Stories I've been following

• Zimbabwe
  It appears Robert Mugabe has won this battle. While a general strike this week, called by Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai, succeeded in shutting down a large number of schools and businesses, fear of government repression prevented large demonstrations. Friday, Tsvangirai was taken into custody and charged with treason.

  Mr Mugabe said Mr Tsvangirai would be taught a lesson and told supporters at a rally on Friday that the MDC was stupid and naive.
  

  "We were expected to quake and shake with fear at this threat from this pathetic puppet who regards the British as his masters and god," the president said.
  

  He said businesses that had observed the strike by closing would now be dealt with and their licences withdrawn, adding that even schools that had closed would have to account for their actions.
  <full story> from the BBC.

  
  

• Congo
  Fighting has intensified in Bunia, even as the first EU peacekeepers arrive on the scene.

  Our correspondent says that, although some of the mission has arrived in Bunia, the bulk of it has not, and there is not much that peacekeeping soldiers can do at the moment.
  

  And the people who so rapturously welcomed the French yesterday are now asking if anything has changed, our correspondent says.
  <full story>

  Keep an eye on this one. In my opinion, this situation requires a serious UN intervention. Here's one example of what I'm talking about (via Don). Why only 1400 troops?
  

• Bush Weapons Intelligence Scandal
  Bob Harris and "Tom Tomorrow" at This Modern World have been all over this story. They're such excellent researchers and writers that I encourage you to make them a habit. One excellent link in today's post is to an article by John Dean (former Nixon legal counsel convicted in the Watergate scandal):

  In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed.

  It's unfortunate that many citizens and officials are focusing on the fact that we haven't found WMD in Iraq. I've said it before: it wouldn't be that hard to plant weapons. This administration has demonstrated many times that they believe their ends justify a host of questionable means.

  The issue centers on what our intelligence analysts knew and believed before the war, and whether that intelligence or analysis was distorted to sell the war to the American public. Even if weapons are found, it won't change the fact that Bush lied to us, and thousands of people died because of his lies.

The whole truth of war

Sami Mikhael Amin Al Shammas, 69
My dad was killed in the war on April 7. During the first days of war we were able to phone frequently and we begged my dad to leave. He told us that he would rather die in his own house than anywhere else. It was as if he had a feeling that something would happen. <continues>

Abu Hassan, 48
Abu worked in a restaurant at the Nasser restaurant on Abu Taleb Street in Baghdad. He was making lunch for customers with Malek Hammoud when a missile hit the westbound carriageway. Both men were killed.

Ali Hamdani, 20, Hussein Hamdani, 18, Mohamed Hamdani, 9
The three Hamdani brothers were killed in an explosion in a market in the Shu'ala area of Baghdad on March 30.

Ali Nasaf, 6
Ali Nasaf, was killed in a missile attack on the Bab al Muadan telephone exchange in Baghdad on March 31. His mother, Lamia, 31, told the Daily Mail: "Even the doctors and nurses cried when he died. They remember him as the boy who played football in the streets and always laughed."

Ali, 20, Hussein, 18 and Mohammad Abed, 11
Three sons of Sumaya Abed were killed by shrapnel in their home in al-Shula, a Shia neighbourhood in Baghdad, on March 29. Sumaya was pregnant with the 11-year-old during the 1991 Gulf war.

<Read more stories> at the Guardian; this project is ongoing.

The threshold for going to war should not be "can we legally justify it?" but rather "is there absolutely no way we can avoid it?"

Remember this the next time your leaders start trying to drum up support for war.

Remember this the next time you vote.

Posted by Me at 20:30 link

Take a little action

Allow Turbaned Sikhs to Serve as Officers in the NYPD

Americ Singh Rathour, an American Sikh born and raised in NYC, was fired from the NYPD because he refused to remove his turban or trim his beard, both of which are required by his religion. Police forces worldwide make accomodation for Sikhs, who have proven themselves as some of the finest law enforcement officers in the world.

"The NYPD forced Americ to choose between his religion and his livelihood. This is a choice that no one should be forced to make," Harpreet Singh, Sikh Coalition director, said.
<full story>

From voice4change.org via Gael:

Take Action! Stop Bechtel's War Profiteering

Tell your Senator that....

• Our taxpayer dollars should be going to education, health care and other basic services rather than illegal, unnecessary and immoral wars.

In the aftermath of the war on Iraq, our tax dollars should be going to genuine humanitarian and reconstruction efforts:

• NOT to corporations seeking to profit from the horror and tragedy of war
• NOT to the major corporate cronies of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld
• NOT to corporations with a history of social, environmental and labor abuses
• NOT to efforts to expand U.S. markets and major U.S. corporate interests in the Middle East.

We, the American people, have a right to full and complete information about the content of all contracts (using American taxpayer dollars) granted by the Department of Defense, USAID and other government agencies to U.S. corporations doing business in post-war Iraq. Full information about Bechtel's contract is currently being denied to members of Congress and the American public.

Take Action! To send an e-mail to your Senators: http://www.voice4change.org/stories/showstory.asp?file=030604~pc.asp

Finally, when someone says something today that you don't agree with, take the time to listen fully. Look for truth and points of agreement in what they're saying. Try to understand why they believe what they believe.

That's it! Just do this and the world will become a little better.

Posted by Me at 20:10 link

Smoldering Headlines

Zimbabwe
Neither Mugabe nor the MDC can claim victory at this point. Strikes have shut down most of the country's businesses and provoked a harsh government reprisal. But Zimbabweans have not taken to the street "in their millions", as they were encouraged to do by opposition leader Tsvangirai. Zimbabwe's press are as divided as the rest of the country seems to be. Here's a journal being kept this week by a student activist there.

Congo
EU governments have now agreed to send 1400 troops to the DRC.

[EU Foreign Policy Chief Javier] Solana described the mission as an emergency "bridging" operation designed to help fill a gap in UN scheduling. "It will have a limited mandate, both geographically and timewise," Solana said. "Our objective is to help stabilize the situation."
<full story>

Iraq
The weapons intelligence scandal is heating up, especially in the UK, where Blair faces an investigation into claims that his government manipulated evidence.

"The truth is nobody believes a word now that the prime minister is saying," Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith shouted above the jeering of Blair's supporters.
<full story>

All these stories are ongoing, so stay tuned...

Posted by Me at 20:10 link

Support the troops?

Isn't this a fitting metaphor for the current American war fetish?

I spoke out repeatedly in favor of supporting the troops, though I became disgusted as conservatives seized the issue as "moral high ground", threw everyone off their hill who didn't agree with them that "supporting the troops" required supporting the president and the war, and then exploited their position to attack as unpatriotic anyone who didn't share their narrow definition.

My point was that the troops should be judged solely by the their conduct on the battlefield, according to the law of jus in bello, while the president alone bore responsibility for waging the war, according to the law of jus ad bellum, because he alone gave the order to begin the unprovoked attack.

For the most part, US and UK forces upheld the laws of jus in bello, especially the "ground level" forces. The further up the chain of command, the worse the conduct. The persons responsible for actions such as (including, but not limited to) the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas, the use of depleted uranium munitions, and the possible deliberate targeting of journalists, need to be identified, tried and punished. The many soldiers who did their jobs admirably should be commended and rewarded.

Troops returning from Vietnam were demonized, which was cruel and wrong.
Troops returning from Iraq are being idolized.

The danger is that war is being idolized, too. America has seen only one side of this war—the "winning" side. The real "losing side" were the 5400 (at least) Iraqi civilians slaughtered by the US/UK military. To America, they are known only as "collateral damage". Click here to read obituaries of some of the people killed in the war. WARNING: may make you cry, or otherwise feel empathy for fellow fragile humans destoyed by the merciless machine of modern war.

A nation that learns to love war—without knowing the realities of war—is dangerous. Leaders who teach a nation to love war—by deliberately and deceptively hiding the ugly realities of war—are monstrously immoral.

Wise, empathetic people recognize war for what it is—failure. War represents the failure of leaders to settle their differences like mature adults. No one "wins" a war; one side merely survives with less damage.

Ask anyone who's ever been in combat: war is anything but glorious, noble or uplifting. War is all about killing, and killing is shameful, base and degrading for everyone involved. To kill, you must first turn off all positive human emotion, especialy empathetic emotions such as compassion. The primary emotions of war (again, ask anyone who's been there) are anger, hate—and especially fear.

War is one of the worst enemies of humankind.

Sometimes war is unavoidable. Sometimes dropping a baby is unavoidable. War is to be avoided the same way dropping babies is to be avoided. (This last war killed dozens of babies).

War is friend only to the undertaker, the plunder-taker, and the weapons maker.

Therefore, let us respect the troops—and support the peacemakers.

Posted by Me at 20:08 link

Arundhati Roy & The Truth About Empire

From a speech given recently in NYC by Arundhati Roy (reprinted with permission):

Way back in 1988, on the 3rd of July, the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner and killed 290 civilian passengers. George Bush the First, who was at the time on his presidential campaign, was asked to comment on the incident. He said quite subtly, "I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are."

I don't care what the facts are. What a perfect maxim for the New American Empire. Perhaps a slight variation on the theme would be more apposite: The facts can be whatever we want them to be.

...

Television tells us that Iraq has been "liberated" and that Afghanistan is well on its way to becoming a paradise for women-thanks to Bush and Blair, the 21st century's leading feminists. In reality, Iraq's infrastructure has been destroyed. Its people brought to the brink of starvation. Its food stocks depleted. And its cities devastated by a complete administrative breakdown. Iraq is being ushered in the direction of a civil war between Shias and Sunnis. Meanwhile, Afghanistan has lapsed back into the pre-Taliban era of anarchy, and its territory has been carved up into fiefdoms by hostile warlords.

...

In countries of the first world, too, the machinery of democracy has been effectively subverted. Politicians, media barons, judges, powerful corporate lobbies, and government officials are imbricated in an elaborate underhand configuration that completely undermines the lateral arrangement of checks and balances between the constitution, courts of law, parliament, the administration and, perhaps most important of all, the independent media that form the structural basis of a parliamentary democracy. Increasingly, the imbrication is neither subtle nor elaborate.

...

In the United States... Clear Channel Worldwide Incorporated is the largest radio station owner in the country. It runs more than 1,200 channels, which together account for 9 percent of the market. Its CEO contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bush's election campaign. When hundreds of thousands of American citizens took to the streets to protest against the war on Iraq, Clear Channel organized pro-war patriotic "Rallies for America" across the country. It used its radio stations to advertise the events and then sent correspondents to cover them as though they were breaking news. The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news.

...

Apart from paying the actual economic costs of war, American people are paying for these wars of "liberation" with their own freedoms. For the ordinary American, the price of "New Democracy" in other countries is the death of real democracy at home.

...

The U.S. government has already displayed in no uncertain terms the range and extent of its capability for paranoid aggression. In human psychology, paranoid aggression is usually an indicator of nervous insecurity. It could be argued that it's no different in the case of the psychology of nations. Empire is paranoid because it has a soft underbelly.

Before I read the speech I wasn't familiar with Arundhati Roy or her work. Having done a little research, it's apparent that she's one of the most well-informed, eloquently reasonable voices for positive social change in the world today.

She's most famous for the novel The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize. Read a Salon interview with Roy about herself and that book here. She's also famous for her non-fiction, as well as for her outspoken social activism. (Here's but one remarkable essay).

She's not without her critics, but she dismisses them with style, when she bothers to notice them at all. She was jailed briefly in 2002 on "contempt of court" charges for criticizing India's Supreme Court.

Her latest book, War Talk is described here in a press release:

Arundhati Roy, the internationally acclaimed author of The God of Small Things, examines democracy and dissent, racism and empire, and war and peace in War Talk, her new collection of essays published by South End Press.

War Talk highlights the global rise of religious and racial violence. Writing desperately against the backdrop of the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan, the horrific massacres of Muslims in Gujarat, India, and the reckless war on Iraq, Roy condemns militarism and nationalism.

In a review of War Talk, Booklist says "this writer of conscience [is] turning herself into an electrifying political essayist....So fluent is her prose, so keen her understanding of global politics, and so resonant her objections to nuclear weapons, assaults against the environment, and the endless suffering of the poor that her essays are as uplifting as they are galvanizing."

Fully annotated versions of all Roy's most recent essays, including her acclaimed Lannan Foundation lecture from September 2002 and her January 2003 address to the World Social Forum in Brazil, are included in War Talk. Another collection of essays by Arundhati Roy, Power Politics, is also published by South End Press and is now in its second edition.

For more information on War Talk, please go to
http://www.southendpress.org/books/wartalk.shtml

To request a review copy, please go to
http://www.southendpress.org/order/review.shtml

To request a desk or exam copy, please go to
http://www.southendpress.org/order/examform.html

Grab hold of something

Three situations in the world seem poised for major drama this week; as my father used to say, "the fertilizer is about to enter the ventilation system".

1. Zimbabwe demonstations/coup attempt. From the BBC:

   Mr Mugabe's government has warned it will crush any demonstrations and the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, could be arrested if the protests go ahead.

   However Mr Tsvangirai said that the order was not binding and the marches would proceed "as planned", calling on Zimbabweans to "rise up in your millions".
   <full story>

2. UN peacekeeping force set to arrive in Congo

   A Ugandan military commander Brigadier Kale Kaihura has told the BBC that fighters from the majority Lendu community have slaughtered at least 100 people in a village of Kyomna populated by Hema people.

   Hema leader Bawunde Kisangani told the French news agency AFP that he visited the village and counted 253 dead bodies, including about 20 babies.

   He said the attackers used machetes and rifles to kill their victims. "They stormed a hospital and killed people they found there."

   ...

   The United Nations Security Council has given the go-ahead for a French-led international force to restore order in the area.

   More than 1,000 peacekeepers will be deployed to the Ituri province in order to halt the ethnic fighting that has left more than 400 dead in recent weeks.
   <full story>

3. U.S. Senate to probe Bush's Iraq weapons claims From AP via ABC News:

   While Democrats have been bashing the White House for the military's failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq, [Sen. John] Warner [R-VA, head of Armed Services Committee] and other Republican senators joined in Sunday in proposing a congressional inquiry.

   "Absolutely, absolutely, there should be," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on ABC's "This Week." "And I would think that the Congress is very well suited for that, a bipartisan committee, or Intelligence Committee report."

   ...

   "I think it cannot go uninvestigated, because big nations have two things: they have their word and they have their credibility," [Sen. Joseph] Biden [D-DE] said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

   "Our credibility is going to be called into question in other parts of the world" if nothing is found, he said.
   <full story>