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January 30, 2005

How Not to Build Bridges

[Zeynep here]

I went to many panels about outsourcing. Some speakers were very informative but there was very few suggested practical and strategic responses. I will blog more about this crucial issue in the future, but I wanted to take this break between panels to write about a very telling moment.

During the comment section of one of these panels, a man got up and identified himself as a post office worker from France and said that outsourcing was a real problem for them, and that jobs were being sent off to the mostly Arab and African French-speaking countries. And then, without even seeming to take note of the irony that those countries spoke French because of France's past colonial practices, pretty brutal ones at that, he said that wanted to draw attention to how call center workers in Morocco were being told to adopt French pseudonyms at the workplace, and how this was depriving them of their identity.

It is with great restraint that I did not get up and exclaim "très horrible!" Being deprived of their identity? How gracious of you to be so concerned! And only coincidentally when your first world living standards might be on the line!

To this day, the state of France continues to wage a war on the identity of Muslims living in France, and is refusing the right of education to young women who wear the veil. (This is not wishing that women wear the veil; this is simply recognizing that shutting them out of public spaces, especially education, can only further disempowerment and constitutes blatant discrimination and stigmatization.) I hope, Mr. Post Office Worker, you are marching with the sans papiers, undocumented immigrants and refugees in France, mostly from former Arab and African French colonies, who get rounded up, tied, drugged and deported even when they have lived in France most of their lives. I hope you are showing the same concern for the rights of Muslim women in France. I hope you are part of a movement that supports reparations for all former colonies of France, where crushing of the native identity was part and parcel of the military strategy of the occupation. And not that long ago.

Alas, I couldn't see him at the end of the panel. He seemed to have registered his concern for Moroccan call center workers' identity and left. Perhaps he really is a genuine internationalist. Perhaps he does support reparations by France. Perhaps he just cut to the chase in his comments. Still, he did not inspire feelings of international worker solidarity in me.

Unfortunately, there aren't too many direct representatives of such workers from India, Africa or Arab North Africa here at the WSF. Only some trade union officials have come, while there are some rank and file workers from the Global North. It creates an imbalance because the trade union representatives from the Global South speak relatively diplomatically -- and even they are few and far between. (With the exception of Latin America: due to its location, the WSF is teeming with people from South America.)

I wish there were a way to subsidize such travel, which is clearly constrained by costs and visas. Such human interaction is clearly desperately needed.

Of course, loss of jobs and livelihood is a serious issue. First world workers also deserve a livelihood that can support their families. The trauma of being unemployed, being redundant as it were, is a great human tragedy no matter where in the global economic food chain one might be standing.

But any serious united struggle against global capital must begin with a sense of justice and equity, including the recognition that the colonial past is very much a current issue, and that there is more to discuss than how to keep good jobs in rich countries.

Posted by zeynep at 11:42 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 29, 2005

Have Some Cool Water, Listen to a few Songs: The Dalits (so-called "Untouchable Castes") of India Remind Us What Real Struggle Looks Like

[Zeynep here]

Just when I was beginning to wonder if coming to these large meetings was worth all that jet fuel, I stumbled onto one of those events that can only be experienced in person -- one that is so powerful that it's hard to put into words, but I will try.

I attended a panel organized by Dalits, the so-called untouchable castes of India. It's very hot here and one is constantly thirsty, which is hard to ignore since it's so physical a need. I think, similarly, many of us in rich countries lead lives that leave one's soul feeling thirsty -- but unlike physical thirst, you can learn to ignore it until someone gives you a cool, clear glass of "water" drawn from a different kind of well. Then you remember.

As I briefly mentioned in the earlier post, such big meetings are a very mixed bag. No real interaction is possible in the big panels. They are still crucial, especially for having a sense of what many global movements, at least the portion that comes to these events, are thinking about. Plus, I now have a lot of info about a lot of important info on upcoming events and campaigns. In that sense, I have a lot of useful contacts that I will put to good use over the next year. Even so, it all leaves one wondering if one would miss anything if all the names, contact info and talks were simply transcribed and posted online.

So, yesterday afternoon, tired, hot, severely underslept, I stopped by a panel entitled "Land Rights" -- it had a little subtitle which mentioned the "Dalits." I normally roam through many panels in any given session: I listen a bit, pick up literature and move on -- there are so many simultaneous events and I want to make the best use of my time here. I have some superficial knowledge of the situation of the Dalits, and I know many South Asians -- mostly from the educated diaspora, of course. Plus, like all people that ever go to a large city, I interact with many South Asian cab drivers, food stall workers, convenience store clerks, etc. So, I have an image in my mind.

I stepped into the tent and the first thing that struck me was the people. I just sat down and thought, wow, I have never met any of these people. I have never encountered them. Not as cab drivers, not as university professors. There were about a few dozen of them mingling around and they were all black. Actual black. Black as in an ebony color rather than the usual range of browns that I associate with South Asians. It was very striking.

Paul Divakar, of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights moderated the panel and gave the first talk. It's really the difference between "knowing" something in the abstract and sitting there, looking at a human being and feeling in your heart that this is the ugly truth of this world. Of course I knew the dalits were discriminated against. Still, I felt crushed by the weight of just listening to him explain how they were thought of as the "polluted people," how they were always denied land so that they would be forced to be semi-slaves to the landlords and the dominant castes, how they were forced into occupations considered unclean by the others such as collecting the dead, cleaning up human waste, skinning cows and garbage work in general, how they were to this day beaten up, killed, tortured and raped if they dared to claim a bit of the rights that were accorded to them on paper, how everything was arranged to continue this situation in perpetuity... It was hard listening to it; these people lived it. And you knew it was true. It's just one of those things; you just know this person is telling you a truth.

And the difference between this panel and the the panels by experts, NGOs, even activists from richer countries came up very quickly. At appropriate times, Paul broke into slogans, enthusiastically joined by the Dalit in the crowd. It was one of the most sincere, the least contrived instances I have even encountered of people shouting slogans. I think I have become jaded a bit with all the big demonstrations I have attended in the U.S. I keep feeling almost bored in some of them. I mean, we yell stuff but we don't really mean it. We're not really going to try to stop the Bush administration from waging war. Not really. We will finish the rally and all go home. And all the marchers know this. So does the administration. I I feel fake yelling "No Blood for Oil," or "No War." There will be blood for oil and there will be war because we will allow it. All we are going to do is yell and then go home and do very little else.

So, the Dalits breaking into slogans really shook me because it was like being handed a cup of actual homemade soup after eating a lot of fake, highly-processed versions that come in cans or plastic from supermarkets. All of a sudden, you think, ah, this is what it was meant to be. This is what a slogan is. This is what it sounds like. This is how it is shouted. This is how it is joined. That was processed cheese.

After Paul, a dalit woman from Nari Gunjan, Sudha Varghese, took the floor. Paul introduced her by saying don't be fooled by her size, she fights a good fight -- physically too. She quietly told of struggles of the Musahar community, which apparently means those who catch and eat rats. (This was something I encountered in Chiapas villages: some of the Mayan ethnic groups look down upon the Tojolobal, another ethnic Mayan group because they believe them to be rat-eaters.) Instead of denying that they eat rats, something the Tojolobal will vehemently deny, she explained what the name of her group meant and simply said, yes, I have shared that tasty meal with members of my community. And went on to explain how, after many years of struggle, they had managed to have a little bit of access to a small section of irrigated land, how that had angered the nearby landlords, and how the landlords had managed to obtain eviction orders for the Dalit. In response, the women of the community put their bodies between the bulldozers and their huts whenever the bulldozers showed up and refused to move. So far, through great unity and a lot of fighting, she says, they have managed to stay put for the last two years. She told of other instances where a woman in the community was badly beaten up for daring to ask for a bit more in wages. The woman had had the courage to bring charges against her high-caste abuser. Alas, all her family was threatened so badly that she withdrew the charges -- to no avail. Her two daughters were raped and she was told that her husband was going to be killed too. The family fled, escaping barely with their lives. She talked about how common such atrocities are, how there are great laws on the books that are never implemented, and how they barely cling to survival by banding together.

I felt the audience was shell-shocked after Sudha's talk. You get this sense in your heart that every word is true and you don't know what to say or do. Cry? Apologize? Run? After her talk, the translation system needed fiddling so there was a break at which point ... three drummers and a singer appeared from the audience, took the microphone and broke into a song! It was like those stereotypical Indian movies! And all the Dalits joined in and all of a sudden we found ourselves in the midst of a mini-festival. I remember thinking that this was the most uncynical space I have been in a very long time -- and it comes from people who face such massive injustice that one could hardly blame them if they lost all hope, and hated the world that mistreats them so horrifically. Often, one hears people talk of apathy and cynicism as resulting from lack of success. How can that be if these people who have mountains to move, and faced such crushing oppression for thousands of years, do not display a shred of apathy? You feel it sitting there, listening: they are fighting hard, they are struggling against it all with every ounce of their being. They're unfazed. They aren't "moving to Canada," as it were.

Many speakers talked about how "globalization" made things much worse for them. I want to write some more about that at some point, the numbers were really striking. It's clear that the neo-liberal machine is decimating communities like these that were marginally surviving to begin with. Some speakers spoke of how this neo-liberal "advanced capitalism" was strengthening feudal institutions like the caste system. They had solidarity speakers who came from other discriminated people like the plantation workers in Sri Lanka and the Quilombola people in Brazil, descendents of escaped slave communities. They talked about the Buraku community in Japan who faces similar discrimination.

As the speakers were revolving, I noticed a white man, neatly-dressed and clean-shaven, sitting among those waiting to speak. He had this "I stay in an expensive hotel paid by my big NGO" look on him. He was introduced as working at the U.N., in Geneva, for the Lutheran World Federation. I braced for the semi-boring NGOspeak that I had heard so much of the last few days. Hah. He got up, took the microphone and promptly shouted "Jai Bhim!" -- and the dalits joined him with enthusiasm. It was the most unexpected thing coming from a person who looked like he did: I thought, wow, he has gone native! And who could blame him! I was reminded of that scene in Dances With Wolves when "Lt. John Dunbar," captured by the army after having spent a long time among the Sioux, suddenly refuses to speak English and keeps repeating "My Name is Dances With Wolves; I'm a Sioux" as the soldiers beat him up. (I later learned Jai Bhim means "Long live Bhim!" and "honours Bhim Rao Ambedkar, a political leader from the independence era who introduced an affirmative-action programme for Dalits in the Indian constitution.") He sat down after a short speech interrupted by many slogans, initiated by him or the Dalit...

Paul Divakar closed the panel by talking about a few things that had impressed him in Brazil. One, he said, was driving along the highway and seeing how much of the land had fences, meaning people had ownership of that land. His people, he said, longed for that. That bit of land which would give them the dignity, would free them from being at the mercy of the dominated castes. I had never thought of looking at fences with a longing. I normally think of fences as a negative thing. But I understood what he was saying. It is their dispossession that reduces their lives to semi-slavery. In fact, many of the Dalit speakers reiterated this point: without land, we will not be treated as human beings of any worth. He talked about meeting with the landless peasants in Brazil and finding how common their feelings were. Second, he said, he noticed that the garbage carts weren't mechanized. He said he saw a garbage worker pulling along a huge cart. Why, he asked, does a society which has cars, trucks and so much mechanization let a man pull garbage like that? It was very appropriate that he, coming from a people forced into garbage cleaning, would notice that while we probably all see the same thing without the appropriate heavy heart. He also talked about an eight-story building the homeless had occupied at the center of Porto Allegre during the WSF to register their protest with the current government. His group went there and put a Dalit flag on the third floor. That's the Dalit, he said: the landless, the homeless, the dispossessed.

Towards the end, Paul also made a point of talking about the proposal forms that the WSF has been distributing. I had looked at the forms and rolled my eyes. The WSF is at once an open space and also an institution tightly controlled by a few, powerful groups which have long resisted calls from many people that the WSF turn partially into a body that can adopt resolutions and declarations. We come, we talk, we go. We don't even have a declaration that says we oppose the war on Iraq! There is a lot of dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. So, these "proposals" on single sheets of paper are to be placed onto the "murals of proposals" in various tents and it's unclear what will happen to the tens of thousands of papers that will be filled in this manner. It really feels like a symbolic measure with no teeth to shut up the critics. By now Paul had dropped Dalit issues and was urging people to fill out these proposals. "If we don't participate, our voices will have no chance" he said, basically.

Once again, it was so uncynical that I didn't know what to feel. Well, first and foremost ,of course, he's right. I should write down a proposal or two. Maybe they won't even be read. Maybe they will receive a hundred thousand pieces of paper that say we want to be able to make collective declarations. Who knows? But the right attitude is to participate fully and forcefully, whatever the structure.

So, as they opened up the panel to questions and comments, I got up and thanked them and told them how I was on the verge of being overwhelmed --and almost bored-- with all the panels, and the long speeches, and the meetings. That I was deeply grateful for being subjected to their infectious determination. I urged them to continue to travel in person to such meetings. I tried to explain what a privilege it felt like to be in their presence. Afterwards a couple of them pulled me aside and interviewed me on tape on this topic, I suspect to explain to their members back at home why all this travel is not a waste of their few resources. They did explain that, of course, cost was a real issue for them but they have so far found that it is worth it and that they try to bring as many people as they can afford. I got my very own "Dalit Rights" black armband, which I'm wearing along with the "Global Call to Action Against Poverty" white band as I type this, and we exchanged email addresses, handshakes and hugs.

Then, of course, they sent us off with a song.

Posted by zeynep at 08:31 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

January 28, 2005

A Little Good News

No, it's not about the glorious exercise in democracy that is about to descend on the Iraqi people.

The FDA has just for the first time ever approved a "generic triple-therapy AIDS cocktail." The rest of the world has been using them for years, of course.

This is of particular significance because of George W. Bush's "Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief." Of his vaunted $15 billion over five years for AIDS relief, only a little over $1 billion has been given to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (this is expected to rise to a little over $2 billion by 2009). The rest goes to his "Emergency Plan," which focuses on 13 African countries, Haiti, Guyana, and Vietnam, and only allows the use of FDA-approved drugs. Thus, while, over the past two years, people have been dying in unprecedented numbers, the administrators of Bush's plan have insisted on paying exorbitant prices for brand-name drugs.

One might even have been forgiven for thinking that the emergency plan was just a cynical scam perpetrated for two reasons:

Somehow, though, things are changing slowly, probably out of a need to appear slightly more multilateral. The FDA approval for the cocktail was fast-tracked by the Bush administration and the company that got the approval, Aspen Pharmaceuticals, is actually a South African company, not an American one.

Don't get too excited, though. We still don't know at what price this generic cocktail will be sold. And, says the Global AIDS alliance,

This approval, a full two years after the President’s declaration of a global AIDS emergency, is a positive development. But, the product that was approved is not a fixed-dose combination, and, as a result, is not as easy to take. Also, the company would not have gotten its drug approved without cozy relationships with several brand name companies, something not all producers of essential, generic medications enjoy. As a result, while many more generics are urgently needed to simplify treatment and make it more cost-effective, this might not be replicated any time soon.
Anyway, so pathetic is the state of worldwide mobilization against the most immediate global crisis and one of the most severe that even this counts as good news.

Posted by rahul at 06:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 27, 2005

Green Neocons

Robert Bryce has an interesting piece in Slate pointing out that Iraq hawks James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney seem to have jumped on the conservation bandwagon -- Woolsey is driving a hybrid Toyota Prius (although that may be just so he can drive in the carpool lane) and Gaffney is talking about "fuel efficiency and plant-based bio-fuels."

Bryce points out that Woolsey and Gaffney, both members of the Project for a New American Century, "are going green for geopolitical reasons, not environmental ones. They seek to reduce the flow of American dollars to oil-rich Islamic theocracies, Saudi Arabia in particular." (Digressive Note: What other "oil-rich Islamic theocracies" do American dollars flow to? Iran is not really so terribly "oil-rich," given its population, and none of the other countries I can think of qualify as theocracies even to the degree that Saudi Arabia, where feudal lords not clerics run the government, does.)

At least some environmentalists have no problem with such detestable bedfellows:

Neocons and greens first hitched up in the fall, when they jointly backed a proposal put forward by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington-based think tank that tracks energy and security issues. (Woolsey is on the IAGS advisory board.) The IAGS plan proposes that the federal government invest $12 billion to: encourage auto makers to build more efficient cars and consumers to buy them; develop industrial facilities to produce plant-based fuels like ethanol; and promote fuel cells for commercial use. The IAGS plan is keen on "plug-in hybrid vehicles," which use internal combustion engines in conjunction with electric motors that are powered by batteries charged by current from standard electric outlets.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Council on Renewable Energy (Woolsey is on the latter's advisory board, too) both endorsed the IAGS plan. The environmental groups, who have been in the weeds ever since George W. Bush moved in at 1600 Pennsylvania, are happy for any help they can get. "It's a wonderful confluence. We agree on the same goals, even if it's for different reasons," says Deron Lovaas, the NRDC's point-man on auto issues.

(Another Parenthetical Note: the NRDC endorsed NAFTA after the unenforceable "side agreements" on labor and the environment were added).

As I have pointed out before, this is the kind of thing on which Michael Moore and Richard Perle agree completely -- in fact, it's not clear who would win a Saudi-bashing contest. One can imagine a grand alliance uniting Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Bill Maher, Arianna Huffington, and Michael Moore in the same righteous cause.

Of course, the neocons who are into this are the liberal type -- Woolsey was actually Director of Central Intelligence under Clinton (and Perle, not mentioned in Bryce's article, has characterized himself as a Democrat). The Cheney/Rumsfeld authoritarian statist right-wing extractive-industry corporate-moneygrubber faction's alliance with the neoconservatives may just be causing a split within the neocon ranks.

Alliances like this point up the dangers of fighting for a "good" cause in purely pragmatic terms without taking on a harmful dominant ideology. This is a question the antiwar movement is faced with now, as the temptation grows among some sectors to concentrate on the number of Americans killed and the economic cost of the war to Americans without taking on the ideology of American exceptionalism that surrounds everything else and has managed to mute the effect of everything from murderous assaults on civilians to torture to the creation of a new police state in Iraq.

Posted by rahul at 08:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Recycle Your World

Zeynep dropping in...

I am finally rewarded for the fact that I carry my laptop around everywhere, lugging a large backpack in Brazil's summer heat as I traverse the many miles that make up the territory of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. I get to have Internet access without the two hour wait and 15 minute time limit imposed on those who skip around carrying only a water bottle.

These meetings simultaneously depress and inspire me. The number of meetings is enormous, the range of subjects bewildering. The large meetings are practically useless, even when translation is provided. What will anyone get done when a thousand people are crowded into a tent, while the few luminaries speak into microphones? On the other hand, there is something uplifting about being there with so many people. And some of the issues are so big and important that it's hard to imagine the meetings would not be so big. The obvious solution, lots of small early meetings which would send delegates to a larger meeting, would not be acceptable to most people here because they would rightly point out delegation is one of the ways power is stolen away from people. Yet, the non-delegation approach does not seem to result in empowerment either.

The smaller meetings can be quite amazing, the ones that draw something between 20-50 people. There is room for dialogue and interaction and mutual learning in a very unique setting, as participants really are from around the world. Yet, we face such huge problems --climate change, war, poverty, AIDS-- that interacting 50 at a time is massively insufficient.

The most telling moment for me came earlier today, but let me first say something about the thoughts that lead me to it. There are explicit references to sustainability and the ethics of the meeting on the WSF brochures. "The world can only be changed by those who practice change," says the program.

Which, of course, is true in some fundamental way. But I think that sentiment leads some people to concentrate on individual behaviour, on personal lifestyle, while standing at the priviliged end of a greatly unequal, exploitative system.

When inequality is so vast and when a large portion of humanity is so mired in poverty, some of those token gestures are just that: tokens to make ourselves feel a bit better. One of my favorite examples is recycling: something many progressives in rich countries do almost religiously. On the one hand, I couldn't agree more. I try to recycle religiously too. On the other hand, recycle or not, any citizen living in the rich world has so much larger an ecological footprint that recycling hardly makes a dent.

On the average, a citizen of Bangladesh consumes 57 kilowatt hours per capita compared to 11,571 for an average American (1995 figures). The difference is an order of magnitude of about 200 times. A single American takes up the energy foot print of 200 Bangladeshis.

The WSF brochure says in its introductory paragraphs that "... the Forum is legitimized through the promotion of waste recycling." Of course, I totally agree that such a large gathering of people must make every effort increase sustainable use. Yet something bothered me about that sentence when I first read it and it immediately flashed before my eyes earlier this afternoon when I witnessed two small, barefoot children with huge bags go through the WSF recycling bins and gather everything in it into their huge bags. And run off to the next one very quickly, with a load almost equal to their size.

I went around later and checked many recycling bins; they are all emptied out. Some trash here is too valuable to be let go to waste. I also saw many people in Sau Paulo systematically go through trash can after trash can on the streets to salvage aluminum cans and plastic bottles.

My point isn't that recycling is pointless and should be stopped. This was just an opportunity to ponder how some acts to which we sometimes attribute great importance are very small and insignificant compared to the horrific levels of injustice that haunt the world.

Posted by zeynep at 01:15 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

January 26, 2005

Zarqawi's Bombmaker

On Monday, Iraqi security forces announced the capture of one of Zarqawi's top bomb-makers, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Omar al-Kurdi.

Apparently, he has confessed not only to a major role in the bombing of the Jordanian embassy in August 2003 but also to involvement in the same month's assassination of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim (the head of SCIRI, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the Americans' staunch allies) via a car-bomb in front of the Imam Ali mosque, which killed about 95 people. The bombing of the U.N. headquarters, also in the same month, was, he said, the work of some of his close associates.

Oddly, this is the first concrete mention of Zarqawi's involvement in the attack on al-Hakim. Ever since his emergence into the public eye about a year ago, I have assumed his organization was responsible for the attack.

I remember trying to figure out what was going on when it happened. Despite the views of many Iraqis, it clearly wasn't the Americans.  Not only was al-Hakim an ally, taking such a huge risk of damage to the mosque when they were depending so heavily on the Shi'a to stay calm made no sense at all.

The claims that it was Moqtada, which you still hear, were ridiculous. He is accused of assassinating Abdel Majid al-Khoei in the Ali mosque, a claim he denies, but in that incident, a stabbing, there was no risk of damage to the mosque. He has later shown, in April and August, that the inviolability of the mosque is essential to his political strategy.

Even "Saddam loyalists," it seemed to me, would have been more careful about the mosque, given their very precarious position.

Both the al-Hakim attack and the U.N. bombing bore the clear imprint of extremist Wahhabi/Salafi Sunnis (bin Laden hates the U.N. almost as much as Dick Cheney does, blaming it, for example, for helping to push Indonesia, a Muslim country, to end its genocidal occupation of East Timor, a Christian country).

Anyway, it's all so plausible that, notwithstanding the methods that might have been used to obtain al-Kurdi's confessions, I believe them. The al-Hakim assassination is a clear example of divergence of the Zarqawi group's attacks from any imaginable goals of the U.S. occupying forces. In fact, the loss of al-Hakim deprived the occupiers of any way to fight against Sistani's influence, with the result that when he puts his foot down, they have to capitulate -- as they did on the matter of elections.

Other Zarqawi attacks, like the U.N. and the frequent executions of Iraqi police and national guard, seem to me very much acts that had no U.S. involvement, but it's possible to figure out some tortured way in which they serve U.S. interests -- and conspiracy theories always rest on a purely functionalist view of human agency, whether individually or in organizations (and, of course, conspiracies do exist).

In particular, although the killings of security forces have scared many people away, they seem also, at long last, to have created a core of Iraqis in the security forces who are as gung-ho against the resistance as the Americans are. That's something the Americans were completely lacking at the beginning.

None of this will daunt the true conspiracists, of course.

Posted by rahul at 02:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 24, 2005

"Empowering" People into the Grave

Hello, all. I'll be guest-blogging while Zeynep is in Porto Alegre at the World Social Forum. My own blog is Empire Notes. Please check out my new commentary on "The Inauguration, Democracy, and the Iraqi Elections."

A little update from the other white meat, Jeb. While George W. destroys Social Security in order to save it, Jeb is following in big bro's Orwellian footsteps by taking an axe to Medicaid and calling it "empowered care." According to the Times,

Mr. Bush is proposing that the state's 2.1 million Medicaid
recipients be allotted money to buy their own health care
coverage from managed care organizations and other private
medical networks. If enacted, the program would make
Florida the first state to allow private companies, not the
state, to decide the scope and extent of services to the
elderly, the disabled and the poor, half of them children.
This is being billed as a way to control Medicaid costs, which have risen 63% in the past five years. This places a major strain on state budgets, since they have to pay half the costs.

Of course, there are only two ways to reduce the cost. Either reduce the total amount of health care provided (by dropping people from the rolls or keeping people but capping their services) or reduce "overhead." Government health-care programs, naturally, have far less "overhead" than private ones, since they don't need to make a profit. The more services private insurance companies deny to their policyholders, the higher their profits.

Thus, even switching over and keeping the same budget outlays for Medicaid would mean a loss in the amount of health care available to Medicaid holders; actually cutting the budget would mean an even greater loss.

Thus, naturally,

Calling his proposal "empowered care," Governor Bush said
when he announced it here on Jan. 11 that it would offer
more choice and flexibility to users.
Apparently, most states already incorporate "managed care" (managing care down and profits up) into Medicaid, but the Florida empowerment will be the first in which the states put no conditions on private insurance companies profiting off of government largesse.

Good thing Jeb has categorically ruled out running for president in 2008. Ever since "Read my lips," we've known how much to trust the family.

Posted by rahul at 09:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 23, 2005

"Elections" Occupation Style

As we approach the event that will be called elections in Iraq, it is pretty much confirmed that there will be no election observer stationed anywhere in the country. Except perhaps a single one, who may or may not show up. Even then, he or she will not be touring polling stations, or anything of the sort. So, the "observation" will probably consist of observing the walls of a room in a hotel in the Green Zone. By a single person. At best:

But in Iraq, where 14 million people are eligible to vote, the elections next week may have only one outsider from the hastily organized International Mission for Iraqi Elections to evaluate the balloting. If reluctant governments change their minds at the last minute about letting their officials go to Iraq, a handful of others may show up. But, even then, none is likely to tour polling stations or to be publicly identified, mission and U.S. officials said.

...

There will be no neutral outside group deployed across Iraq to determine whether voters are impeded, ballot boxes are stuffed, any party tries to interfere with the process or votes are counted fairly. No congressional delegation will monitor the polls, and the European Union announced last week that it had declined an invitation from Iraq to send observers. The Carter Center, which has monitored more than 50 elections overseas, also decided not to send observers.

All these precious words have now become something akin to brand names: "democracy", "freedom", "liberty", "empowerment." They don't really mean anything, they're just the names attached to things we do. They aren't defined by any intrinsic quality. It's like the reverse of the abuse/torture dichotomy. If we do it, it's "abuse," if anyone else does it, it's torture. If we do it, it's democracy and freedom.

And on that note, I'm turning the blog over for yet another week as I travel to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. These past two months have been a whirlwind of travel and the WSF will bring this fun but hectic period to a close. I still have so much to write especially about my Venezuela trip, and hopefully after this last trip, I can slowly return to blogging all of that.

Rahul Mahajan of the Empire Notes will be guest blogging this week, the timing of which is quite fortuitous for the blog because he's been a very astute observer of the "demonstration elections" that this administrations has been putting on around the world.

P.S. I sincerely apologize to the person whose comment to the previous entry was accidentally deleted -- I noticed it was gone after one of my routine comment-spam clean-ups. I've been informed of some ways that might help limit the enormous comment spam this blog receives, ranging from the ridiculous to the offensive, and I've been mostly manually deleting them which doesn't take that much time but results in the occasional mishap of a genuine comment being deleted. Hopefully, I'll have time to implement a better system soon.

P.P.S. Any WSF suggestions? This is my first trip to The Event.

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January 21, 2005

Idealist. Lofty Goals. Too Ambitious. Really.

I haven't had a chance to follow the press coverage of the inaugral speech too closely. But I did flip through the channels a bit, and read a bit of the commentary.

Idealist. Such lofty goals. Are commiting to fight all the dictatorships now?

That kind of rhetoric was a non-trivial portion of the pundit chatter. Have these people completely lost their sense of reality? Have they lost every last shred of dignity and self-respect? But even then, how does one keep a straight face while discussing if this president is too much of an idealist in search of democracy? Are they all this superb actors? Are they all this delusional?

Some of this is becoming really hard to comprehend.

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January 20, 2005

One of Those Weeks

Some weeks there is so much to say I get bewildered. Where do you start?

At his inaugral, Bush quoted Abraham Lincoln: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it." He also added, "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

May we have the strength to hold him to that.

I was also struck by a slogan on a handmade sign, held up by a middle aged protestor along the inaugral route: "My silence did not make me any safer."

I hope more and more people realize that.

Lastly, if you are as horrified as I am by sense that our world now seems beyond the most outrageous nightmare George Orwell could conjure up, maybe a bit of Edgar Allan Poe will make you feel, well, worse or better.

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January 17, 2005

No Regrets

Specialist Graner said he had no regrets, even as he was led in shackles from the courtroom after being sentenced to 10 years over his actions in Abu Ghraib.

He certainly takes his cue from his commander-in-chief. Last week, even as the administration publicly gave up pretending to search for those "missing" weapons of mass destruction, White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan remained unfazed ""Based on what we know today, the president would have taken the same action because this is about protecting the American people." Bush probably won't even stop arguing the weapons were somehow smuggled, hidden, dismantled. It's not like he will be held accountable for statements like this from September, 2003:

"I think he dispersed them. I think he is so adapted at deceiving the civilized world for a long period of time that it's going to take a while for the troops to unravel. But I firmly believe he had weapons of mass destruction. I know he used them at one time."

You see, according to Bush, "accountability moment" has come and gone with the election. He won and that's it. In some sense, can you blame him for thinking this day? Recent polls show that six in ten people feel hopeful about Bush's second term:

Nearly two-thirds of those polled described Bush as likable, strong and intelligent. A majority said he is dependable and honest.

A majority said he's honest -- this, after so many lies with such deadly consequences have been exposed time after time. On the one hand, it's clear that the media have been failing miserably. On the other hand, the lies are so blatant, so in-your-face, it's hard to argue this is just the propaganda system at work. Somehow, people seem to not want to come to terms with what their country is doing. The stratgey seems to be, I guess, ok, let's continue hiding our heads in the sand and pretend the rest of the world does not exist.

Graner, being small fish, will pay some price for his actions, regrets or none. His lawyer has correctly pointed out the different treatment he received compared to all the other soldiers who've been tried in connection with Abu Ghraib:

Womack said look no further than the final glimpses of Graner to see what he calls the attitude of the Government. Graner was in shackles and cuffs as he was led past the unblinking eye of the media. The other four soldiers sentenced were slipped out the back of the building.

Bush, on the other hand, will now go on and attend $40-$50 million "inaugration festivities;" express no regrets; make plans to attack Iran, continue the occupation of Iraq with terrible consequences for people of Iraq as well as for soldiers deployed there as part of an unwanted, unpopular occupation; appoint as Attorney General the man who devised ways torturers can legally defend themselves; and appoint as Secretary of State the woman who has loyally repeated whatever lie she needed to repeat in order to push the warmongering agenda... Why shouldn't specialist Graner not correctly perceive all that has happened is that he's being punished because he was too eager with his digital camera. Why should he feel like he's done anything wrong?

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January 14, 2005

Graner is to the Torture Scandal What Martha Stewart Was to the Corporate Accounting Scandals

So, Specialist Graner, who appeared in many of the Abu Ghraib photos, is found guilty -- and he faces serious jail time. I had thought that he too would be given a slap on the wrist, just a bit more than the other because he was so obviously enjoying his sadism, but I was wrong. It seems that he is too irresistable a scapegoat. During his closing arguments, the prosecutor argued that the final word on the "abuses" at Abu Ghraib would come with this trial:

"Fortunately," he said, "the accused does not have the final word on the abuses at Abu Ghraib." That, he said, would come from the jury's verdict.

Find him guilty, in other words, and close the Abu Ghraib chapter. Hard to resist.

The defense argued that all of Graner's actions were done under orders, that all this "abuse" was necessary for Iraqi freedom, and even that all those naked human pyramids were done with care so that the detainees did not suffocate:

Interrogators and military intelligence, he repeatedly reminded the jury, had given orders to and consistently praised Specialist Graner and other military police soldiers. Their actions, he said, were done in the name of Iraqi freedom, and ultimately allowing the elections that will happen at the end of this month.

"Sometimes, when you make an omelet, you have to break some eggs," Mr. Womack told the jury, adding, "You had to use approaches that we would not want to do with our own children."

Mr. Womack did not deny most of the harsh treatment seen in the photographs, or the even the idea that it might seem abusive, calling it the "day to day events" at Abu Ghraib. He cited an explanation from an expert witness he called earlier in the week, who said that the pyramid of naked and hooded detainees was done safely, to make sure they would not suffocate.

"It was an ingenious move," Mr. Womack said. The military police soldiers put the detainees in sexually humiliating positions, he said, because they knew the detainees would be embarrassed, and had been told by military intelligence that this was an effective psychological tool to draw out information.

You gotta admit, his lawyers have a point but it's not a point defense of Specialist Graner, but rather an indictment of the whole system: the evidence is overwhelming that torture has become systematic in most American-run detention centers around the world, and it's very also clear that this "make an omelet, break a few eggs, what's the big deal" approach is official explanation of whatever eggregious practice becomes uncovered.

I'm afraid many people will see this as case closed: the guilty were charged, tried and found guilty. That's likely be the official spin.

So, this is all turning out to be like the Martha Stewart epsidoe in which she was revealed to have dabbled in the insider-"networking" that is part-and-parcel of how corporate America operates. In the middle of all the corporate scandals and corporate crimes that have netted billions of dollars for the corporate barons, she ended up with the jail sentence -- and the quite vicious media coverage. Why? I guess because she was already visible and disliked by many for being annoying, female and rich. She was thus the easiest scapegoat that the public could be fed -- even though the things she was accused of, even if they were all true, were obviously quite minor compared to the rest of the field. So, Martha Stewart's in jail and perhaps Ken Lay will do a few months because he too is so visible, but we hardly hear of the corporate scandals nowadays.

So, it seems, it will be with Graner. He will do time and he will be reviled. At least for a while. In our culture where fame is a valuable commodity, no matter what the origins, Graner just has to hope he gets a short enough sentence that he is still notorious when he gets out. He can always look to Martha Stewart as an example: I hear she is signed up to do a reality show after she gets out.

Posted by zeynep at 10:24 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 12, 2005

Oops. No Regrets. Can We Talk About Iran Now?

It was a small item in the evening news. You could have missed it if you went away for a minute or two. They are stopping their "search" for WMD in Iraq. They're acknowledging that Iraq had made no WMD since 1991:

The White House acknowledged Wednesday that its hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction — a two-year search costing millions of dollars — has closed down without finding the stockpiles that President Bush cited as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Bush's spokesman said the president had no regrets about invading Iraq. ... Duelfer said then that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and had not made any since 1991.

That's it. Let's move on. Flip the channel and voila! It's David Kay and Kenneth Pollack on CSPAN talking about the threat posed by Iran and what the U.S. should do about it.

As the peace movement, we have many failings. Failing to stop the war; failing to hold our government accountable for the torture; failing to put withdrawal on the political table...

But this one is inexcusable. Weapons Inspector David Kay and Professional Warmonger Kenneth Pollack are able to show their face in public and talk about Iran. Why haven't we run them out of public life? Why isn't moral outrage enough to at least put the these warmonger apartchiks into the political oblivion they deserve? How come these men are on television pontificating on the very day their lies from the previous war become so unavoidable that they are now part of official history?

Posted by zeynep at 10:33 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 10, 2005

Give me a T! Give me an O! Give me an R! Give me a T! Give me a U! Give me an R! Give me an E!

That's what cheerleaders do, those naked human pyramids. And what's a leash? That's what parents use to control their todders in shopping malls. What's the big deal? It was all harmless. Anyway, he was ordered to do so.

Yes, those are the arguments Specialist Graner's lawyer made today.

"Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?" Guy Womack, Graner's attorney, said in opening arguments.

...

Womack said using a tether was a valid method of controlling detainees, especially those who might be soiled with feces.


"You're keeping control of them. A tether is a valid control to be used in corrections," he said. "In Texas we'd lasso them and drag them out of there." He compared the leash to parents who place tethers on their toddlers while walking in shopping malls.

And here's another bit of harmless cheerleading that Graner engaged in:

Explaining a new video that shows a detainee writhing as Private Sivits tries to cut off a pair of handcuffs, he said Specialist Graner had attached them so tightly, the detainee's hands were turning purple. "I personally thought he was going to lose his hands," he said.

Another new photograph taken by Specialist Graner showed a 19-year-old Iraqi woman exposing her breasts. Private Sivits said that Specialist Graner said he had tried to photograph her pubic area but that she would not let him.

Asked to explain photos of detainees masturbating, Private Frederick said Specialist Graner "said it was a present for our birthday." Soldiers also said commanders explicitly told them not to take photographs.

Mr. Womack, Specialist Graner's lawyer, said that the photos were part of a plan to force information from detainees and that government officials blamed his client only after the pictures set off outrage around the world.

The only part true their is that "his client" is in court today only because there were pictures. Otherwise, all the people who pointed out that torture was possibly going on in American-run detention centers around the world just be painted as some lefty-loonly-America-haters who were moved to make these crazy allegations because they were overcome by their love of Saddam Hussein.

Posted by zeynep at 10:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 09, 2005

Pentagon to Train Paramilitary Death Squads in Iraq -- A la Salvador

Newsweek details a very important development:

NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria.... It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

El Salvador, and Central America, has clearly been in the minds of this administration for awhile. Back in October, Dick Cheney mentioned it as a model for Afghanistan. Of course, the current U.S. "ambassador" to Iraq is John Negroponte, who was the ambassador to Honduras -- where he helped build "Contra" operations against the Nicaraguan people. And it was during his ambassadorship that "deaths quads" trained by CIA rained terror in Honduras. He also lied to Congress about all this and more but since this Congress seems to impervious to all insult I will not dwell on that part.

Here's Bob Parry, commenting on Dick Cheney's laudatory mention of the Salvador example:

People forget that the war on terror was also being applied in Central America, even though it was often the security forces of the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala that were conducting the terror. The 75,000 people killed in El Salvador that Mr. Cheney mentioned, the vast majority, the vast, vast majority were killed by Salvadoran security forces and not in battle but taken out and executed, often tortured and raped first. This was a bloody mess, and the United States, under then President Reagan and Vice President Bush, supported it, and they advocated it, and they tried to cover up the facts of the matter.

It's deplorable that such a shameful chapter in our history is lauded as a success but unfortunately it is not surprising. In fact, El Salvador is indeed a model of how to successfully quell an uprising that has widespread popular support: with enough force, terror and lawlessness most populations can be made to give up.

This may well be more a trial baloon rather than an actual plan at the moment but it's still very significant because it indicates the direction of this administration -- crushing the obviously growing insurgency through very bloody means. Unsurprisingly, Ayad Allawi is reportedly among "the most forthright proponents."

Hopefully, people who were part of the Central America solidarity groups in the eighties, and people from those countries, can step up and speak the truth about the "Salvador Option" as Newsweek calls the death squad plan. This path we are going down is scary and sad, with the worst immediate consequences for the people of Iraq but for all of us in the end.

Posted by zeynep at 09:35 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Why Do They Hate Us, Continued...

Remember the case where two Iraqis were forcibly thrown into the Tigris river by U.S. soldiers -- resulting in one of them drowning? Well, it's sentencing time, time to send a message about what we think of Iraqi life.

Six months in jail, one rank demotion. No discharge.

That's it.

An Army platoon sergeant who ordered his soldiers to throw Iraqis into the Tigris River was sentenced Saturday to six months in military prison, but will not be discharged.

...

He did not testify during his trial, but before he was sentenced Saturday told the jury of Army officers and enlisted members that his actions were wrong — although he did not apologize to the Iraqis.

...

Perkins did not discuss specifics of the incident on the stand Saturday, but admitted he had ordered his soldiers to throw an Iraqi man into the river in December 2003.

The six-man military jury had the option for dishonorable discharge, rank reduction and 11 1/2 years in prison -- which it chose not to exercise. Which brings me to another point: it's bad enough that crimes committed against Iraqis, in Iraq, are not tried in Iraq. (Imagine the uproar if that were the case here). But at least serious crimes, such as murder and torture, should be tried in civilian courts where the jury wouldn't be all enlisted men and women. It's the same thing in the trial of Charles Graner's trial -- the most notorious torturer in the Abu Ghraib photos. It's, of course, an all-military jury but, further, all members of the jury have been deployed overseas, either in Iraq or Afghanistan. In other words, they are people like to feel kinship with Graner and feel defensive about their own role in this war.

Unsurprisingly, the defense was pretty happy with the jury:

"This case involves terrorists and insurgents and the war on terrorism," defense attorney Guy Womack said. "We could not pick a truer jury of peers than to have a combat veteran tried by combat veterans."

...

Graner, shown in some of the notorious photographs taken inside the Baghdad prison, was upbeat after the jury was picked Friday.

"The sun is shining, the sky is blue and this is America," he said. "Whatever happens is going to happen, but I still feel it's going to be on the positive side."

How about a jury of torture victims? How about a jury composed of parents of torture victims? How about including just a single parent of a torture victim? If this jury too is going to condone torture with some slap-on-the-wrist sentence, let them at least have to look in the eye a single person whose life has been damaged by the peculiar evil that is torture.

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January 07, 2005

"Elections" by "Secret" "Ballot," You Said? Ha, ha, ha.

Is anyone reading these major newspapers? Are they just used to fill the recycling bin so that one looks environmentally conscious to the neighbors?

Even amidst all the Pentagon propaganda re-released as news, all the false assumptions, distortions and outright lies, it's hard to not understand what's actually going on in Iraq if one is paying a bit of attention.

This one is from the L.A. Times:

At five heavily guarded entry points to the city [Fallujah], military interrogators are selectively asking returning residents whether they have heard of the upcoming election and, if so, which, if any, candidates they support.

First a foreign occupying army levels your city. Then they tell you that you can't be in your own hometown without I.D cards issued by them and that there will be fingerprinting and retina scans. Then they claim it's so that there can be "elections" free of coercion. Then their military interrogators question you on your vote as you try to return to what's left of your house.

How can something like that be reported just like that, in passing, without much comment? Military interrogators questioning refugees about which candidate they plan to support. If it happened anywhere else in the world, everyone would recognize it for what it was.

Meanwhile government officials continue to declare we're trying to bring democracy to Iraq -- and discussing whether that goal is too noble and lofty for the real world passes as critical punditry.

Posted by zeynep at 05:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 06, 2005

"Most Iraq Vote Observers Will Be in Jordan"

Just when you think it can't get more absurd:

Most international experts assessing the fairness of Iraq's elections will monitor the Jan. 30 vote from the safety of neighboring Jordan, but a few observers will head to Baghdad and perhaps other Iraqi cities if security permits, U.N. and other officials said Thursday.

But not to worry. Elections can be observed just as well from another country.

"We believe we can run a very effective operation to assess how well-run the election was even if there are not huge numbers of electoral observers on the ground," said Canada's chief electoral officer, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, who hosted a meeting in Ottawa this week of international election experts to discuss the Iraqi election.

I suggest they don't even bother going to Jordan, really. In fact, why not go on a vacation and watch the whole thing on the news? It's not like the news media will actually be covering it anyway. One way or the other, it will be called "elections" and that's all that matters.

But, wait, it gets better. Here's Kingsley again:

"We have not ruled out going into Iraq or parts of Iraq."

Wow. The "Iraq" "election" "observers" have not ruled out going into Iraq. Or even parts of Iraq. Imagine that.

(Thanks to Left I on the News).

Posted by zeynep at 07:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 05, 2005

I hereby swear I'll do whatever it takes to rise through the ranks! Trust me!

So, is this supposed to make us feel better?

Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales plans to promise senators on Thursday that he would abide by treaties prohibiting torture of prisoners, despite deriding the restraints as outdated relics two years ago.

If you want to torture, Mr. President, go ahead. I'll issue a memo that says the Geneva Conventions aren't binding, torture isn't torture and the President is King. You want me to promise to oppose torture in order to get confirmed, Mr. Senator? Sure, I promise that we will abide by the Geneva Conventions, torture is against American values, and the President is King.

I'm sorry that I have to keep repeating stuff I blogged before but it's hard to know what else to do in the face of such constant lies and propaganda. You want a sense of how unprincipled, callous and slave to power Mr. Gonzales is, go back to his Texas days:

Gonzales had opined in 1997 that the State of Texas was not bound by international treaties signed by the United States -- when Texas executed a Mexican-national who was interrogated and tried without letting him contact his embassy and made to sign a confession in English, which he thought was an immigration document --clearly a violation of international treaties in this matter. Here's part of what I wrote about it then:
The current White House chief legal counsel Alberto Gonzales, who had been widely rumored to be the next Supreme Court Nominee before authoring the latest memos arguing the president was not bound by international or domestic law, had opined in the past that the State of Texas was not bound by international treaties signed by the United States.

There goes a few hundred years of precedent along with the United States constitution, but, hey, we got to execute a Mexican national who did not speak English and who signed a murder confession thinking it was an immigration document, without a translator or lawyer present

...

I wonder if [Gonzales] found it odd that nobody asked for his passport when he left Texas for D.C.

Oh, the multiple political uses of that execution -- similar to Bill Clinton's execution of a mentally retarded black man to prove he was tough and "electable." In one swift stroke, Gonzales demonstrated that he was willing to put aside all considerations of law, principle and minimal logic and make the most absurd declarations if necessary. Plus, by helping execute a Mexican national he showed that he has no loyalty to anything beside power and his career. In that act, he reassured the establishment that his own brown skin, or his experience as children of poor migrant farmworkers, would not cause any outbreak of undue empathy, compassion or sense of justice. (Always a danger with humans, much research underway to solve that last pesky glitch so that the imperial-consumptionfest can proceed smoothly; that is until that day the earth just gives up and spits us all out or swallows us all in.)

Posted by zeynep at 06:12 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Comments

I accidently erased a few legitimate reader comments while carrying out my usual chore of deleting comment spam. This site, like many others, gets tons of comments spam each day and I have been manually deleting them. So, my apologies to those commenters (it would have been comments from the last few days).

Also, as you can probaby tell from my postings, I'm terribly swamped catching up with everything since returning from all the travel. Hopefully, things will come under control soon and I will also begin to post Venezuela and Mexico impressions, along with more analysis of current events...

Posted by zeynep at 12:30 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 04, 2005

Nallavadu

Here's a story from South India (that I first saw on Andy Carvin's article, The Tsunami as a Wake-Up Call to Bridging the Digital Divide .)

Nallavadu Total Families: 500, Population: 3630 [Male: 1950, Female: 1680] 200 catamarans and 150 houses are lost. One of our former volunteer by name Mr Vijayakumar is presently working in Singapore. He has seen the tsunami warning in Singapore. Immediately he telephoned to his house. That information spread out in the entire street. He also phoned to the knowledge Center at 1145am. Another person by name Mr Gopu also phoned to the Center from abroad. At the time tsunami has attacked nearly 200 fishermen who were in the sea. By God's grace all of them are safe. Immediately they spread the information through public address system and blew the siren. Because of this all are safe with their families in this village.
Not one person died in that village even though it came under the force of the Tsunami in a serious way -- a third of the houses were destroyed -- because someone from the region, who was in Signapore at the time, heard of the Tsunami and called his home and the Village Resource Centre, which then broadcast the information over the public announcement system.

It's stories like this that make me angry, and sad, about all that was not done to warn people of the possible effects of the earthquake. Most governments in the region also hadn't put in place simple public awareness programs to teach people how to recognize a Tsunami -- basicaly, if seawater rapidly recedes, turn around and run instead of congregating around the newly exposed seabed to examine the curious phenomenon, as many unfortunate thousands did.

Posted by zeynep at 11:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 02, 2005

"Iraq Was Disarmed"

Here's Kofi Annan responding to George Stephanopoulos on a question regarding the oil-for-food program:

The sanctions [on Iraq] were effective. Iraq was disarmed. Iraq is well-fed.

A good journalist would have followed up on that very important statement. Iraq was disarmed. If Iraq was disarmed, what then of this invasion and occupation? And why, Mr. Secretary General, weren't you making this point before the invasion?

And "Iraq is well-fed." Is? I'm not sure there is any tense in which that sentence is correct for the period since 1991: not during the sanctions era, and it's certainly not the first word that comes to mind for Iraq today.

The sad truth is there this administration would like to destroy even this United Nations because, in spite of its pathetic current state, it still represents a global institution, a gathering of nations not under the thumb of the United States. And it seems clear that trying to "appease" the militaristic goals of the United States, as Kofi Annan's leadership did during the run-up to this invasion, does not work. One would hope that with two years left in an unrenewable post, Annan would find more backbone. Instead, he's spending his time at Richard Holbrooke's apartment listening to friendly "advice" about how he has to "repair relations with Washington." Shame on him.

Posted by zeynep at 11:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 01, 2005

"Elections" in Fallujah Around the Corner

Remember how we were constantly told that the operation in Fallujah was taking place in order to provide a "secure and stable enough situation to be able to conduct nationwide elections in January"? All that talk about we had to make sure Fallujah's residents could vote, and thus had to attack?

Well, here's a glimpse of the current state of the town:

U.S. and Iraqi officials say that they tried to warn Falloujans that it was too soon to return, but that they let them go last week after a groundswell of protest. Officials also face pressure to reopen the city before the election. The U.S.-led invasion of the city last month was prompted, in part, by a desire to clear the way for the vote.

...

After enduring three hours of military checkpoints and searches, Atiya and two brothers anxiously reentered the city Monday, uncertain what to expect.

U.S. troops handed them leaflets warning against a myriad of dangers and advising them that the U.S. military could not guarantee their safety. Don't drink the water, the leaflets warned, or eat food left behind.

Every resident is required to carry a small card outlining special new rules for the city. There's a 6 p.m. curfew. No weapons are allowed. Graffiti and public gatherings are illegal. Cars and visitors are banned.

Males between the ages of 15 and 55 must carry special identification cards. U.S. military officials have announced plans to use fingerprinting and retina scans to prevent insurgents from returning.

The whole L.A. Times article is worth reading.

What amazes me is how it can be reported with a straight face that we do what we do in order to ensure elections can be held in Iraq.

Posted by zeynep at 08:02 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack