[Peace-discuss] News notes, 1/20/02 (Part 2 of 2)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[continued from part 1 -- note the remarkable account of political
effectiveness in the article at the end]

SUNDAY, JANUARY 20, 2002

Britain asked the United States on Sunday to explain photographs from the
Guantanamo prison that show al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners kneeling on the
ground in handcuffs. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw sought the explanation
after the photos were prominently displayed in many British newspapers and
on television ... The U.S. government calls the prisoners "unlawful
combatants" or "detainees" rather than prisoners of war, a designation
that would invoke rights under the Geneva Conventions ... A group of
British parliamentarians asked on Saturday to meet the U.S. ambassador to
express their concerns. Ann Clwyd, chairwoman of Parliament's Human Rights
Committee, said members wanted assurances from Ambassador William Farish
that the detainees were considered prisoners of war ... Menzies Campbell,
foreign affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrat party, said the
photographs would damage the credibility of the international
anti-terrorism coalition. "I don't believe that we will successfully fight
a campaign against terror if we publicly treat people in the way in which
these photographs suggest," he told Sky News. "You only have to ask
yourself the question 'What sort of effect will these pictures have in
capitals like, for example, Cairo, or Amman in Jordan?'" [AP]

George W. is proposing fat increases in defense and homeland security
spending for 2003, according to the Post lead. Even with a budget deficit
of about $100 billion, only slight increases-barely enough to keep up with
inflation-have been set aside for the social programs one might ordinarily
turn to in a rancid economy. The Post reports that the war in Afghanistan
is costing about $1 billion per month, and that Bush wants to increase
defense spending by $28 billion. [WASH POST]

WILLIAM D. HARTUNG: Four months after September 11, Osama bin Laden is on
the run and the Pentagon is riding high. Our warmaker in chief, Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, has been described by the talking heads of
cable TV as "a virtual rock star" and "a babe magnet for the 70-year-old
set." More important, Rumsfeld's department has become a virtual money
magnet, attracting $50 billion in spending increases since mid-September
on the way to a budget that could hit $363 billion this year. The bulk of
these new funds have nothing to do with fighting terrorism. The war in
Afghanistan is costing $1 billion to $2 billion a month, but most of those
expenses will be covered in a supplemental request that the Pentagon will
forward to Congress later this year. Meanwhile, spending on systems that
have actually proved useful in Afghanistan is lagging far behind
expenditures for costly pet projects favored by the White House, key
members of Congress, military bureaucrats and major weapons contractors.
For example, ballistic missile defense, a provocative program that has
more to do with promoting unilateralist ideology than it does with
defending the country, received a $2.5 billion increase in the budget
approved by Congress in December. But spending on the unmanned aerial
vehicles that have been a critical element of the air war in Afghanistan
will increase by just one-tenth of that amount, or $250 million. And
despite George W. Bush's campaign pledge to "skip a generation" of
big-ticket systems to make way for a leaner, more mobile military force,
not a single major weapons system has been canceled. As a result of Bush's
decision to give up the fight for Pentagon procurement reform, tens of
billions will be squandered on systems like: § the F-22 fighter plane,
which was designed to do battle with a next-generation Soviet fighter that
was never built; § the ninety-ton Crusader artillery system, which is too
cumbersome to transport to any of the likely battlefields of the future; §
heavy combat ships like a next-generation destroyer and a new attack
submarine that were meant to shadow Soviet war vessels now rusting in
Russian ports. Add to that Congressionally mandated boondoggles like a
provision to spend $20 billion over the next ten years leasing unneeded
aircraft from Boeing, and the dimensions of the wasteful spending being
approved in the name of the war on terror begin to become apparent. A
recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found that more than two-thirds of
the respondents expected the war on terrorism to diminish funding for
other needed programs, but that more than half of those surveyed felt the
sacrifice was worth it. That view would surely change if more people knew
how much of the Pentagon's new largesse is serving the needs of special
interests rather than the national interest. [NATION]

As the war in Afghanistan becomes a mopping-up operation, the US has
stepped up troop deployments in central Asia, in what Russia and China
fear is an effort to secure dominant influence over their backyards, a
region rich in oil and gas reserves. In the past weeks, diplomats and
generals from all three countries have streamed into Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The war on terrorism has turned the
Central Asian republics from backwaters into prizes overnight ... From
Africa to the Philippines, South America and Central Asia, unease is
growing over the way the US is flexing its military and political muscle.
In the Philippines, a dispute has erupted over the impending deployment of
650 US troops to help combat the Abu Sayyaf Islamic insurgency. In Saudi
Arabia, too, public concern over the presence of US troops and
Washington's future global ambitions has led officials to declare that the
US may have overstayed its welcome. What worries these countries is that
when American troops come, they stay. On a swing through the former Soviet
republics last week, US Senate majority leader Tom Daschle confirmed
Washington's long-term interests when he told Uzbek leaders that the US
presence 'is not simply in the immediate term'. Since October, the US has
established open-ended military presences in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan, and is now understood to be negotiating with Kazakhstan's
President Nursultan Nazarbayev to send Kazakh troops to Afghanistan and to
construct a military base. 'It is clear that the continuing war in
Afghanistan is no more than a veil for the US to establish political
dominance in the region,' a Kazakh government source said. 'The war on
terrorism is only a pretext for extending influence over our energy
resources.' Kazakhstan's oil reserves could be the third largest in the
world. Moreover, the Afghan conflict has made the prospect of the
US-favored route of a pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan a
potential reality. Over the past month, the Chinese Prime Minister Zhu
Rongji has signaled his country's wariness over a long-term US presence by
sending delegations to the former Soviet republics, and by convening a
meeting of the regional Shanghai Co-operation Organization (SCO). Reacting
to reports that the US was about to deploy in Kazakhstan, the chief of the
general staff of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, General Fu Quanyou,
warned such a move 'poses a direct threat to China's security'. Beijing is
understood to be mainly concerned that instability caused by radicals
among the Uighur Muslims on its western borders could derail its
modernization. Russia has also expressed unease about the growing Western
presence - painfully aware that it does not have the resources to pit
itself against the US. 'They are unhappy about the US presence, but not
too publicly because [President Vladimir] Putin wants to be seen as an
active participant in the coalition against terrorism,' says Margot Light,
professor of international relations at the London School of Economics.
'The speed at which the US established coalition-backed military forces in
the region has served to make the Russian failure all the more
spectacular.' Last week on the ancient, frozen Silk Road over the Alatau
mountains from Kazakhstan to China, it was easy to see how the US presence
plays into Chinese fears: large lorries loaded with Chinese goods streamed
across the border toward Almaty as high-flying US B-52s flew westwards
towards home. America has not sought to hide the fact that it intends to
remain in the region, even after its 'battle against terrorism' has been
won. To local Kyrgyz and Russians, the spectacle of beefy US soldiers
opens a new perspective. 'They are making themselves at home, going to
cafes, exchanging money, leafing through the newspapers,' one local
resident said recently. 'They are the good guys, who beat the terrorists.
They go to the village to stock up on goods. Local people hope for dollar
opportunities.' But some Russian leaders have begun to speak out. Last
week the Speaker of the Russian parliament, Gennady Seleznyov, said Russia
'would not approve of permanent United States military bases in Central
Asia'. And Russia's border guard commander, Konstantin Totsky, warned the
US presence could only be tolerated for the duration of the anti-terrorist
operation. However, the Russian protestations have been undermined by
allegations of influence-peddling in the area. Recent reports suggest that
as recently as two years ago Russian forces aided members of the
al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in guerrilla operations
in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in order to foster insecurity and
thus coax its former provinces into accepting protection. Still, human
rights groups are already complaining that in the rush to secure
influence, the US is ignoring human rights abuses, corruption and weak
democratic processes in the region. There is further concern that active
support of the US by Muslim countries with nascent Islamic fundamentalist
movements serves only to inflame their problems. 'The Central Asian
governments are being misguided because their own insurgency movements are
likely to only grow with the presence of US military,' says Light.
[OBSERVER UK]

Despite the official declaration of peace, thousands of Afghans who fled
during the war cannot go home because their houses, fields, and villages
are littered with unexploded remnants of US cluster bombs - far more than
the United States had predicted. Demining specialists said last week that
nearly 20 percent of the ''bomblets'' they've seen in Afghanistan had
failed to explode on impact. The Pentagon puts the failure rate at about
10 percent. What is not in dispute is that the small, bright yellow
canisters with white parachutes attached are silent killers, particularly
dangerous for children, who often take them for playthings ... In just the
past three weeks, seven children have been killed while playing with
bomblets in a village near Mazar-e-Sharif, according to the Halo Trust.
The US planes that bombarded Denar Kheil, a former front-line Taliban
position, liberated it to the local villagers' joy from the control of the
hard-line fundamentalists. But it has become a casualty of the US-led
bombing campaign, deemed too dangerous for its inhabitants to safely
return any time soon. Ten cluster bombs hit the village last fall,
scattering an estimated 2,020 bomblets - many still active - across
winding alleys and amid the 300 mud-brick homes. ''It's one of the worst
villages I've seen,'' said Ghulum Galari, head of the local demining team.
Each cluster bomb releases 202 BLU-97 bomblets, which look like yellow
soda cans and spread shrapnel over a wide area when they explode. The
bombs, used during US bombing campaigns in the Gulf War and Kosovo, have
been widely criticized by human rights groups because so many fail to
explode. A report by Human Rights Watch in October noted that when
bomblets fail to detonate on contact, they essentially act as land mines
that can explode from a ''simple touch.'' New bombs had been used in this
war, with the expectation that more would explode on impact. The 20
percent failure rate reported by Halo Trust, critics of the bombs say, is
far higher than expected. ''That's stunning,'' said Mark Hiznay of Human
Rights Watch in Washington, D.C, which has called for a moratorium on the
use of cluster bombs until they become more reliable. ''Someone needs to
get the message these bombs are not working.'' [BOSTON GLOBE]

The final day of Colombia peace negotiations ahead of a government-imposed
deadline and threat of military action began in this remote town in
rebel-controlled territory.  Agreement on a timetable aimed at ending
Colombia's four decade-long war must be reached by midnight Sunday (0500
GMT Monday), President Andres Pastrana warned earlier.  If not, 48 hours
later soldiers will storm the Switzerland-sized southern Colombian safe
haven occupied by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia since
November 1998. [AFP]


Sunday, January 20, 2002 in The Sunday Herald (Scotland): HOW ARUNDHATI
ROY TOOK BACK THE POWER IN INDIA She Won the Booker Prize for The God Of
Small Things, Then She Helped Author Enron's Downfall by James Hamilton

IT was the biggest piece of inward investment India had ever seen, a $2.9
billion bonanza, but for the Texas-based Enron it was also one of the
reasons why the multinational corporation has just become one of the
biggest ever corporate losses in the history of capitalism. One of the
authors of that collapse is best-selling novelist Arundhati Roy whose
Booker Prize winner, The God Of Small Things, catapulted her into
international literary stardom. Not that her head has been turned by fame.
When Hollywood came looking to film her work she told her agent to spin
out the negotiations, make them grovel and then turn them down. In her
book, the Hollywood agents are in the same league as multinationals such
as Enron, which wanted to turn her native India into one big franchise.
'Is globalization about the eradication of world poverty or is it a mutant
variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?' she
asked in the wake of Enron's recent fall from financial grace. Roy is an
unlikely rebel. A drop-out architectural student and a one-time aerobics
instructor, she comes from a middle-class family in the southern state of
Kerala. She enjoys a global reputation for her fiction yet she is now a
committed activist who has campaigned against nuclear testing, the war in
Afghanistan and the construction of the controversial Sardar Sarovar dam
in the Narmada valley in central India. And in taking on Enron, whose
Dabhol Power Corporation produced one of the biggest corruption scandals
in Indian history, she showed that she was not afraid of standing up to
the might of international big business backed by international power
politics. The story of Enron's involvement in India is one of
double-dealing, corruption, violence and violation of human rights. It
began in 1993 when the company signed a deal to provide much-needed
electricity in a state that was desperate for power to fuel its new
high-tech industries and to propel the country on its new free-market
economy. Even though the World Bank said that the project was too
expensive and that other forms of power would be cheaper, Enron bulldoze d
ahead. There were no competitive tenders, politicians were bought off with
bribes estimated to run to $20 million and local police and thugs were
hired to terrorize the opposition into silence. By 1997 Enron had been
listed by the New York-based Human Rights Watch organization as guilty of
being 'complicit in human rights violations' in the state of Maharashtra.
The scandal attracted the attention of Roy, who was already campaigning
against the construction of dams on the Narmada river -- moves that would
have displaced 400,000 people. When Roy agreed to head the protest
movements, she was accused of inciting violence and tried at the Supreme
Court -- an action that she countered by writing her own affidavit and
publishing it in a mass-circulation magazine. From the dams it was a short
stroll to Enron, which by 1999 was deeply in trouble. That year DBC began
supplying electricity to Maharashtra at a price pegged to world oil
prices, the state could not afford the $1.4bn bill -- seven times higher
than other electricity costs in India -- and stopped paying it. The cost
was, after all, equivalent to the state's annual expenditure on education.
As the stand-off continued, the US put pressure on India to settle the
problem -- the ambassador Frank Wisner went on to become a director of
Enron -- but the state government of Maharashtra dug in and refused to
cough up. The workers downed tools, Enron was left waiting for $50m and
gave notice that it would pull out of India unless it was paid. For Roy,
India's leading critic of globalization and arch-enemy of Enron, this was
all too typical of a company that had come to India not to help people get
cheaper electricity but to line its own pockets. It was corporate
imperialism at its worst. Roy went on to write Power Politics, a
coruscating essay about Enron's involvement in Indian politics. The firm's
office was in a gleaming high-tech building in Bombay within reach of some
of the city's worst slums, and that seemed to exemplify their attitudes.
The Indians were left with little option but to honor the deal on pain of
Enron pulling out and leaving millions of people destitute. For Roy this
was the classical locus of globalization -- 'a process of barbaric
dispossession which has few parallels in history'. Last June, DBC's plant
closed down, work halted on the second phase of the development and all
the employees were sacked. With Enron's collapse, DBC is likely to be sold
off at a bargain basement price, the most likely purchaser being the
Indian-based Tata Power. On Friday, the White House defended US
encouragement for the Enron project in India, and vice-president Dick
Cheney's support for Enron's attempts to collect a $64m debt from the
country. It insisted that this had nothing to do with Enron contributions
to the Bush campaign.

[Regards, CGE]