So we do see that the results are very clear once troops do withdraw and that there is some stability in this certain region.
(...) These are the pillars of the occupation, and we wanted to give readers a kind of lens or view into the gritty details of how these mechanisms works, such as convoys. I mean, these are just freight trains of death. You have to remain moving once you leave what they call the wire, once you leave the safe perimeter of a base. And so, these heavily armored convoys will drive at breakneck speeds, fifty, sixty miles an hour down the middle of roads, smashing into Iraqi cars, shoving Iraqi vehicles to the side, running over Iraqi civilians, and then, of course, any time an IED goes off, unleashing withering what they call suppressing fire with belt-fed weapons—these are light machine guns like SAWs, .50-caliber machine guns—into a densely populated areas. And so, I think that rather than sort of do a Studs Terkel kind of memoir, we wanted to focus specifically on sort of key mechanisms that make the occupation work, how these mechanisms function, and the effect that these mechanisms have on Iraqi civilians.
(...) checkpoints are deadly for Iraqi civilians, in part because checkpoints are often put up very quickly, so that you can turn a corner in Baghdad, Fallujah or any other city, and there could never have been a checkpoint there, and there suddenly is a checkpoint there. Also, you know, as a kind of security measure, American forces will often put Iraqi forces before their checkpoints. So there’s actually two checkpoints. So you’ll go through the Iraqi forces, and many Iraqi civilians, by the way, are terrified, because they don’t know who those Iraqis are in the uniform. So sometimes they’ll just try and gun it, which will mean that their cars—American forces or Iraqi forces or both will open fire on their car, or they’ll get through the Iraqi checkpoint not expecting another checkpoint, or it’s night, or their breaks don’t work. And in Iraq, the situation is so volatile and so deadly for the occupation forces that the response is to open fire repeatedly. Checkpoints are a very common form of death for Iraqi civilians, and these, you know, incidents where cars are fired upon and whole families are killed are rarely investigated or documented.
(...) You would be hard-pressed to find one single Iraqi family who hasn’t experienced the terrifying experience of a raid. And basically, as John Bruhns described on your show a year ago, they storm into a house, they turn the entire house upside-down, making it look like a hurricane hit it. They usually separate the men from the women and children. Most of the time, the vast majority of the time, they actually arrest the men. They zipcuff them, and they take them to a detention facility or a prison, which leaves the family looking for them for days.
(...) They would say that this is something that’s standard operating procedure, that the convoys that race down the streets, they jump over medians in the middle of the street, they drive on the wrong side of the road. They—again, men get arrested for months, sometimes years, at a time, with their families not even knowing where they are. And this just shows that an occupation not only destroys the people that are under occupation, but the soldiers and Marines who are asked to carry out the occupation, because when these troops return from their service, they’re haunted by what they’ve seen and they’re haunted by what they’ve done.
(...) Well, you know, this is sort of perhaps the great irony of the occupation itself. There is an understanding—and Petraeus wrote the counterinsurgency manual, the new one that’s used by the occupation forces—that you can’t win an insurgency unless you win the support of the civilian population. And yet, I think as this book points out, every single mechanism used to enforce the occupation alienates and enrages the average Iraqi. It is not only a form of collective humiliation of great indignity, but violence and danger and terror is the right word. And that is the experience of these Iraqis.
(...) And so, I think if there’s a kind of summation of the book, it is that we are not a force for stability. We are not a force that in any way dampens or inhibits or minimizes violence. But we are another mix in the cauldron of horror and violence and terror, along with militias and criminal gangs and warlords that go into making Iraqi society essentially a kind of Hobbesian nightmare.
The terror that I saw on the patriarch’s face, like I said, that really was the turning point for me. I imagined in my mind what he must have been thinking, understanding that he had lived under Saddam’s brutal regime for many years, worried about—you know, hearing stories about Iraqis being carried away in the middle of the night by the Iraqi secret service and so forth, to see all those lights, all those soldiers with guns, all the uniform things that we wear, as far as the helmet, the night vision goggles, very intimidating, very terrifying for the man. He screamed a very guttural cry that I can still hear it every day. You know, it was just the most awful, horrible sound I’ve ever heard in my life. He was so terrified and so afraid for his family. And I thought of my family at that time, and I thought to myself, boy, if I was the patriarch of a family, if soldiers came from another country, came in and did this to my family, I would be an insurgent, too.
(...) And when they do join the resistance, President Bush says, “They’re al-Qaeda. They’re al-Qaeda.” But they’re not. They’re just regular Iraqi people who feel occupied, and they’re reacting to an occupation.
(...) Well, Amy, the numbers are that less than one percent of the Iraqis actually support a US presence in Iraq, and this has been demonstrated time and time again in polls and also in the result when troops do withdraw from the region. For example, last December, British troops withdrew from Basra, and we saw a calm in the area and a rapid decrease in violence. Some estimates are that it was a 99 percent decrease in violence. So we do see that the results are very clear once troops do withdraw and that there is some stability in this certain region.
(...) These are the pillars of the occupation, and we wanted to give readers a kind of lens or view into the gritty details of how these mechanisms works, such as convoys. I mean, these are just freight trains of death. You have to remain moving once you leave what they call the wire, once you leave the safe perimeter of a base. And so, these heavily armored convoys will drive at breakneck speeds, fifty, sixty miles an hour down the middle of roads, smashing into Iraqi cars, shoving Iraqi vehicles to the side, running over Iraqi civilians, and then, of course, any time an IED goes off, unleashing withering what they call suppressing fire with belt-fed weapons—these are light machine guns like SAWs, .50-caliber machine guns—into a densely populated areas. And so, I think that rather than sort of do a Studs Terkel kind of memoir, we wanted to focus specifically on sort of key mechanisms that make the occupation work, how these mechanisms function, and the effect that these mechanisms have on Iraqi civilians.
(...) checkpoints are deadly for Iraqi civilians, in part because checkpoints are often put up very quickly, so that you can turn a corner in Baghdad, Fallujah or any other city, and there could never have been a checkpoint there, and there suddenly is a checkpoint there. Also, you know, as a kind of security measure, American forces will often put Iraqi forces before their checkpoints. So there’s actually two checkpoints. So you’ll go through the Iraqi forces, and many Iraqi civilians, by the way, are terrified, because they don’t know who those Iraqis are in the uniform. So sometimes they’ll just try and gun it, which will mean that their cars—American forces or Iraqi forces or both will open fire on their car, or they’ll get through the Iraqi checkpoint not expecting another checkpoint, or it’s night, or their breaks don’t work. And in Iraq, the situation is so volatile and so deadly for the occupation forces that the response is to open fire repeatedly. Checkpoints are a very common form of death for Iraqi civilians, and these, you know, incidents where cars are fired upon and whole families are killed are rarely investigated or documented.
(...) You would be hard-pressed to find one single Iraqi family who hasn’t experienced the terrifying experience of a raid. And basically, as John Bruhns described on your show a year ago, they storm into a house, they turn the entire house upside-down, making it look like a hurricane hit it. They usually separate the men from the women and children. Most of the time, the vast majority of the time, they actually arrest the men. They zipcuff them, and they take them to a detention facility or a prison, which leaves the family looking for them for days.
(...) They would say that this is something that’s standard operating procedure, that the convoys that race down the streets, they jump over medians in the middle of the street, they drive on the wrong side of the road. They—again, men get arrested for months, sometimes years, at a time, with their families not even knowing where they are. And this just shows that an occupation not only destroys the people that are under occupation, but the soldiers and Marines who are asked to carry out the occupation, because when these troops return from their service, they’re haunted by what they’ve seen and they’re haunted by what they’ve done.
(...) Well, you know, this is sort of perhaps the great irony of the occupation itself. There is an understanding—and Petraeus wrote the counterinsurgency manual, the new one that’s used by the occupation forces—that you can’t win an insurgency unless you win the support of the civilian population. And yet, I think as this book points out, every single mechanism used to enforce the occupation alienates and enrages the average Iraqi. It is not only a form of collective humiliation of great indignity, but violence and danger and terror is the right word. And that is the experience of these Iraqis.
(...) And so, I think if there’s a kind of summation of the book, it is that we are not a force for stability. We are not a force that in any way dampens or inhibits or minimizes violence. But we are another mix in the cauldron of horror and violence and terror, along with militias and criminal gangs and warlords that go into making Iraqi society essentially a kind of Hobbesian nightmare.
afghanistan: fear, disillusion, and despair:
In the seventh year after the fall of the first incarnation of the Taliban, two Afghanistans exist. The first is defined by international effort in the country - civil and military - whose story is told in battles won and reconstruction projects brought successfully to fruition. It is largely told through the prism of foreigners, diplomats and soldiers, British, Canadian and American. It emphasises good news, most recently a claim - that would surprise Afghans - that foreign forces were ‘routing’ the Taliban. The other Afghanistan is largely ignored. This has 30 million people in whose name the war is being fought. Its themes are disappointment, bitterness and pessimism: a conviction that the vast intervention to rebuild the world’s fourth poorest country has benefited only a small handful, and Afghanistan is heading for a new crisis. As even some Western diplomats are beginning to acknowledge, the prevailing fear is that the war is in danger not of being lost or won in Helmand province, but in the perceptions of Afghans.
(...) What optimism that there was after the fall of the Taliban has largely dissipated. With 40 per cent unemployment, and faced with drought, rocketing food prices and vast amounts of aid money squandered, the international community’s promises to transform Afghanistan - six years on - ring increasingly hollow.
(...) The accumulating crisis is building around both the failure of governance and the Taliban’s renewed insurgency. Despite national elections in 2004 and 2005, democracy has failed to gain any real traction. Karzai’s Western-backed government, in trying to buy off rival warlords and factions who were once powerful, has created a charmed inner circle. The warlords have found themselves new jobs in the Interior Ministry or police, where they continue to protect drug traffickers. Some of those accused are among Karzai’s closest associates - including his brother Wali. When asked, the unemployed who gather at the roundabouts, the tribal leaders, and the women activists, the journalists and the housewives list the same complaints. Karzai, they say, is ‘weak’. Security is disintegrating. His cabinet is corrupt, the country is in danger again of descending into warlordism.
(...) A UN ‘accessibility’ map shows a very different picture from the official one: a nation sliced in two, much of it hostile for aid workers. Where it is red - classified ‘extreme’ - is where the opium poppies are. Much of the south is red. In the centre of this zone is Kandahar, the Taliban’s first capital in the south. At first glance it seems much like Kabul, a bustling and busy place. Small groups of men pray on the rooftop mosques, silhouetted against the sky. But Kandahar’s differences exist in a hidden geography, in such places as Loyah Wallah, the ‘Big Canal’ district, towards the city university where the Taliban discreetly hold sway. Officially the government says it controls the city. But local people tell a different story. And what people only fear in Kabul, in Kandahar exists as reality.
(...) It is left to a lorry driver from Lashkar Gah to say: ‘There are no jobs.’ And he complains that there is too little security despite the British base. ‘We are all thinking about who will be the next ruler of Afghanistan. If foreign troops go, the Taliban will come. Then there will be resistance and chaos, like there was before. For now there is no peace, no security, no central government. During the time of the Taliban I was left in peace. ‘There is an old Pashto proverb,’ he adds ruefully. ‘The old thieves were better than the new.’
In the seventh year after the fall of the first incarnation of the Taliban, two Afghanistans exist. The first is defined by international effort in the country - civil and military - whose story is told in battles won and reconstruction projects brought successfully to fruition. It is largely told through the prism of foreigners, diplomats and soldiers, British, Canadian and American. It emphasises good news, most recently a claim - that would surprise Afghans - that foreign forces were ‘routing’ the Taliban. The other Afghanistan is largely ignored. This has 30 million people in whose name the war is being fought. Its themes are disappointment, bitterness and pessimism: a conviction that the vast intervention to rebuild the world’s fourth poorest country has benefited only a small handful, and Afghanistan is heading for a new crisis. As even some Western diplomats are beginning to acknowledge, the prevailing fear is that the war is in danger not of being lost or won in Helmand province, but in the perceptions of Afghans.
(...) What optimism that there was after the fall of the Taliban has largely dissipated. With 40 per cent unemployment, and faced with drought, rocketing food prices and vast amounts of aid money squandered, the international community’s promises to transform Afghanistan - six years on - ring increasingly hollow.
(...) The accumulating crisis is building around both the failure of governance and the Taliban’s renewed insurgency. Despite national elections in 2004 and 2005, democracy has failed to gain any real traction. Karzai’s Western-backed government, in trying to buy off rival warlords and factions who were once powerful, has created a charmed inner circle. The warlords have found themselves new jobs in the Interior Ministry or police, where they continue to protect drug traffickers. Some of those accused are among Karzai’s closest associates - including his brother Wali. When asked, the unemployed who gather at the roundabouts, the tribal leaders, and the women activists, the journalists and the housewives list the same complaints. Karzai, they say, is ‘weak’. Security is disintegrating. His cabinet is corrupt, the country is in danger again of descending into warlordism.
(...) A UN ‘accessibility’ map shows a very different picture from the official one: a nation sliced in two, much of it hostile for aid workers. Where it is red - classified ‘extreme’ - is where the opium poppies are. Much of the south is red. In the centre of this zone is Kandahar, the Taliban’s first capital in the south. At first glance it seems much like Kabul, a bustling and busy place. Small groups of men pray on the rooftop mosques, silhouetted against the sky. But Kandahar’s differences exist in a hidden geography, in such places as Loyah Wallah, the ‘Big Canal’ district, towards the city university where the Taliban discreetly hold sway. Officially the government says it controls the city. But local people tell a different story. And what people only fear in Kabul, in Kandahar exists as reality.
(...) It is left to a lorry driver from Lashkar Gah to say: ‘There are no jobs.’ And he complains that there is too little security despite the British base. ‘We are all thinking about who will be the next ruler of Afghanistan. If foreign troops go, the Taliban will come. Then there will be resistance and chaos, like there was before. For now there is no peace, no security, no central government. During the time of the Taliban I was left in peace. ‘There is an old Pashto proverb,’ he adds ruefully. ‘The old thieves were better than the new.’
blackwater: from the nisour square massacre to the future of the mercenary industry:
And what I should say at the onset here is that what’s become very, very clear over the past year is that without Blackwater, the occupation of Iraq would be untenable. I mean, this is a company now that has become so central to the US occupation that it can be responsible for one of the single greatest killing sprees of Iraqi civilians and face basically no consequences for that action and in fact continue to win hundreds of millions of dollars in US State Department contracts. Blackwater in Iraq was awarded over $100 million in contracts just in the two weeks following the Nisour Square shooting. It’s had over a billion dollars in contracts from the United States State Department. And the men who were alleged to have been responsible for those killings at Nisour Square, to this day, are walking around as free individuals.
(...) So, according to the witnesses, including this individual, the shooting of this young Iraqi medical student and his mother really began a shooting—a series of shootings in the square that would ultimately leave seventeen Iraqi civilians dead. And what he’s talking about there is that when the initial shots were fired, what happened was that this mother is sitting in the car and sees her son’s head essentially explode after being shot, and she grabs onto him. And it was an automatic car, and so what may have happened is that the car continued to sort of veer toward the Blackwater men, although aerial photos that were later obtained by the Washington Post revealed that that car hadn’t even really come anywhere close to the Blackwater operatives. That’s the allegation that the Washington Post made based on these aerial photos that they obtained.
(...) But let’s be clear here, we’re talking about what is alleged to be the single greatest massacre of Iraqi civilians by a private force in Iraq. The individuals alleged to have been responsible for that have faced no consequences right now. When the Iraqi government said, “We want to prosecute them as criminals for what they’ve done in our country,” the Bush administration had to remind Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that he in fact is not the prime minister of Iraq, that George Bush is the prime minister of Iraq and that the United States has imposed on Iraq a law, going back to the Bremer era, Order 17, that says that no private contractors in Iraq can be prosecuted by any Iraqi legal system. And Bremer issued this order at the time he was allegedly handing over sovereignty to the Iraqi government. No armed private security contractors have ever been prosecuted for any crimes in Iraq, not to mention killing of Iraqi civilians. So while this grand jury is meeting, I think that the odds of actual justice being achieved here for the victims of the Nisour Square massacre is highly unlikely. Maybe one or two people will go down as a symbolic gesture. Blackwater, as a company, is not facing any consequences for this.
(...) Right. I mean, what happened after the Nisour Square killings was extraordinary. You have the puppet Iraqi government saying, “These guys need to leave the country immediately, and we’re going to prosecute them.” And in fact, Blackwater’s work shut down for three days. As one Iraqi friend of mine said, they turned the Green Zone into the green zoo, because we saw how embedded Blackwater is in the occupation. No US officials could leave the Green Zone when Blackwater’s work was shut down. And so, you understand that, in the words of one US official, Blackwater has a client that will go to the ends of the earth to protect it, to shield it, because the US needs, the Bush administration needs, Blackwater. And so, the response of the Bush administration at every turn was to try to cover up for the individuals who did this shooting, try to protect Blackwater and shield the company from public scrutiny or any consequences for its actions.
(...) The other thing I have to add, Amy, is that when the first—they call it the “first blush” report on this incident came out, it purported to be the State Department’s view of what happened at Nisour Square. It said that they were ambushed, that there was enemy fire, that the Blackwater men were defending American lives in a war zone. And it was written on State Department letterhead, official stationery of the United States State Department. Well, it turns out it was actually written by a Blackwater contractor named Darren Hanner and put forward as the State Department’s official report on it. I mean, this is all what happened right away.
(...) But what has gotten almost no attention is that a US military unit did respond right after the shooting, arrived on the scene. And Lieutenant Colonel Mike Tarsa and his men did an investigation, and what they found is that there was no evidence of enemy fire. They examined the shell casings on the scene and found no evidence that there were any shots fired at the Blackwater convoy. And they labeled it a criminal event and said that all of the Iraqis killed that day were killed as a result of unjustified and unprovoked gunfire. Now, this has gotten almost no attention whatsoever.
(...) But the reality here, Amy, is that if you step back for a minute and you look at the situation, Blackwater’s role in Iraq is completely secure. I mean, what we learned through this in a very clear way is that this occupation cannot continue without Blackwater. It’s now ceased to be just a political dedication on the part of the Bush administration to these kinds of companies. It literally is now the case that they couldn’t do the work of the occupation without Blackwater.
(...) And so, if you say, well, Blackwater’s contract should be cancelled, as some have called for, then the question becomes, who’s going to do their job in Iraq? The military said it doesn’t want to do that, because it conflicts with the mission of the United States military. The State Department says it would take two to three years to recruit, train and vet a force of that size. And Blackwater’s competitors don’t seem to have the personnel to step in and fill Blackwater’s role. So Blackwater’s vice president, Martin Strong, Erik Prince and others, they actually don’t even need to have this debate anymore, because the money is in the bank and the boots are on the ground.
(...) But Erik Prince said shortly after this that he sleeps the sleep of the just. No, he sleeps the sleep of a man who knows that his business is going to be very secure, whether there’s a Democrat or a Republican in the White House. One of the most pathetic things that happened during that hearing where Erik Prince was there was watching the members of the House Oversight Committee who were Democrats reading the report, the investigative report, done by the committee for that hearing during Erik Prince’s testimony. The Democrats were completely unprepared. And in reality, Erik Prince sort of won the day. He was able to avoid having to talk about Nisour Square, which was what brought him there in the first place, and he was never faced, with few exceptions, with a very substantive follow-up to the things he was saying, some of which were totally untrue.
(...) Well, this is one of Erik Prince’s new initiatives. It’s a private CIA, essentially, called Total Intelligence Solutions. It opened for business in February of 2007 and could prove to be one of Blackwater’s most successful ventures. As I said, it’s like a private CIA. In fact, it’s run by three former very senior US intelligence officials. At the top of the Total Intelligence pyramid is J. Cofer Black, who is the former head of counterterrorism at the Central Intelligence Agency, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the CIA, the man who on 9/11 was responsible at the CIA for the hunt for bin Laden. And we’ve talked about him on this show before. He also ran the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, the government-sanctioned kidnap and torture program, where people like Maher Arar are abducted at JFK airport or in other places around the world and then sent to a third country to be tortured, often while being read questions provided by US interrogators. So this man Cofer Black, who said there was a before 9/11 and an after 9/11, and after 9/11 the gloves come off, he’s the head of Total Intelligence Solutions, along with Robert Richer, who is the former deputy director of operations at the Central Intelligence Agency and Enrique “Ric” Prado, who was a veteran of the CIA in Latin America and worked for the CIA’s paramilitary division for a solid decade.
(...) The US has sixteen intelligence agencies now under one umbrella. 70 percent of their combined budget is now in the hands of the private sector. You have private contractors working basically at every level of the US intelligence apparatus. And so, what we see now, through Total Intelligence Solutions, is that Erik Prince is taking the decades and decades of CIA experience, the careers of people like Cofer Black, Robert Richer, Enrique “Ric” Prado, and putting all of their contacts, their knowledge, their networks, their intimate relationships with governments and heads of state around the world, on the open market for bidding.
(...) Blackwater has recruited soldiers from Chile, from Colombia. They paid their Colombian soldiers $34 a day, which is about $1,000 a month. The Chileans were paid somewhere in the ballpark of $4,000. But a US operative working for Blackwater right now is making about $600 to $650 a day. So there’s a real disparity in pay. When you go down to the bottom, you’ve got the Colombians at $34, the US soldiers at $650 a day working for Blackwater.
(...) But on Barack Obama, he’s in a very complicated situation, because his Iraq plan actually is not a plan to end the occupation of Iraq. It’s to continue it with a different label attached to it. And so, you hear him there talking about how “I don’t want to replace contractors with US troops.” The reality is, and Barack Obama knows this very well, his Iraq plan could not be implemented if he was against the use of Blackwater or other private security forces. And the reality is, he’s probably going to have to use these companies for two to three years at a minimum, unless he makes it an aggressive point of trying to shut them down. He might even have to use Blackwater for the first year of his administration.
And what I should say at the onset here is that what’s become very, very clear over the past year is that without Blackwater, the occupation of Iraq would be untenable. I mean, this is a company now that has become so central to the US occupation that it can be responsible for one of the single greatest killing sprees of Iraqi civilians and face basically no consequences for that action and in fact continue to win hundreds of millions of dollars in US State Department contracts. Blackwater in Iraq was awarded over $100 million in contracts just in the two weeks following the Nisour Square shooting. It’s had over a billion dollars in contracts from the United States State Department. And the men who were alleged to have been responsible for those killings at Nisour Square, to this day, are walking around as free individuals.
(...) So, according to the witnesses, including this individual, the shooting of this young Iraqi medical student and his mother really began a shooting—a series of shootings in the square that would ultimately leave seventeen Iraqi civilians dead. And what he’s talking about there is that when the initial shots were fired, what happened was that this mother is sitting in the car and sees her son’s head essentially explode after being shot, and she grabs onto him. And it was an automatic car, and so what may have happened is that the car continued to sort of veer toward the Blackwater men, although aerial photos that were later obtained by the Washington Post revealed that that car hadn’t even really come anywhere close to the Blackwater operatives. That’s the allegation that the Washington Post made based on these aerial photos that they obtained.
(...) But let’s be clear here, we’re talking about what is alleged to be the single greatest massacre of Iraqi civilians by a private force in Iraq. The individuals alleged to have been responsible for that have faced no consequences right now. When the Iraqi government said, “We want to prosecute them as criminals for what they’ve done in our country,” the Bush administration had to remind Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that he in fact is not the prime minister of Iraq, that George Bush is the prime minister of Iraq and that the United States has imposed on Iraq a law, going back to the Bremer era, Order 17, that says that no private contractors in Iraq can be prosecuted by any Iraqi legal system. And Bremer issued this order at the time he was allegedly handing over sovereignty to the Iraqi government. No armed private security contractors have ever been prosecuted for any crimes in Iraq, not to mention killing of Iraqi civilians. So while this grand jury is meeting, I think that the odds of actual justice being achieved here for the victims of the Nisour Square massacre is highly unlikely. Maybe one or two people will go down as a symbolic gesture. Blackwater, as a company, is not facing any consequences for this.
(...) Right. I mean, what happened after the Nisour Square killings was extraordinary. You have the puppet Iraqi government saying, “These guys need to leave the country immediately, and we’re going to prosecute them.” And in fact, Blackwater’s work shut down for three days. As one Iraqi friend of mine said, they turned the Green Zone into the green zoo, because we saw how embedded Blackwater is in the occupation. No US officials could leave the Green Zone when Blackwater’s work was shut down. And so, you understand that, in the words of one US official, Blackwater has a client that will go to the ends of the earth to protect it, to shield it, because the US needs, the Bush administration needs, Blackwater. And so, the response of the Bush administration at every turn was to try to cover up for the individuals who did this shooting, try to protect Blackwater and shield the company from public scrutiny or any consequences for its actions.
(...) The other thing I have to add, Amy, is that when the first—they call it the “first blush” report on this incident came out, it purported to be the State Department’s view of what happened at Nisour Square. It said that they were ambushed, that there was enemy fire, that the Blackwater men were defending American lives in a war zone. And it was written on State Department letterhead, official stationery of the United States State Department. Well, it turns out it was actually written by a Blackwater contractor named Darren Hanner and put forward as the State Department’s official report on it. I mean, this is all what happened right away.
(...) But what has gotten almost no attention is that a US military unit did respond right after the shooting, arrived on the scene. And Lieutenant Colonel Mike Tarsa and his men did an investigation, and what they found is that there was no evidence of enemy fire. They examined the shell casings on the scene and found no evidence that there were any shots fired at the Blackwater convoy. And they labeled it a criminal event and said that all of the Iraqis killed that day were killed as a result of unjustified and unprovoked gunfire. Now, this has gotten almost no attention whatsoever.
(...) But the reality here, Amy, is that if you step back for a minute and you look at the situation, Blackwater’s role in Iraq is completely secure. I mean, what we learned through this in a very clear way is that this occupation cannot continue without Blackwater. It’s now ceased to be just a political dedication on the part of the Bush administration to these kinds of companies. It literally is now the case that they couldn’t do the work of the occupation without Blackwater.
(...) And so, if you say, well, Blackwater’s contract should be cancelled, as some have called for, then the question becomes, who’s going to do their job in Iraq? The military said it doesn’t want to do that, because it conflicts with the mission of the United States military. The State Department says it would take two to three years to recruit, train and vet a force of that size. And Blackwater’s competitors don’t seem to have the personnel to step in and fill Blackwater’s role. So Blackwater’s vice president, Martin Strong, Erik Prince and others, they actually don’t even need to have this debate anymore, because the money is in the bank and the boots are on the ground.
(...) But Erik Prince said shortly after this that he sleeps the sleep of the just. No, he sleeps the sleep of a man who knows that his business is going to be very secure, whether there’s a Democrat or a Republican in the White House. One of the most pathetic things that happened during that hearing where Erik Prince was there was watching the members of the House Oversight Committee who were Democrats reading the report, the investigative report, done by the committee for that hearing during Erik Prince’s testimony. The Democrats were completely unprepared. And in reality, Erik Prince sort of won the day. He was able to avoid having to talk about Nisour Square, which was what brought him there in the first place, and he was never faced, with few exceptions, with a very substantive follow-up to the things he was saying, some of which were totally untrue.
(...) Well, this is one of Erik Prince’s new initiatives. It’s a private CIA, essentially, called Total Intelligence Solutions. It opened for business in February of 2007 and could prove to be one of Blackwater’s most successful ventures. As I said, it’s like a private CIA. In fact, it’s run by three former very senior US intelligence officials. At the top of the Total Intelligence pyramid is J. Cofer Black, who is the former head of counterterrorism at the Central Intelligence Agency, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the CIA, the man who on 9/11 was responsible at the CIA for the hunt for bin Laden. And we’ve talked about him on this show before. He also ran the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, the government-sanctioned kidnap and torture program, where people like Maher Arar are abducted at JFK airport or in other places around the world and then sent to a third country to be tortured, often while being read questions provided by US interrogators. So this man Cofer Black, who said there was a before 9/11 and an after 9/11, and after 9/11 the gloves come off, he’s the head of Total Intelligence Solutions, along with Robert Richer, who is the former deputy director of operations at the Central Intelligence Agency and Enrique “Ric” Prado, who was a veteran of the CIA in Latin America and worked for the CIA’s paramilitary division for a solid decade.
(...) The US has sixteen intelligence agencies now under one umbrella. 70 percent of their combined budget is now in the hands of the private sector. You have private contractors working basically at every level of the US intelligence apparatus. And so, what we see now, through Total Intelligence Solutions, is that Erik Prince is taking the decades and decades of CIA experience, the careers of people like Cofer Black, Robert Richer, Enrique “Ric” Prado, and putting all of their contacts, their knowledge, their networks, their intimate relationships with governments and heads of state around the world, on the open market for bidding.
(...) Blackwater has recruited soldiers from Chile, from Colombia. They paid their Colombian soldiers $34 a day, which is about $1,000 a month. The Chileans were paid somewhere in the ballpark of $4,000. But a US operative working for Blackwater right now is making about $600 to $650 a day. So there’s a real disparity in pay. When you go down to the bottom, you’ve got the Colombians at $34, the US soldiers at $650 a day working for Blackwater.
(...) But on Barack Obama, he’s in a very complicated situation, because his Iraq plan actually is not a plan to end the occupation of Iraq. It’s to continue it with a different label attached to it. And so, you hear him there talking about how “I don’t want to replace contractors with US troops.” The reality is, and Barack Obama knows this very well, his Iraq plan could not be implemented if he was against the use of Blackwater or other private security forces. And the reality is, he’s probably going to have to use these companies for two to three years at a minimum, unless he makes it an aggressive point of trying to shut them down. He might even have to use Blackwater for the first year of his administration.
worlds apart: part 1
Perhaps the real question is how Israel came to be in the same league as apartheid South Africa, whether by mirroring laws and political strategies, or in the suffering caused. And how it is that the government of a people who suffered so much at the hands of discrimination and hatred came to secretly embrace a regime led by men who once stood on the docks of Cape Town and chanted: "Send back the Jews."
(...) As it is, Goldreich sees Israel as closer to the white regime he fought against and modern South Africa as providing the model. Israeli governments, he says, ultimately proved more interested in territory than peace, and along the way Zionism mutated. Goldreich speaks of the "bantustanism we see through a policy of occupation and separation", the "abhorrent" racism in Israeli society all the way up to cabinet ministers who advocate the forced removal of Arabs, and "the brutality and inhumanity of what is imposed on the people of the occupied territories of Palestine".
(...) The contrast between West and East Jerusalem is not as stark, but the disparities between Jewish and Arab neighbourhoods are underpinned by attitudes, policies and laws similar to those used against Johannesburg's black population. Most of Jerusalem's Jews never cross the "green line" - the international border that divided the city until 1967 - and many of those that do go only as far as the Wailing Wall to pray. If more Israelis were to travel deeper into the city they claim as their indivisible capital, they would encounter a different world from their own, a place where roads crumble, rubbish is left uncollected and entire Palestinian neighbourhoods are not connected to the sewage system.
(...) According to the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, Jerusalem's Jewish population, who make up about 70% of the city's 700,000 residents, are served by 1,000 public parks, 36 public swimming pools and 26 libraries. The estimated 260,000 Arabs living in the east of the city have 45 parks, no public swimming pools and two libraries. "Since the annexation of Jerusalem, the municipality has built almost no new school, public building or medical clinic for Palestinians," says a B'Tselem report. "The lion's share of investment has been dedicated to the city's Jewish areas."
(...) "We had the old Group Areas Act in South Africa. East Jerusalem has territorial classification that has the same sort of consequences as race classification had in South Africa in respect of who you can marry, where you can live, where you can go to school or hospital." Palestinians in East Jerusalem, often the city of their birth, are not considered citizens but immigrants with "permanent resident" status, which, some have found, is anything but permanent. In the old South Africa, a large part of the black population was treated not as citizens of the cities and townships they were born into but of a distant homeland many had never visited. "Israel treats Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem as immigrants, who live in their homes at the beneficence of the authorities and not by right," says B'Tselem. "The authorities maintain this policy although these Palestinians were born in Jerusalem, lived in the city and have no other home. Treating these Palestinians as foreigners who entered Israel is astonishing, since it was Israel that entered East Jerusalem in 1967."
(...) "Planning and urban policy, which normal cities view as this benign tool, was used as a powerful partisan tool to subordinate and control black people in Johannesburg and is still used that way against Palestinians in Jerusalem," says Scott Bollens, a University of California professor of urban planning who has studied divided cities across the globe, including Belfast, Berlin, Nicosia and Mostar. "In South Africa there was 'group areas' legislation, and then there was land use, planning tools and zoning that were used to reinforce and back up group areas. In Israel, they use a whole set of similar tools. They are very devious, in that planning is often viewed as this thing that is not part of politics. In Jerusalem, it's fundamental to their project of control, and Israeli planners and politicians have known that since day one. They've been very explicit in linking the planning tools with their political project."
(...) The authors of a 1992 book on Jerusalem, Separate and Unequal, laid bare the policy. The writers, two of whom were advisers to the city's mayors, said that Israeli policy since 1967 was "remorselessly" pursued with four objectives: to expand the Jewish population in the mainly Arab east of the city; to hinder growth of Arab neighbourhoods; to induce Arabs to leave; and to seal off Arab areas behind Jewish settlements.
(...) Of the 70 sq km of annexed Arab land around Jerusalem, the state expropriated more than one-third to build homes for Jews without constructing a single house for Palestinians on the confiscated land. The Jewish population of East Jerusalem had fled or been driven out in 1948. A gradual return after 1967 turned to a flood as the settlements ate into the east of the city. Today, the population of Jewish settlements in and close to East Jerusalem has grown to nearly two-thirds that of the Arab neighbourhoods.
(...) During the 1990s, about 12 times as many new homes were legally built in Jewish areas as in Arab ones. Denied permission to build new homes or expand existing ones, many Palestinians build anyway and risk a demolition order. Israel's former prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, routinely defends the demolitions by arguing that any civilised society enforces planning regulations. But Israel is the only western society to deny construction permits to people on the grounds of race. Until 1992, so did South Africa.
(...) Israeli law also restricts where non-Jews may live. "Muslims and Christians are barred from buying in the Jewish quarter of the old city on the grounds of "historic patterns of life of each community having its own quarter'," says Seidemann, in a phrase eerily reminiscent of apartheid's philosophy. "But that didn't prevent the Israeli government from aggressively pursuing activities to place Jews within the Muslim quarter. The attitude is: what's mine is exclusively mine, but what's yours is mixed if we happen to target it."
(...) "What stands out for Jerusalem and Johannesburg is that it was and is such a prolonged use of planning in pursuit of a political objective," says Scott Bollens. "One distinction with South Africa is the racial identifiers and the racial rhetoric was so blatant, and it was so visible and it was so much part of apartheid South African language. But, despite the difference in rhetoric, the outcomes are very, very similar and the urban landscape Israel has created in the Jerusalem region is just as unequal, just as subjugating of the Palestinians as the 'group area' planning was in South Africa for the blacks."
(...) A former Jerusalem city councillor, Meir Margalit, says the process was flawed from the start because the steering committee of 31 people who put the plan together included only one Arab. "It is characteristic everywhere of colonial regimes which believe that the 'natives' are worthy neither of suitable representation nor of being masters of their own fate. The planning team apparently sets out from the assumption that, in any case, one is dealing with a Jewish city and therefore there is no reason to ask the opinion of anyone who does not belong to the Jewish people," he says.
(...) "This, in fact, is the strength of municipal racism. It is neither brutal nor openly visible, preferring to take cover behind apparently neutral formulations. Thus it is always carefully concealed behind consensus-oriented wording, hidden beneath a thick layer of cosmetic liberal language," he says. "This is how a unique term which does not exist in the professional literature was born in our country: 'grey racism'. This is not a racism stemming from hatred of the 'other', but a 'lite racism' rooted in a Zionist ideology which strove to be democratic but, in giving priority to Jewish interests, inevitably deprived others of their rights. When there is no equality, there is bound to be discrimination, and when all those discriminated against are of the same nationality, there is no alternative but to call it what it is - 'national discrimination' - which belongs to the same family as the infamous racial discrimination."
(...) According to the municipality's most recent annual figures, the council issued 1,695 building permits in the city in 2004. Of these, 116 went to Arab parts of East Jerusalem and, of those, 46 were to build new homes. The balance was for extensions to existing houses. In 2004, a total of 212,789 sq metres was built in all of Jerusalem; 7% was in Arab neighbourhoods. Several months ago, Israel's cabinet minister for Jerusalem, Haim Ramon, described the 33ft-high wall dissecting Arab neighbourhoods - which the government has insisted is purely a security measure with no political intent - as having the added advantage of making the city "more Jewish".
(...) Israel's one million Arab citizens are on a firmer footing. They can vote - the primary evidence, for many angered by the apartheid analogy, that Israel is not the old South Africa - at least, within Israel's recognised borders. But the Jewish state has long viewed its remaining Arab population with suspicion and hostility, and even as the enemy within, through the country's wars for survival against hostile neighbours and in the competition for land. Until 1966, Israeli Arabs lived under "military administration" which allowed detention without trial and subjected them to curfews, restrictions on jobs and where they could live, and required them to obtain passes to move around the country.
(...) Israeli governments reserved 93% of the land - often expropriated from Arabs without compensation - for Jews through state ownership, the Jewish National Fund and the Israeli Lands Authority. In colonial and then apartheid South Africa, 87% of the land was reserved for whites. The Population Registration Act categorised South Africans according to an array of racial definitions, which, among other things, determined who would be permitted to live on the reserved land. Israel's Population Registry Act serves a similar purpose by distinguishing between nationality and citizenship. Arabs and Jews alike can be citizens, but each is assigned a separate "nationality" marked on identity cards (either spelled out or, more recently, in a numeric code), in effect determining where they are permitted to live, access to some government welfare programmes, and how they are likely to be treated by civil servants and policemen.
(...) In the 2002 budget, Israel's housing ministry spent about £14 per person in Arab communities compared with up to £1,500 per person in Jewish ones. The same year, the health ministry allocated just 1.6m shekels (£200,000) to Arab communities of its 277m-shekel (£35m) budget to develop healthcare facilities.
(...) Five per cent of civil servants are Arabs, and a high proportion of those are hired to deal with other Arabs. The foreign and finance ministries employ fewer than a dozen Arab Israelis between them, when their combined staff totals more than 1,700 Jews. Until recently, the Bank of Israel and the state electricity company did not hire a single Arab.
(...) Separate and unequal education systems were a central part of the apartheid regime's strategy to limit black children to a life in the mines, factories and fields. The disparities in Israel's education system are not nearly so great and the intent not so malign, but the gap is wide. The Israeli education ministry does not reveal its budget for each of the two systems, but 14 years ago a government report concluded that nearly twice as much money was allocated to each Jewish pupil as to each Arab child.
(...) Under Sharon's tenure as prime minister from 2001, new forms of discriminatory legislation were passed, including the now notorious Nationality and Entry into Israel Law, which bars Israelis who marry Palestinians from bringing their spouses to live in the country. The legislation applies solely to Palestinian husbands or wives. Hassan Jabareen, a lawyer and director general of Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, challenged the law before the supreme court. He told the judges there was a parallel with a landmark case in 1980s South Africa - the Komani case - which successfully challenged the pass laws that broke up black families by preventing spouses from joining their husbands or wives in towns.
worlds apart: part 2
Reitzer joined the apartheid Nationalist party (NP) in the early 1950s, at about the time that the new prime minister, DF Malan, was introducing legislation reminiscent of Hitler's Nuremberg laws against Jews: the population registration act that classified South Africans according to race, legislation that forbade sex and marriage across the colour line and laws barring black people from many jobs.
(...) Reitzer saw no contradiction in surviving the Holocaust only to sign up for a system that was disturbingly reminiscent in its underpinning philosophy, if not in the scale of its crimes, as the one she had outlived. She vigorously defended apartheid as a necessary bulwark against black domination and the communism that engulfed her native Yugoslavia. Reitzer let slip that she thought Africans inferior to other human beings and not entitled to be treated as equals. I asked if Hitler hadn't said the same thing about her as a Jew. She called a halt to the conversation.
(...) In time, Israeli governments too set aside objections to a regime whose leaders had once been admirers of Adolf Hitler. Within three decades of its birth, Israel's self-proclaimed "purity of arms" - what it describes as the moral superiority of its soldiers - was secretly sacrificed as the fate of the Jewish state became so intertwined with South Africa that the Israeli security establishment came to believe the relationship saved the Jewish state.
(...) Many South African Jews were soon reassured that, while there would be Nuremberg-style laws, they would not be the victims. The apartheid regime had a demographic problem and it could not afford the luxury of isolating a section of the white population, even if it was Jewish. Within a few years many South African Jews not only came to feel secure under the new order but comfortable with it. Some found echoes of Israel's struggle in the revival of Afrikaner nationalism.
(...) Many Afrikaners saw the Nationalist party's election victory as liberation from bitterly hated British rule. British concentration camps in South Africa may not have matched the scale or intent of Hitler's war against the Jews, but the deaths of 25,000 women and children from disease and starvation were deeply rooted in Afrikaner nationalism, in the way the memory of the Holocaust is now central to Israel's perception of itself. The white regime said that the lesson was for Afrikaners to protect their interests or face destruction.
(...) "This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was 'a land without people for a people without land', so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest."
(...) For decades, the Zionist Federation and Jewish Board of Deputies in South Africa honoured men such as Percy Yutar, who prosecuted Nelson Mandela for sabotage and conspiracy against the state in 1963 and sent him to jail for life (in the event, he served 27 years). Yutar went on to become attorney general of the Orange Free State and then of the Transvaal. He was elected president of Johannesburg's largest orthodox synagogue. Some Jewish leaders hailed him as a "credit to the community" and a symbol of the Jews' contribution to South Africa.
(...) Israel was openly critical of apartheid through the 1950s and 60s as it built alliances with post-colonial African governments. But most African states broke ties after the 1973 Yom Kippur war and the government in Jerusalem began to take a more benign view of the isolated regime in Pretoria. The relationship changed so profoundly that, in 1976, Israel invited the South African prime minister, John Vorster - a former Nazi sympathiser and a commander of the fascist Ossewabrandwag that sided with Hitler - to make a state visit. Leaving unmentioned Vorster's wartime internment for supporting Germany, Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed the South African premier as a force for freedom and made no mention of Vorster's past as he toured the Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. At a state banquet, Rabin toasted "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence". Both countries, he said, faced "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness". Vorster, whose army was then overrunning Angola, told his hosts that South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of western civilisation. A few months later, the South African government's yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."
(...) Liel, who headed the Israeli foreign ministry's South Africa desk in the 80s, says that the Israeli security establishment came to believe that the Jewish state may not have survived without the relationship with the Afrikaners. "We created the South African arms industry," says Liel. "They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies. "We were involved in Angola as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate." Alongside the state-owned factories turning out material for South Africa was Kibbutz Beit Alfa, which developed a profitable industry selling anti-riot vehicles for use against protesters in the black townships.
(...) The biggest secret of all was the nuclear one. Israel provided expertise and technology that was central to South Africa's development of its nuclear bombs. Israel was embarrassed enough about its close association with a political movement rooted in racial ideology to keep the military collaboration hidden. "All that I'm telling you was completely secret," says Liel. "The knowledge of it was extremely limited to a small number of people outside the security establishment. But it so happened that many of our prime ministers were part of it, so if you take people such as [Shimon] Peres or Rabin, certainly they knew about it because they were part of the security establishment. "At the UN we kept saying: we are against apartheid, as Jewish people who suffered from the Holocaust this is intolerable. But our security establishment kept cooperating."
(...) By the 1980s, Israel and South Africa echoed each other in justifying the domination of other peoples. Both said that their own peoples faced annihilation from external forces - in South Africa by black African governments and communism; in Israel, by Arab states and Islam. But each eventually faced popular uprisings - Soweto in 1976, the Palestinian intifada in 1987 - that were internal, spontaneous and radically altered the nature of the conflicts. "There are things we South Africans recognise in the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination and human rights," says Kasrils. "The repressed are demonised as terrorists to justify ever-greater violations of their rights. We have the absurdity that the victims are blamed for the violence meted out against them. Both apartheid and Israel are prime examples of terrorist states blaming the victims."
(...) Israel faced three wars of survival, and the armed struggle in South Africa never evolved to the murderous tactics or scale of killing adopted by Palestinian groups over recent years. But, from the 1980s, the overwhelming superiority of Israeli military power, the diminishing threat from its neighbours and the shift of the conflict to Palestinian streets eroded the sympathy that Israel once commanded abroad.
(...) When Israel finally began to back away from the apartheid regime as international pressure on the Afrikaner government grew, Liel says Israel's security establishment balked. "When we came to the crossroads in '86-'87, in which the foreign ministry said we have to switch from white to black, the security establishment said, 'You're crazy, it's suicidal.' They were saying we wouldn't have military and aviation industries unless we had had South Africa as our main client from the mid-1970s; they saved Israel. By the way, it's probably true," he says.
(...) The deputy director general of Israel's foreign ministry, Gideon Meir, says that while he had no detailed knowledge of Israel's relationship with the apartheid government, it was driven by a sole consideration. "Our main problem is security. There is no other country in the world whose very existence is being threatened. This is since the inception of the state of Israel to this very day. Everything is an outcome of the geopolitics of Israel."
(...) In 2004, Ronnie Kasrils visited the Palestinian territories to assess the effect of Israel's assault on the West Bank two years earlier in response to a wave of suicide bombings that killed hundreds of people. "This is much worse than apartheid," he said. "The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale."
(...) You might say that Israel and the old South Africa were caught out by history. The world of 1948 into which the Jewish state was born and the Afrikaners came to power cared little about the "dark peoples" who stood in the way of grand visions. Neither government was doing very much that others - including British colonists - had not done before them.
(...) Stepping into modern Israel, anyone who experienced the old South Africa would see few immediately visible comparisons. There are no signs segregating Jews and non-Jews. Yet, as in white South Africa then and now, there is a world of discrimination and oppression that most Israelis choose not to see. Israeli soldiers routinely humiliate and harass Palestinians at checkpoints and settlers paint hate-filled slogans on the walls of Arab houses in Hebron. The police stop citizens who appear to be Arabs on West Jerusalem streets to demand their identity cards as a matter of routine.
(...) Some Jewish communities refuse to allow Arabs in their midst on the grounds of cultural differences. One Jewish settlement mayor tried to require Arabs who entered to wear a tag that identified them as Palestinians. In the 1990s, rightwingers menaced shopkeepers into sacking Arab workers. Those who complied were given signs declaring their shops Arab-free. Sometimes the hatred is explained away as religious discrimination, but the chants at the football matches go "Death to Arabs" not "Death to Muslims".
(...) The eight-metre-high wall driven through Jerusalem is almost invisible to residents of the Jewish west of the city. Because of the geography, most of the city's Jews do not see the concrete mammoth dividing streets and families, and the demolished homes - just as most of South Africa's whites steered clear of the townships and were blind to what was being done in their name.
(...) Opinion polls show that large numbers of Israelis regard Arabs as "dirty", "primitive", as not valuing human life and as violent.
(...) But South African apartheid was more than just separation. "Apartheid was all about land," says John Dugard, the South African lawyer and UN human rights monitor. "Apartheid was about keeping the best parts of the country for the whites and sending the blacks to the least habitable, least desirable parts of the country. And one sees that all the time here [in the occupied territories], particularly with the wall, now, which is really a land grab. One sees Palestinians dispossessed of their homes by bulldozers. One can draw certain parallels with respect to South Africa that, during the heyday of apartheid, population relocation did result in destruction of property, but not on the same scale as the devastation in Gaza in particular, [or in] the West Bank."
(...) "Yes, there are enormous parallels with apartheid, but the problem with making comparisons is it actually distracts from the Palestinian context," he says. "We have to look for another definition. What struck me is dispossession, colonial dispossession. Most colonial dispossession took place over centuries through settlers and forced removals. In South Africa, that was a 300-year process. Here, it's taken place in 50 years; 1948, 1967 and the present in terms of the heightened nature of militarism in the West Bank and Gaza leading to the wall, which I don't see as a wall of security but a wall of dispossession."
(...) Arnon Soffer has spent years advising the government on the "demographic threat" posed by the Arabs. The Haifa university geographer paints a bleak vision of how he sees the Gaza strip a generation after Israel's withdrawal. "When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day," he told the Jerusalem Post. "If we don't kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings."
Perhaps the real question is how Israel came to be in the same league as apartheid South Africa, whether by mirroring laws and political strategies, or in the suffering caused. And how it is that the government of a people who suffered so much at the hands of discrimination and hatred came to secretly embrace a regime led by men who once stood on the docks of Cape Town and chanted: "Send back the Jews."
(...) As it is, Goldreich sees Israel as closer to the white regime he fought against and modern South Africa as providing the model. Israeli governments, he says, ultimately proved more interested in territory than peace, and along the way Zionism mutated. Goldreich speaks of the "bantustanism we see through a policy of occupation and separation", the "abhorrent" racism in Israeli society all the way up to cabinet ministers who advocate the forced removal of Arabs, and "the brutality and inhumanity of what is imposed on the people of the occupied territories of Palestine".
(...) The contrast between West and East Jerusalem is not as stark, but the disparities between Jewish and Arab neighbourhoods are underpinned by attitudes, policies and laws similar to those used against Johannesburg's black population. Most of Jerusalem's Jews never cross the "green line" - the international border that divided the city until 1967 - and many of those that do go only as far as the Wailing Wall to pray. If more Israelis were to travel deeper into the city they claim as their indivisible capital, they would encounter a different world from their own, a place where roads crumble, rubbish is left uncollected and entire Palestinian neighbourhoods are not connected to the sewage system.
(...) According to the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, Jerusalem's Jewish population, who make up about 70% of the city's 700,000 residents, are served by 1,000 public parks, 36 public swimming pools and 26 libraries. The estimated 260,000 Arabs living in the east of the city have 45 parks, no public swimming pools and two libraries. "Since the annexation of Jerusalem, the municipality has built almost no new school, public building or medical clinic for Palestinians," says a B'Tselem report. "The lion's share of investment has been dedicated to the city's Jewish areas."
(...) "We had the old Group Areas Act in South Africa. East Jerusalem has territorial classification that has the same sort of consequences as race classification had in South Africa in respect of who you can marry, where you can live, where you can go to school or hospital." Palestinians in East Jerusalem, often the city of their birth, are not considered citizens but immigrants with "permanent resident" status, which, some have found, is anything but permanent. In the old South Africa, a large part of the black population was treated not as citizens of the cities and townships they were born into but of a distant homeland many had never visited. "Israel treats Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem as immigrants, who live in their homes at the beneficence of the authorities and not by right," says B'Tselem. "The authorities maintain this policy although these Palestinians were born in Jerusalem, lived in the city and have no other home. Treating these Palestinians as foreigners who entered Israel is astonishing, since it was Israel that entered East Jerusalem in 1967."
(...) "Planning and urban policy, which normal cities view as this benign tool, was used as a powerful partisan tool to subordinate and control black people in Johannesburg and is still used that way against Palestinians in Jerusalem," says Scott Bollens, a University of California professor of urban planning who has studied divided cities across the globe, including Belfast, Berlin, Nicosia and Mostar. "In South Africa there was 'group areas' legislation, and then there was land use, planning tools and zoning that were used to reinforce and back up group areas. In Israel, they use a whole set of similar tools. They are very devious, in that planning is often viewed as this thing that is not part of politics. In Jerusalem, it's fundamental to their project of control, and Israeli planners and politicians have known that since day one. They've been very explicit in linking the planning tools with their political project."
(...) The authors of a 1992 book on Jerusalem, Separate and Unequal, laid bare the policy. The writers, two of whom were advisers to the city's mayors, said that Israeli policy since 1967 was "remorselessly" pursued with four objectives: to expand the Jewish population in the mainly Arab east of the city; to hinder growth of Arab neighbourhoods; to induce Arabs to leave; and to seal off Arab areas behind Jewish settlements.
(...) Of the 70 sq km of annexed Arab land around Jerusalem, the state expropriated more than one-third to build homes for Jews without constructing a single house for Palestinians on the confiscated land. The Jewish population of East Jerusalem had fled or been driven out in 1948. A gradual return after 1967 turned to a flood as the settlements ate into the east of the city. Today, the population of Jewish settlements in and close to East Jerusalem has grown to nearly two-thirds that of the Arab neighbourhoods.
(...) During the 1990s, about 12 times as many new homes were legally built in Jewish areas as in Arab ones. Denied permission to build new homes or expand existing ones, many Palestinians build anyway and risk a demolition order. Israel's former prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, routinely defends the demolitions by arguing that any civilised society enforces planning regulations. But Israel is the only western society to deny construction permits to people on the grounds of race. Until 1992, so did South Africa.
(...) Israeli law also restricts where non-Jews may live. "Muslims and Christians are barred from buying in the Jewish quarter of the old city on the grounds of "historic patterns of life of each community having its own quarter'," says Seidemann, in a phrase eerily reminiscent of apartheid's philosophy. "But that didn't prevent the Israeli government from aggressively pursuing activities to place Jews within the Muslim quarter. The attitude is: what's mine is exclusively mine, but what's yours is mixed if we happen to target it."
(...) "What stands out for Jerusalem and Johannesburg is that it was and is such a prolonged use of planning in pursuit of a political objective," says Scott Bollens. "One distinction with South Africa is the racial identifiers and the racial rhetoric was so blatant, and it was so visible and it was so much part of apartheid South African language. But, despite the difference in rhetoric, the outcomes are very, very similar and the urban landscape Israel has created in the Jerusalem region is just as unequal, just as subjugating of the Palestinians as the 'group area' planning was in South Africa for the blacks."
(...) A former Jerusalem city councillor, Meir Margalit, says the process was flawed from the start because the steering committee of 31 people who put the plan together included only one Arab. "It is characteristic everywhere of colonial regimes which believe that the 'natives' are worthy neither of suitable representation nor of being masters of their own fate. The planning team apparently sets out from the assumption that, in any case, one is dealing with a Jewish city and therefore there is no reason to ask the opinion of anyone who does not belong to the Jewish people," he says.
(...) "This, in fact, is the strength of municipal racism. It is neither brutal nor openly visible, preferring to take cover behind apparently neutral formulations. Thus it is always carefully concealed behind consensus-oriented wording, hidden beneath a thick layer of cosmetic liberal language," he says. "This is how a unique term which does not exist in the professional literature was born in our country: 'grey racism'. This is not a racism stemming from hatred of the 'other', but a 'lite racism' rooted in a Zionist ideology which strove to be democratic but, in giving priority to Jewish interests, inevitably deprived others of their rights. When there is no equality, there is bound to be discrimination, and when all those discriminated against are of the same nationality, there is no alternative but to call it what it is - 'national discrimination' - which belongs to the same family as the infamous racial discrimination."
(...) According to the municipality's most recent annual figures, the council issued 1,695 building permits in the city in 2004. Of these, 116 went to Arab parts of East Jerusalem and, of those, 46 were to build new homes. The balance was for extensions to existing houses. In 2004, a total of 212,789 sq metres was built in all of Jerusalem; 7% was in Arab neighbourhoods. Several months ago, Israel's cabinet minister for Jerusalem, Haim Ramon, described the 33ft-high wall dissecting Arab neighbourhoods - which the government has insisted is purely a security measure with no political intent - as having the added advantage of making the city "more Jewish".
(...) Israel's one million Arab citizens are on a firmer footing. They can vote - the primary evidence, for many angered by the apartheid analogy, that Israel is not the old South Africa - at least, within Israel's recognised borders. But the Jewish state has long viewed its remaining Arab population with suspicion and hostility, and even as the enemy within, through the country's wars for survival against hostile neighbours and in the competition for land. Until 1966, Israeli Arabs lived under "military administration" which allowed detention without trial and subjected them to curfews, restrictions on jobs and where they could live, and required them to obtain passes to move around the country.
(...) Israeli governments reserved 93% of the land - often expropriated from Arabs without compensation - for Jews through state ownership, the Jewish National Fund and the Israeli Lands Authority. In colonial and then apartheid South Africa, 87% of the land was reserved for whites. The Population Registration Act categorised South Africans according to an array of racial definitions, which, among other things, determined who would be permitted to live on the reserved land. Israel's Population Registry Act serves a similar purpose by distinguishing between nationality and citizenship. Arabs and Jews alike can be citizens, but each is assigned a separate "nationality" marked on identity cards (either spelled out or, more recently, in a numeric code), in effect determining where they are permitted to live, access to some government welfare programmes, and how they are likely to be treated by civil servants and policemen.
(...) In the 2002 budget, Israel's housing ministry spent about £14 per person in Arab communities compared with up to £1,500 per person in Jewish ones. The same year, the health ministry allocated just 1.6m shekels (£200,000) to Arab communities of its 277m-shekel (£35m) budget to develop healthcare facilities.
(...) Five per cent of civil servants are Arabs, and a high proportion of those are hired to deal with other Arabs. The foreign and finance ministries employ fewer than a dozen Arab Israelis between them, when their combined staff totals more than 1,700 Jews. Until recently, the Bank of Israel and the state electricity company did not hire a single Arab.
(...) Separate and unequal education systems were a central part of the apartheid regime's strategy to limit black children to a life in the mines, factories and fields. The disparities in Israel's education system are not nearly so great and the intent not so malign, but the gap is wide. The Israeli education ministry does not reveal its budget for each of the two systems, but 14 years ago a government report concluded that nearly twice as much money was allocated to each Jewish pupil as to each Arab child.
(...) Under Sharon's tenure as prime minister from 2001, new forms of discriminatory legislation were passed, including the now notorious Nationality and Entry into Israel Law, which bars Israelis who marry Palestinians from bringing their spouses to live in the country. The legislation applies solely to Palestinian husbands or wives. Hassan Jabareen, a lawyer and director general of Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, challenged the law before the supreme court. He told the judges there was a parallel with a landmark case in 1980s South Africa - the Komani case - which successfully challenged the pass laws that broke up black families by preventing spouses from joining their husbands or wives in towns.
worlds apart: part 2
Reitzer joined the apartheid Nationalist party (NP) in the early 1950s, at about the time that the new prime minister, DF Malan, was introducing legislation reminiscent of Hitler's Nuremberg laws against Jews: the population registration act that classified South Africans according to race, legislation that forbade sex and marriage across the colour line and laws barring black people from many jobs.
(...) Reitzer saw no contradiction in surviving the Holocaust only to sign up for a system that was disturbingly reminiscent in its underpinning philosophy, if not in the scale of its crimes, as the one she had outlived. She vigorously defended apartheid as a necessary bulwark against black domination and the communism that engulfed her native Yugoslavia. Reitzer let slip that she thought Africans inferior to other human beings and not entitled to be treated as equals. I asked if Hitler hadn't said the same thing about her as a Jew. She called a halt to the conversation.
(...) In time, Israeli governments too set aside objections to a regime whose leaders had once been admirers of Adolf Hitler. Within three decades of its birth, Israel's self-proclaimed "purity of arms" - what it describes as the moral superiority of its soldiers - was secretly sacrificed as the fate of the Jewish state became so intertwined with South Africa that the Israeli security establishment came to believe the relationship saved the Jewish state.
(...) Many South African Jews were soon reassured that, while there would be Nuremberg-style laws, they would not be the victims. The apartheid regime had a demographic problem and it could not afford the luxury of isolating a section of the white population, even if it was Jewish. Within a few years many South African Jews not only came to feel secure under the new order but comfortable with it. Some found echoes of Israel's struggle in the revival of Afrikaner nationalism.
(...) Many Afrikaners saw the Nationalist party's election victory as liberation from bitterly hated British rule. British concentration camps in South Africa may not have matched the scale or intent of Hitler's war against the Jews, but the deaths of 25,000 women and children from disease and starvation were deeply rooted in Afrikaner nationalism, in the way the memory of the Holocaust is now central to Israel's perception of itself. The white regime said that the lesson was for Afrikaners to protect their interests or face destruction.
(...) "This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was 'a land without people for a people without land', so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest."
(...) For decades, the Zionist Federation and Jewish Board of Deputies in South Africa honoured men such as Percy Yutar, who prosecuted Nelson Mandela for sabotage and conspiracy against the state in 1963 and sent him to jail for life (in the event, he served 27 years). Yutar went on to become attorney general of the Orange Free State and then of the Transvaal. He was elected president of Johannesburg's largest orthodox synagogue. Some Jewish leaders hailed him as a "credit to the community" and a symbol of the Jews' contribution to South Africa.
(...) Israel was openly critical of apartheid through the 1950s and 60s as it built alliances with post-colonial African governments. But most African states broke ties after the 1973 Yom Kippur war and the government in Jerusalem began to take a more benign view of the isolated regime in Pretoria. The relationship changed so profoundly that, in 1976, Israel invited the South African prime minister, John Vorster - a former Nazi sympathiser and a commander of the fascist Ossewabrandwag that sided with Hitler - to make a state visit. Leaving unmentioned Vorster's wartime internment for supporting Germany, Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed the South African premier as a force for freedom and made no mention of Vorster's past as he toured the Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. At a state banquet, Rabin toasted "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence". Both countries, he said, faced "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness". Vorster, whose army was then overrunning Angola, told his hosts that South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of western civilisation. A few months later, the South African government's yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."
(...) Liel, who headed the Israeli foreign ministry's South Africa desk in the 80s, says that the Israeli security establishment came to believe that the Jewish state may not have survived without the relationship with the Afrikaners. "We created the South African arms industry," says Liel. "They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies. "We were involved in Angola as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate." Alongside the state-owned factories turning out material for South Africa was Kibbutz Beit Alfa, which developed a profitable industry selling anti-riot vehicles for use against protesters in the black townships.
(...) The biggest secret of all was the nuclear one. Israel provided expertise and technology that was central to South Africa's development of its nuclear bombs. Israel was embarrassed enough about its close association with a political movement rooted in racial ideology to keep the military collaboration hidden. "All that I'm telling you was completely secret," says Liel. "The knowledge of it was extremely limited to a small number of people outside the security establishment. But it so happened that many of our prime ministers were part of it, so if you take people such as [Shimon] Peres or Rabin, certainly they knew about it because they were part of the security establishment. "At the UN we kept saying: we are against apartheid, as Jewish people who suffered from the Holocaust this is intolerable. But our security establishment kept cooperating."
(...) By the 1980s, Israel and South Africa echoed each other in justifying the domination of other peoples. Both said that their own peoples faced annihilation from external forces - in South Africa by black African governments and communism; in Israel, by Arab states and Islam. But each eventually faced popular uprisings - Soweto in 1976, the Palestinian intifada in 1987 - that were internal, spontaneous and radically altered the nature of the conflicts. "There are things we South Africans recognise in the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination and human rights," says Kasrils. "The repressed are demonised as terrorists to justify ever-greater violations of their rights. We have the absurdity that the victims are blamed for the violence meted out against them. Both apartheid and Israel are prime examples of terrorist states blaming the victims."
(...) Israel faced three wars of survival, and the armed struggle in South Africa never evolved to the murderous tactics or scale of killing adopted by Palestinian groups over recent years. But, from the 1980s, the overwhelming superiority of Israeli military power, the diminishing threat from its neighbours and the shift of the conflict to Palestinian streets eroded the sympathy that Israel once commanded abroad.
(...) When Israel finally began to back away from the apartheid regime as international pressure on the Afrikaner government grew, Liel says Israel's security establishment balked. "When we came to the crossroads in '86-'87, in which the foreign ministry said we have to switch from white to black, the security establishment said, 'You're crazy, it's suicidal.' They were saying we wouldn't have military and aviation industries unless we had had South Africa as our main client from the mid-1970s; they saved Israel. By the way, it's probably true," he says.
(...) The deputy director general of Israel's foreign ministry, Gideon Meir, says that while he had no detailed knowledge of Israel's relationship with the apartheid government, it was driven by a sole consideration. "Our main problem is security. There is no other country in the world whose very existence is being threatened. This is since the inception of the state of Israel to this very day. Everything is an outcome of the geopolitics of Israel."
(...) In 2004, Ronnie Kasrils visited the Palestinian territories to assess the effect of Israel's assault on the West Bank two years earlier in response to a wave of suicide bombings that killed hundreds of people. "This is much worse than apartheid," he said. "The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale."
(...) You might say that Israel and the old South Africa were caught out by history. The world of 1948 into which the Jewish state was born and the Afrikaners came to power cared little about the "dark peoples" who stood in the way of grand visions. Neither government was doing very much that others - including British colonists - had not done before them.
(...) Stepping into modern Israel, anyone who experienced the old South Africa would see few immediately visible comparisons. There are no signs segregating Jews and non-Jews. Yet, as in white South Africa then and now, there is a world of discrimination and oppression that most Israelis choose not to see. Israeli soldiers routinely humiliate and harass Palestinians at checkpoints and settlers paint hate-filled slogans on the walls of Arab houses in Hebron. The police stop citizens who appear to be Arabs on West Jerusalem streets to demand their identity cards as a matter of routine.
(...) Some Jewish communities refuse to allow Arabs in their midst on the grounds of cultural differences. One Jewish settlement mayor tried to require Arabs who entered to wear a tag that identified them as Palestinians. In the 1990s, rightwingers menaced shopkeepers into sacking Arab workers. Those who complied were given signs declaring their shops Arab-free. Sometimes the hatred is explained away as religious discrimination, but the chants at the football matches go "Death to Arabs" not "Death to Muslims".
(...) The eight-metre-high wall driven through Jerusalem is almost invisible to residents of the Jewish west of the city. Because of the geography, most of the city's Jews do not see the concrete mammoth dividing streets and families, and the demolished homes - just as most of South Africa's whites steered clear of the townships and were blind to what was being done in their name.
(...) Opinion polls show that large numbers of Israelis regard Arabs as "dirty", "primitive", as not valuing human life and as violent.
(...) But South African apartheid was more than just separation. "Apartheid was all about land," says John Dugard, the South African lawyer and UN human rights monitor. "Apartheid was about keeping the best parts of the country for the whites and sending the blacks to the least habitable, least desirable parts of the country. And one sees that all the time here [in the occupied territories], particularly with the wall, now, which is really a land grab. One sees Palestinians dispossessed of their homes by bulldozers. One can draw certain parallels with respect to South Africa that, during the heyday of apartheid, population relocation did result in destruction of property, but not on the same scale as the devastation in Gaza in particular, [or in] the West Bank."
(...) "Yes, there are enormous parallels with apartheid, but the problem with making comparisons is it actually distracts from the Palestinian context," he says. "We have to look for another definition. What struck me is dispossession, colonial dispossession. Most colonial dispossession took place over centuries through settlers and forced removals. In South Africa, that was a 300-year process. Here, it's taken place in 50 years; 1948, 1967 and the present in terms of the heightened nature of militarism in the West Bank and Gaza leading to the wall, which I don't see as a wall of security but a wall of dispossession."
(...) Arnon Soffer has spent years advising the government on the "demographic threat" posed by the Arabs. The Haifa university geographer paints a bleak vision of how he sees the Gaza strip a generation after Israel's withdrawal. "When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day," he told the Jerusalem Post. "If we don't kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings."
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