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April 25, 2003
Bankers trump human lives
Well, well. Developing countries, constantly accused of waste and mismangement by self-righteous Western conservatives, in fact spend more on paying their debts to the West than they do on health care.
This in countries where millions of people are already HIV infected. 2.3 million Africans died of AIDS in 2001; another 28 million are infected. In several countries, 20 or even 30 percent of the population carries the virus.
The suffering is devastating. More than 13 million children are AIDS orphans, who have lost both parents to the disease and are left to fend for themselves.
Posted by Tyrone at 08:57 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2003
They want war, not peace
Arch-conservatives like Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich don't want peace in the Middle East. They are urging a position even more hardline than that of the Israeli government itself. To them anything about peace or settlement is appeasement.
Exactly how the cycle of suicide bombings and retaliatory strikes is in the interest of either Israel or the US escapes me. But, logic has never been a strong point for the hawks. It's all about emotion and feeling for them. They're outraged over suicide bombings, and they think Palestinians are all fanatical killers who should be chased out of the country.
It is the fault of the stubborn, militant hawks on both sides that have kept this conflict simmering for fifty years. It is time for it to end.
Posted by Tyrone at 08:55 PM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2003
Evil outside the Axis
One of the members of the "Coalition of the Willing" against Iraq was Uzbekistan. Its human rights record is
From the U.S. State Department report on human rights in Uzbekistan:
Although the law prohibits these practices, both police and the NSS routinely tortured, beat, and otherwise mistreated detainees to obtain confessions or incriminating information. Police and the NSS allegedly used suffocation, electric shock, rape, and other sexual abuse; however, beating was the most commonly reported method of torture...On August 7, authorities returned the bodies of two men, Mirzakomil Avazov and Khusnuddin Olimov, to their families. Both men, members of Hizb ut-Tahrir held in Jaslyk prison, were badly beaten and had burns attributable to scalding water over significant portions of their bodies... Police insisted that the men died in an altercation with two other inmates and that in the course of the fight hot water from a tea caldron was spilled on them...
On November 10, three intoxicated NSS officers in Surkhandarya province tortured Musurmon Kulmurodov to death with pliers, a screwdriver, and a metal baton in front of his mother, wife, and their two children... He and his family had been stopped at a traffic checkpoint and transferred to NSS custody on suspicion of narcotics trafficking...
Prisoners suspected of extremist Islamic political sympathies reportedly were routinely beaten and treated more harshly than criminals, regardless of whether investigators were seeking a confession... Credible sources reported that Imam Abdulvakhid Yuldashev, convicted in April 2001 on suspicion of Islamic extremism, was beaten regularly in prison. In December 2001, his lawyer visited him in jail and reported that the soles of his feet were flayed, apparently from beatings. There were reports that on several occasions police beat members of Jehovah's Witnesses...
On September 4, police in Khorezm arrested Ilkhom Salayev and his wife Khovajon Bekjanova in connection with a civil complaint. Bekjanova is a relative of Erk opposition leader Mohammed Solikh. Bekjanova was reportedly raped and beaten in front of her husband, who committed suicide after returning home.
Police forcibly disrupted some protests by women demanding the release of male relatives jailed on suspicion of Islamic extremism and in some cases injured some of the protesters...
Defendants in trials often claimed that their confessions on which the prosecution based its cases were extracted by torture... Imam Abdulvakhid Yuldashev, convicted in April 2001 of organizing an underground Islamic movement, stated in court that investigators had beaten him and burned his genitals in order to extract a confession during detention.
Prison conditions were poor and worse for male than for female prisoners. Prison overcrowding was a problem, with some facilities holding 10 to 15 persons in cells designed for 4. The overcrowding may have been one of the reasons for the large-scale amnesty in 2001, but the problem remained severe. Tuberculosis and hepatitis were epidemic in the prisons, making even short periods of incarceration potentially deadly. Reportedly there were shortages of food and medicines, and prisoners often relied on visits by relatives to obtain both...
If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning. I can't wait till the invasion of Uzbekistan.
Posted by Tyrone at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)
April 22, 2003
America's blind eye in Indonesia
Last January the U.S. Senate voted down a measure that would require Indonesia to prosecute perpetrators of war crimes in East Timor and murders of U.S. citizens in order to qualify for expanded military aid.
Over the years, the Indonesian military has killed far more people than terrorists ever have. Yet the Senate apparently feels it is better to turn a blind eye to those atrocities in order to deal with the much smaller threat of terrorism in Indonesia. Fight evil with a greater evil.
I'm still waiting for a talk show host to even mention this.
Posted by Tyrone at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2003
The first German genocide
It is little known in the West to this day, that, more than 40 years before the Holocaust, there was another people - the Herero of Namibia - who faced genocide at the hands of Germany.
Posted by Tyrone at 06:56 PM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2003
Corporate fat cats
The Economist reports:
Corporate scandals and falling share prices have forced companies to rethink their executive-compensation schemes. And yet, bosses are still being paid sums that many shareholders consider indefensible: in America, top-level compensation actually rose last year.
Posted by Tyrone at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2003
Powell admits to US guilt
Maybe there's hope after all.
Colin Powell expresses regret for the Nixon administration's role in overthrowing the democratically elected Marxist government in Chile in 1973.
Chile was subjected to a 17-year reign of terror under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Posted by Tyrone at 05:31 PM | Comments (0)
Globalissues.org
Globalissues.org is a fascinating site with a wealth of information about many key issues.
Posted by Tyrone at 08:25 AM | Comments (0)
April 15, 2003
Hunger in Southern Africa
The World Food Programme is asking for donations of US$120 million to maintain its emergency food aid in southern Africa, where 15 million people are at risk of starvation, due to a drought, farm workers dying en masse of AIDS, and Robert Mugabe's senseless policies.
It sounds like a lot, but it's less than 0.2 percent of what was spent to wage the war in Iraq.
Posted by Tyrone at 07:10 PM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2003
Rich countries stall on helping poor
The Economist reports on how the Iraq reconstruction effort threatens to crowd out attention from other poor countries.
Posted by Tyrone at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2003
Enough with the triumphalism
The crowing of the pro-war side is getting silly. The propaganda racing through the media since the toppling of the Saddam statues is claiming that the anti-war side was completely wrong and the pro-war side completely right. Actually, both sides were largely wrong, at least in those of their predictions which are now testable.
On the anti-war side:
The war would last several months, and be difficult. Wrong.
There would be tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties. Wrong.
This war is about oil. Too early to tell.
This war is fought for Israel's benefit. Too early to tell.
The US will turn Iraq into a de facto American colony. Too early to tell.
Iraq will fall apart into ethnic strife after Saddam falls. Too early to tell.
On the pro-war side:
Saddam had hidden stockpiles of WMDs. Wrong.
Saddam had an undiscovered link to Al Qaeda. Wrong.
Iraq's army would collapse in only a few days. Wrong.
Saddam was a major military threat to his neighbors. Wrong.
There will be a reverse domino effect spreading democracy throughout the Arab world. Too early to tell.
Iraqis will greet Americans as liberators. Only partially true.
Too often, commentators on both sides of the issue seem more interested in making points than in analyzing the situation. The truth is that the results of this war have been mixed. They have not been the catastrophe feared by war opponents, and they have not been the cakewalk promised by war proponents.
Posted by Tyrone at 08:47 PM | Comments (0)
The tolerance of war hawks
An Oregon high school student is beaten up by classmates for his opposition to the war.
Posted by Tyrone at 06:26 PM | Comments (0)
Break-in at dorm of Yale antiwar activist
A Yale student protested the war by flying an American flag upside-down, which is normally used for a distress signal. This is not in the same league as burning the flag. Burning the flag is a criticism of America itself; flying it upside-down is symbolizing that the war is, in some ways, a danger to American values, as menacing as a storm at sea.
Of course, the goonda war supporters don't really appreciate this kind of subtle distinction, so they broke into her room and scrawled hate speech on the walls.
Posted by Tyrone at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)
April 09, 2003
Liberation and Empire
Of all the arguments against war, only one stands up to serious scrutiny; the human-rights argument, that it is morally just to overthrow a brutal dictator. The anti-war side's only argument against this is that of consistency; why invade Iraq when there are plenty of other dictators, and even Iraq was once a US ally?
On a moral calculus, that fails. The US is being inconsistent, even hypocritical, in attacking Iraq, but that does not make the war unjust. The war would only be unjust if it caused more suffering than it relieved. With the unexpectedly low casualty figures, that does not seem to be the case.
Which raises the troubling question. What is to stop America from engaging in similar attacks against any other state it doesn't happen to like? The same moral case for invading Iraq could be made again and again for Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba, and a long list of others.
So does America have the right to carry out a series of lightning strikes against every dictator too small to put up much of a fight, and install democratic regimes in their place? The only argument against this that makes sense to me is that America's previous interventions have usually replaced one dictatorship with another, or even (Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973) replaced a democracy with a dictatorship. But the immoral action there is not the intervention, but the nature of the regime that followed the intervention.
Consider the track records of US interventions abroad. This list includes both direct actions (deployment of US troops) and indirect (US training or other support provided to one or both sides).
In defense of democracy or civilians: Berlin Airlift (1948), Grenada (1983), Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Zaire (1996), Liberia (1997), Bosnia (1995), Albania (1997), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003).
Defending one dictatorship against another: Philippines (1948), Puerto Rico (1950), South Korea (1950), Iran (1953), Lebanon (1958), Cuba (1961), Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia (1959-73), Indonesia (1965), Dominican Republic (1965), Oman (1970), Angola (1976), El Salvador (1981), Nicaragua (1981), Lebanon (1982), Iran(1987), Iraq (1991)
Overthrowing a democracy: Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973).
A pattern emerges. The dividing line is about 1991. Since then, the US has not intervened to support a dictatorial regime. The only genuinely questionable US military actions since the first gulf war were the airstrikes against an alleged chemical weapons plant in Sudan, which turned out to be an aspirin factory. The sanctions against Iraq, maintained for 12 years, could also be considered violence in a different form.
So can the US be trusted as a self-imposed global policeman? Too early to say. During the Cold War no rational person could possibly have trusted America as a global policeman. After it ended, the record is better, but in several cases it remains murky. Their most recent intervention - Afghanistan 2001 - allowed the country to slip back into tribal conflicts after the Americans' enemy was defeated.
The reason so many people around the world have opposed the war on Iraq is fundamentally not about Iraq. It is about America, and whether the world is ready for an active American role as global policeman and effective hegemon. The past experience of history suggests that whenever one nation gets too powerful, others gang up against it. Diplomatically, this has already started; France and Russia did not object to the 1991 war (which killed far more Iraqis than this one) but were unexpectedly obstinate this time around.
Can we trust America? Fundamentally, that is what the war debate is all about. America has not repeated the crimes it committed during the Cold War, but neither has it acknowledged or apologized for them. And it continues to support some very repressive regimes (Colombia, Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia come to mind).
It is also true that if a repression or humanitarian crisis does not involve US interests, US military involvement will not appear. During the genocide of 1994, the US not only refused to intervene, it vetoed attempts by other countries to do so, and actually insisted on withdrawal of the few UN troops that were there. Evil is only stopped when it is in the American interest to do so.
Ethically, where does that leave us? Is good and evil to be defined as whether America's national interest is affected? This seems obviously distasteful, to say nothing of the maddening air of superiority it gives to America over the rest of the world.
These are difficult questions. It is not enough for us to oppose US empire. We have to come up with an alternative.
Posted by Tyrone at 01:02 PM | Comments (0)
April 07, 2003
American money fueling extremism
Matching donations from US companies may have ended up fundingHindu extremist violence in India.
Posted by Tyrone at 09:53 PM | Comments (0)
Haiti's punishment
A hostile US goverment is exacting a harsh aid embargo on Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The issue? A demand for a recount in an election! (This coming from the Bush administration?):
Huge sums of bilateral aid are now being denied Haiti due to the recalcitrance of the White House and other opponents of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, as well as by other U.S.-influenced donor nations. This is owing to Washington's unremitting hostility to Aristide and his Lavalas Family Party rule. The Republicans leading the charge against him, in this rabidly partisan battle, argue that USAID already delivers sufficient, if minimum, funds to Haiti. Last year's $73 million released to provide emergency rations for throngs of starving Haitians, however, is scheduled to be slashed this year to a trifling $20 million, based on remarks made by Secretary of State Colin Powell at June's OAS General Assembly in Barbados. Moreover, the Quixote Center, a Haitian advocacy organization, maintains that U.S. assistance often ends up as consultancies to foreign nationals, in foreign financial accounts of U.S. venders or in accounts held by the tiny minority of wealthy Haitian nationals. A USAID official in Haiti recently told visitors that "79 cents of every USAID dollar worldwide is actually spent in the U.S.," when such funds are eventually disbursed.A total of over $500 million in approved international loans and grants have been blocked under the guise of demands made by Aristide's enemies that they be frozen until a political consensus can be reached in Haiti between the legitimate, democratically-based administration and a loose, largely discredited coalition of oppositional factions, the Democratic Convergence.
The real issue at stake, however, is the status of privatization of public facilities on the island. International financial institutions—true to their unbudging formulae—have conditioned all development assistance on the implementation of structural adjustment policies in order to open up Haiti's economy and increase the exportation of raw materials such as sugar. While sugarcane grows in the island's fields, starving families are forced to buy "Domino sugar," processed duty free in the U.S. to support over-consumption and retard Haiti's economy. The IDB claims that no loans can be sent to Haiti simply because the country is in arrears, but the State Department has made it clear that the noose will be loosened only if its agenda is met.
At the root of this unforgiving policy, as well as the hard-hearted freezing of nearly $100 million in additional IDB funds, is the International Republican Institute (IRI) and its Hill allies. Under the philosophical guidance of Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), this rightwing operation, financed by the paper funds laundered through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), has orchestrated a sweeping embargo of Western aid for the island.
Posted by Tyrone at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)
India's poor starve as wheat rots
The New York Times doesn't give an explanation of why this is happening, but shows horrific pictures of children starving, presumably because of bad agricultural policies.
Posted by Tyrone at 08:57 PM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2003
Why I hate Fox News
Jamahl Epsicokhan has a good article on Why I Hate the Fox News Channel. It's not because of the network's political views, but because of its format:
Have you ever seen "Hannity and Colmes"? I have, and I've declared it unwatchable, because no one ever permits anyone else to finish a sentence. This is not political commentary or balanced debate; this is a brutal shouting contest, a competition of who can make their opinion best heard rather than best argued, and an exercise in people starting to make points they never get to finish.
Posted by Tyrone at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)
April 03, 2003
No limits to madness
Two extremely poor countries, Ethiopia and Eritrea, ready to go to war again over a small and unimportant patch of land. This after the last war killed more then 70,000 people.
This is ridiculous. These are poor countries where drought and famine are chronic risks and mass starvation is never far away. Don't they have anything better to do than fight each other?
I hope and pray war does not break out again.
Posted by Tyrone at 04:15 PM | Comments (0)
The real killers in Colombia
The Center for International Policy has a good and impartial overview of the Colombian civil war.
Despite the propaganda you hear in the US news media about the military bravely fighting communist drug traffickers, in fact half the drug trade (and 80 percent of the civilian killings) can be laid at the door of right-wing paramilitary death squads, who operate with the tacit collusion of the country's military.
In effect, US military aid is used, not to end the drug trade, but to transfer control of it from leftist killers to rightist killers. Typical.
Posted by Tyrone at 03:51 PM | Comments (0)
Neither trade nor aid
"Trade not aid" has long been the mantra of the anti-foreign-aid crowd. Yet Western countries' tariffs outweight the impact of debt relief.
Unfortunately, leftists are as much to blame for this as conservatives. Talk of reducing farm subsidies is met with moans about the "death of the family farm" despite the fact that most subsidies go to big agri-businesses anyway. Further, protecting Western farms is killing family farms in poor countries, who don't have a developed manufacturing or service sector.
So the poor remain poor, trapped by ideological blinkers.
Posted by Tyrone at 03:12 PM | Comments (0)
April 01, 2003
An NRA myth belied
If there are so many guns in Iraq, why is it still a dictatorship?
One of the NRA's sillier talking points is the notion that guns in the hands of citizens are necessary to overthrow any government that becomes tyrannical. One of their favorite lines is that "Hitler started out by taking away people's guns." But Saddam Hussein didn't, and yet widespread gun use doesn't seem to have helped much against his dictatorship.
Posted by Tyrone at 08:27 PM | Comments (0)
The impact of propaganda
Do Americans support the war in Iraq for well-thought-out strategic or humanitarian reasons, or is it an emotional reaction to Sept. 11?
This poll seems to indicate the latter.
Maybe that explains why support for the war is so much higher in the US than almost everywhere else.
Posted by Tyrone at 07:31 PM | Comments (0)