[Peace-discuss] News notes, 12/23 (Part 2 of 2)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[continued from part 1]

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21 - FIRST DAY OF WINTER

Argentinean president Fernando de la Rua resigns. The now-despised leader
left his palace yesterday amidst continued violent rioting, making it
likely that the government will default on its $132 billion international
debt. Economic incompetence and dithering brought down de la Rua, and the
country will now most likely exchange him and his once-lauded free-market
policies for the populist Peronists. [ALL]

The US economy turned in its weakest performance in a decade in the third
quarter, shrinking at an annual rate of 1.3 percent, an even bigger drop
than the government previously estimated. [WASH POST]

The federal government will give an average of $1.65 million to families
of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks who waive their rights to sue for
compensation. The cuts range from $300,000 to more than $4 million, with
families of younger or higher-income workers getting the most. This money
will come in addition to charitable aid. The LAT points out that the fund
will give money to victims' same-sex partners ... the total pot of federal
and charitable money for victims' families roughly matches the amount
Afghanistan will get from the international community's current long-term
aid plan. [USA TODAY]

Homicide numbers in several major US cities have started increasing after
a long decline. Possible explanations include recession and "the large
number of recently released prisoners" [but war is not mentioned] ... The
rise in homicides was led by Boston and Phoenix, which had increases of
more than 60 percent through Dec. 18, compared with the same period last
year, according to police figures in a survey of 18 major cities.
Homicides jumped 22 percent in St. Louis, 17.5 percent in Houston, 15
percent in San Antonio, 11.6 percent in Atlanta, 9.2 percent in Los
Angeles and 5.2 percent in Chicago, the police departments in those cities
said. However, even the sharp increases this year leave the big cities far
below the peak in homicide in 1991. The rise in Chicago, which has had 644
homicides this year, compared with 612 in the same period last year, means
that it will probably pass New York for the first time as the city with
the most homicides, though Chicago has 2.9 million people and New York has
8 million. [NY TIMES]

More than half of Operation Desert Storm veterans are being treated for
service-connected disabilities. [US NEWS]

WM. GREIDER: the latest trend in corporate globalization: the migration of
production from places like Mexico and Taiwan to China, where wages are
significantly lower. Developing countries end up ensnared by the
exploitative logic of globalization; if they do anything to try to lift
wages, allow unionization, or improve environmental conditions, they end
up being punished by losing business to some other nation willing to drive
production costs down even further. [NATION]

Afghans scarred by decades of war awaited the inauguration of the first
post-Taliban government as conflicting reports emerged over the identity
of a large group of people killed in a convoy blasted by US planes.  The
United States said AC-130 helicopter gunships and navy jets destroyed a
convoy in eastern Afghanistan carrying "leadership" figures, as part of a
raids targeting members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and his
former Taliban protectors.  "There were a lot of people killed and a lot
of vehicles damaged, or destroyed," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
said.  A report from Pakistan however said 65 tribal elders, chiefs and
commanders heading for the inauguration of the new government in Kabul
were killed in the raid.  But the Pentagon was adamant: "there is no
doubt, they hit the bad guys," spokesman Lieutenant Colonel David Lapan
said. [AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE]

PETER DALE SCOTT: Within two years, Afghanistan may again be producing
2,800 or more tons of opium annually, according to U.S. and Pakistani
sources, becoming again the world's chief supply source. In areas
bordering Pakistan, where most of the opium is processed, prices have
already plummeted. While the Taliban effectively forbade growing opium
poppies - the raw material for heroin - their defeat means starving
farmers are hurrying to replant the one lucrative crop available to them.
This is of course bad news for those striving to reduce the scourge of
heroin in the world. It also presents the risk of a return of warlordism
to Afghanistan - regional commanders and armies financed by the opium in
their area, jealously refusing to relinquish such a lucrative income
source to a central government. At risk is a revival of the vicious
internecine feuds that took so many civilian lives in the 1990s, after the
Soviet withdrawal. [PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE]]

ON THIS DAY IN 1919 Emma Goldman and 248 radical aliens are deported to
Russia aboard the S.S. Buford thanks to an ambitious young J. Edgar
Hoover, head of the Justice Department's General Intelligence Division. In
November 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched a series of
raids targeting the most vulnerable radical and progressive organizations.
By early 1920, more than five thousand people were arrested in what became
known as the "Palmer Raids." Goldman's Mother Earth office was among the
first to be ransacked in 1917.

SATURDAY DECEMBER 22

The Colombian government has announced it will formally open peace talks
with the leftist National Liberation Army at the same time recognizing the
group's political status.  In a statement, the government said it was
suspending arrest orders reissued in August for leaders of the group,
known as the ELN, as a result of their decision to observe a truce through
January 6.  The rebels repeated its promise to forego mass kidnapping for
ransom, even once the truce concludes. Kidnapping for ransom is a major
source of income for the rebels.  "It's not the policy of the ELN to
conduct massive kidnappings. It is forbidden to conduct this type of
activity and that is what we have instructed our units," ELN spokesman
Ramiro Vargas said from Havana ... Contact between the government and the
4,500-strong ELN resumed November 24, after President Andres Pastrana
broke it off in August, charging that the insurgents were not serious
about making peace.

Israel's government said on Sunday it would bar Palestinian President
Yasser Arafat from attending Christmas festivities in Bethlehem because he
had not done enough to clamp down on "terror organizations.'' [REUTERS]

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 23

Indian Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani will ask Washington to identify
Pakistan as a "terrorist state" during a visit next month to the United
States. [AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE]

Strange snub to US at inaugural ceremony.  They thanked the UN, the EU,
each other and even the Chancellor of Germany. But when Afghanistan's new
interim government took power yesterday, at a colourful ceremony at the
Grand Hall of the Ministry of the Interior in Kabul, there was no mention
of the US, the country that had made it all possible.  To add to the
surreal note, American representatives overwhelmed those of every other
country at the inauguration ceremony. There was General Tommy Franks - who
might have expected a victor ludorum after vanquishing the Taliban - the
US ambassador, State Department officials, secret service men and armed
uniformed soldiers.  Speech after speech passed without any reference to
the Americans and how they had changed Afghanistan. Even Hamid Karzai, the
new American-backed leader, made only fleeting reference to the 11
September attack.  The one name mentioned constantly, to roars of
"Bismillah" and "Allahu akbar", was a man who was not there, but whose
memory overshadowed the proceedings.  A huge portrait of Ahmed Shah
Masood, the murdered leader of anti-Taliban forces, loomed over the stage.
The chair in the centre was not given to Mr Karzai; it was draped in
black, with another portrait of the absent leader. [INDEPENDENT UK]

A tribal leader in eastern Afghanistan threatened to launch a war against
new Afghan leader Hamid Karzai if US jets launched another attack on his
area, Afghan Islamic Press reported.  The warning from Gulab Din, head of
the Zadran tribe in Paktia province, came as the US government struggled
to shake off accusations that its jets had attacked a convoy taking tribal
elders and other local officials to Karzai's inauguration in Kabul on
Saturday.  According to AIP, 65 people were killed in the attack on the
convoy near the town of Khost on Thursday ... Din said the US attacks
killed only civilians. According to the Pakistan-based AIP, the tribal
leader warned: "If the US launches similar tyrannical attacks again, we
will launch an armed struggle against Hamid Karzai's government."  He
accused the head of the Khost administration, Bacha Khan, of supplying the
wrong information to US forces and causing the attack on the convoy ...
AIP quoted a wounded Afghan, Mazali, as saying that seven members of his
family were killed in the bombing. [AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE]

US "Tones Down Denials of a Mistake." [LA TIMES]

	***

JOHN PILGER: Since 11 September, the "war on terrorism" has provided a
pretext for the rich countries, led by the United States, to further their
dominance over world affairs. By spreading "fear and respect", as a
Washington Post reporter put it, America intends to see off challenges to
its uncertain ability to control and manage the "global economy", the
euphemism for the progressive seizure of markets and resources by the G8
rich nations.

 This, not the hunt for a man in a cave in Afghanistan, is the aim behind
US Vice-President Dick Cheney's threats to "40 to 50 countries". It has
little to do with terrorism and much to do with maintaining the divisions
that underpin "globalisation". Today international trade is worth more
than £11.5bn [$17 billion] a day. A tiny fraction if this, 0.4 per cent,
is shared with the poorest countries. American and G8 capital controls 70
per cent of world markets, and because of the rules demanding the end of
tariff barriers and subsidies in poor countries while ignoring
protectionism in the west, the poor countries lose £1.3bn [$2 billion] a
day in trade.

 By any measure, this is a war of the rich against the poor. Look at the
casualty figures. The toll, says the World Resources Institute, is more
than 13 million children every year, or 12 million under the age of five,
according to United Nations estimates. "If 100 million have been killed in
the formal wars of the 20th century", wrote Michael McKinley, "why are
they to be privileged in comprehension over the annual [death] toll of
children from structured adjustment programmes since 1982?"

 McKinley's paper, "Triage: a survey of the new inequality as combat zone"
was presented to a conference in Chicago this year and deserves wider
reading (he teaches at the Australian National University:
michael.mckinley at anu.edu.au). It vividly describes the acceleration of
western economic power in the Clinton years, which, since 11 September,
has passed a threshold of danger for millions of people.

 Last month's World Trade Organisation meeting in Doha in the Gulf state
of Quatar, was disastrous for the majority of humanity. The rich nations
demanded and got a new "round" of "trade liberalisation", which is the
power to intervene in the economies of poor countries, to demand
privatisation and the destruction of public services. Only they are
permitted to protect their home industries and agriculture; only they have
the right to subsidise exports of meat, grain and sugar, then to dump them
in poor countries at artificially low prices, thereby destroying the
livelihoods of millions. In India, says the environmentalist Vandana
Shiva, suicides among poor farmers are "an epidemic".

 Even before the WTO met, the American trade representative Robert
Zoelliek invoked the "war on terrorism" to warn the developing world that
no serious opposition to the American trade agenda would be tolerated. He
said: "The United States is committed to global leadership of openness and
understands that the staying power of our new coalition.[against
terrorism].depends on economic growth." The code is that "economic growth"
(rich elite, poor majority) equals anti-terrorism.

 Mark Curtis, a historian and Christian Aid's head of policy, who attended
Doha, has described "an emerging pattern of threats and intimidation of
poor countries" that amounted to "economic gunboat diplomacy". He said:
"It was utterly outrageous. Wealthy countries exploited their power to
spin the agenda of big business. The issue of multinational corporations
as a cause of poverty was not even on the agenda; it was like a conference
on malaria that does not discuss the mosquito."

 Delegates from poor countries complained of being threatened with the
removal of their few precious trade preferences. "If I speak out too
strongly for the rights of my people," says an African delegate, "the US
will phone my minister. They will say that I am embarrassing the United
States. My government will not even ask, 'What did he say?' They will just
send me a ticket tomorrow.so I don't speak for fear of upsetting the
master."

 A senior US official telephoned the Ugandan government to ask that its
ambassador to the WTO, Nathan Irumba, be withdrawn. Irumba chairs the
WTO's committee on trade and development and has been critical of the
"liberalisation" agenda. Dr Richard Bernal, a Jamaican delegate at Doha,
said his government had come under similar pressure. "We feel that this
[WTO] meeting has no connection with the war on terrorism," he said,
"[yet] we are made to feel that we are holding up the rescue of the global
economy if we don't agree to a new round [of liberalisation measures]."
Haiti and the Dominican Republic were threatened that their special trade
preferences with the United States would be revoked if they continued to
object to "procurement", the jargon for the effective takeover of a
government's public spending priorities. India's minister for commerce and
industry, Murasoli Maran, said angrily, "The whole process is a mere
formality and we are being coerced against our will.the WTO is not a world
government and should not attempt to appropriate to itself what
legitimately falls in the domain of national governments and parliaments."

 What the conference showed was that the WTO has become a world
government, run by the rich (principally Washington). Although it has 142
members, only 21 governments in reality draft policy, most of which is
written by the "quad": the United States, Europe, Canada and Japan. At
Doha, the British played a part similar to Tony Blair's promotion of the
"war on terrorism". The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry,
Patricia Hewitt, has already said that "since 11 September, the case is
very overwhelming for more trade liberalisation". In Doha, the British
delegation demonstrated, according to Christian Aid, "the gulf between its
rhetoric about making trade work for the poor" and its real intentions.

 This "rhetoric" is the speciality of Clare Short, the International
Development Secretary, who surpassed herself by announcing £20m as "a
package of new measures" to help poor countries. In fact, this was the
third time the same money had been announced within a year. In December
2000, Short said the government "will double its support for
trade-strengthening initiatives in developing countries from £15m over the
past three years to £30m over the next three years". Last March, the same
money was announced again. Short, said her press department, "will
announce that the UK will double its support for.developing countries'
trade performance." On 7 November, the £20m package was announced all over
again. Moreover, a third of it in effect is tied to the launch of a new
WTO "round".

 This is typical of the globalisation of poverty, the true name for
"liberalisation". Indeed, Short's title of International Development
Secretary is as much an Orwellian mockery as Blair's moralising about the
bombing. Short is worthy of special mention for the important supporting
role she has played in the fraudulent war on terrorism.

 To the naïve, she is still the rough diamond who speaks her mind in the
headlines: and this is true in one sense. In trying to justify her support
for the lawless bombing of civilians in Yugoslavia, she likened its
opponents to Nazi appeasers. She has since abused relief agency workers in
Pakistan, who called for a pause in the current bombing as "emotional" and
has questioned their integrity. She has maintained that relief is "getting
through" when, in fact, little of it is being distributed to where it is
most needed.

Around 700 tonnes are being trucked into Afghanistan every day, less than
half that which the UN says is needed. Six million people remain at risk.
Nothing is reaching those areas near Jalalabad, where Americans are
bombing villages, killing hundreds of civilians, between 60 and 300 in one
night, according to anti-Taliban commanders who are beginning to plead
with Washington to stop. On these killings, as on the killing of civilians
in Yugoslavia, the outspoken Short is silent.

 Her silence, and her support for America's $21bn homicidal campaign to
subjugate and bribe poor countries into submission, exposes the sham of
"the global economy as the only way to help the poor", as she has said
repeatedly. The militarism that is there for all but the intellectually
and morally impaired to see is the natural extension of the rapacious
economic policies that have divided humanity as never before. As Thomas
Friedman wrote famously in the New York Times, "the hidden hand" of the
market is US military force.

 Little is said these days about the "trickle down" that "creates wealth"
for the poor, because it is transparently false. Even the World Bank, of
which Short is a governor, has admitted that the poorest countries are
worse off, under its tutelage, than ten ago: that the number of poor had
increased, that people are dying younger. And these are countries with
"structural adjustment programmes" that are meant to "create wealth" for
the majority. It was all a lie.

 Giving evidence before a House of Commons select committee, Clare Short
described the US as "the only great power [that] almost turns its back on
the world". Her gall deserves a prize. Britain gives just 0.34 per cent of
GNP in aid, less than half the minimum laid down by the United Nations. It
is time we recognised that the real terrorism is poverty, which kills
thousands of people every day, and the source of their suffering, and that
of innocent people in dusty villages, is directly related. <www.
johnpilger.com> [NEW STATESMAN]

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