Just Foreign Policy News, December 19, 2011
Israel moots "terror" label for settlers; Obama moots "speculation tax"
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I) Actions and Featured Articles
Russia Today Video: ‘Blue bra’ girl brutally beaten by Egypt military
Your tax dollars at work: Egyptian soldiers competing with each other to beat people who are already lying motionless on the ground. Why are we paying $1.3 billion a year for this?
http://youtu.be/mnFVYewkWEY
‘I feel wretched’: Woman protester who was stripped and dragged through streets by Egyptian soldiers breaks her silence
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2076115/Egypt-protests-Woman-stripped-dragged-streets-soldiers-breaks-silence.html
Will the Media Let Ron Paul Question U.S. Foreign Policy?
Will the media let Ron Paul raise serious questions about U.S. foreign policy? Economist and media critic (and Just Foreign Policy board member) Dean Baker recently posed this question in a forum at Politico. It’s a crucial test case not only of the prospects that the media will serve the interests of the 99% rather than the 1%, but of the prospects for a foreign military and economic policy that reflects the values and interests of the 99%, rather than those of the 1%.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/ron-paul-foreign-policy_b_1151442.html
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II) Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) A spate of attacks by Jewish right-wing extremists has called into question Israel’s definition of the word "terrorist," and has prompted security officials to acknowledge the separate rules of engagement they’ve created for Jews and Palestinians, McClatchy reports. Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that Israel should classify the perpetrators as terrorists. "In terms of their conduct, there is no doubt that this is the conduct of terrorists – terrorism, albeit Jewish," Barak told Army Radio.
2) Sen. Harkin says there is growing interest in the White House in supporting a "speculation tax" on financial trades, Dan Froomkin reports for the Huffington Post. Harkin and Rep. DeFazio introduced legislation last month that would impose a 0.03 percent fee on financial transactions, an amount so small that its sting would only be felt by speculators who rapidly move vast sums in and out of trading positions. Because of the enormous volume of transactions, the new tax would still raise $350 billion in next 10 years, according to the Joint Tax Committee.
3) Victoria’s Secret uses cotton picked by children – certified as "fair trade" – in its underwear, Bloomberg reports.
Afghanistan
4) The US is considering the transfer of Taliban prisoners from the Guantanamo military prison into Afghan government custody as confidence-building measure in talks with the Afghan Taliban, Reuters reports. The US has asked the Taliban to reciprocate with measures of its own, such as a denunciation of international terrorism and a public willingness to enter formal political talks with the Afghan government. A next step would be stronger U.S. support for establishing a Taliban office outside of Afghanistan. U.S. officials said they have told the Taliban they must not use that office for fundraising, propaganda or constructing a shadow government, but only to facilitate future negotiations that could eventually set the stage for the Taliban to reenter Afghan governance.
5) The U.S. military acknowledged that members of US-backed local police forces have committed human rights abuses, the Washington Post reports. The report summarized an investigation in response to a Human Rights Watch probe that implicated members of Afghan Local Police units in killings, rapes, arbitrary detentions and land grabs. The military investigation substantiated some of HRW allegations, although not the most serious of them. HRW said the program needs to be fixed before it can be expanded.
Bahrain
6) Before approving an arms sale to Bahrain, Obama needs to understand the systematic, violent repression there, argues Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. The repression is ubiquitous, Kristof says. Zainab al-Khawaja’s husband and father are both in prison and have been tortured for pro-democracy activities, according to human rights reports. Police officers have threatened to cut off Khawaja’s tongue, she said, and they told her father she had been shipped to Saudi Arabia to be raped and tortured. Khawaja begged Obama not to approve the arms sale.
Libya
7) NATO has shown little interest in acknowledging or investigating reports of killings of civilians in Libya by NATO airstrikes, the New York Times reports. A New York Times examination found credible accounts of dozens of civilians killed by NATO in many distinct attacks. NATO’s failure to thoroughly assess the civilian toll reduces the chances that allied forces, which are relying ever more heavily on air power, will examine their Libyan experience to minimize collateral deaths elsewhere, the Times says. "It’s crystal clear that civilians died in NATO strikes," said Fred Abrahams, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. "But this whole campaign is shrouded by an atmosphere of impunity."
El Salvador
8) Protestors demanded a World Bank tribunal dismiss a case brought by Pacific Rim Mining Corporation against the government of El Salvador, Inter Press Service reports. Pacific Rim is suing El Salvador for more than $77 million over the government’s refusal to permit for a cyanide-leach gold mining project along the Lempa River, which is the main water source for a majority of the nation’s population.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Jewish attacks prompt Israeli debate: ‘Who’s a terrorist?’
Sheera Frenkel, McClatchy Newspapers, December 15, 2011 04:44:26 PM
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/12/15/133231/jewish-attacks-prompt-israeli.html
Yitzhar, Israel – A young man calling himself Yehudi Tzadik – "righteous Jew" – picked up a rock and rolled it around in his hand, as if considering pitching it at a police car parked nearby.
Within sight was a mosque in Jerusalem that was torched and defamed Wednesday with graffiti that included, "Death to Arabs." Tzadik claimed he knew some of the group that was responsible for the attack, though he added that he wasn’t there when it happened.
"The state of Israel has lost its moral code. It has forgotten what is at the heart of the Jewish nation. … We are reminding them," said Tzadik, who gave his real name only as David.
A spate of attacks this week by Jewish right-wing extremists has called into question Israel’s definition of the word "terrorist," and has prompted security officials to acknowledge the separate rules of engagement they’ve created for Jews and Palestinians.
Those rules were highlighted when a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, Brigadier Yoav Mordechai, was asked whether a soldier should open fire on a Jewish person who was throwing rocks, as soldiers routinely do with rock-throwing Palestinians. Mordechai answered, "I assume … you wouldn’t expect the brigade commander to open fire at a Jew standing in front of him. I am certain you didn’t mean that."
Palestinians routinely are arrested and convicted of stone throwing, one of the most popular forms of resistance to Israel’s presence in the West Bank. According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, over the past five years Israel’s military has detained more than 800 Palestinian youths and children after they pelted rocks at Israelis soldiers, jailing and interrogating many of them.
While there are relatively few known cases of Jewish settlers throwing rocks, Israeli military officials in the West Bank acknowledge that they’re on the rise. One young woman was arrested Tuesday after throwing rocks at a Palestinian vehicle, and several men were detained on suspicion of throwing rocks in the southern West Bank.
Yet Israeli officials said that few of the arrests had led to indictments or court judgments. Earlier this year, a half-dozen residents of the northern West Bank settlement of Yitzhar were arrested in connection with attacks on Palestinians. They were ordered to remain outside the West Bank, but they weren’t brought to trial.
On Thursday morning, Israeli soldiers destroyed several structures in a small outpost adjacent to Yitzhar. Israeli officials had ordered the buildings demolished because they’d been built on private Palestinian land, but their demolition had been delayed repeatedly.
Jeremy, a resident of Yitzhar who wouldn’t give his surname, said he viewed the demolition order as a declaration of war by the Jewish state.
"What is it if not war? It’s a declaration of war against the settlements and what we stand for," he said. "How would you feel if they came and kicked you out of your home in the middle of the night? Would you not want to defend your home?"
Yitzhar, which is on a hilltop adjacent to the Palestinian city of Nablus, is widely considered the heart of the "price tag" movement, a name given to the practice by right-wing settlers of exacting retribution against Palestinians or Israeli authorities for policies that target the settlement movement.
On Thursday, graffiti was sprayed across a military base and popular bus stop down the road from Yitzhar. The graffiti read in part, "The military are pigs," "IDF are Nazis" and "Yitzhar will live on forever."
Outside the de facto Palestinian capital of Ramallah, police blamed right-wing Jewish extremists for an arson attack on a mosque – the second attack on a mosque in as many days, after the one in Jerusalem.
Several Israeli public figures expressed their outrage at the recent wave of violence, with Defense Minister Ehud Barak saying that Israel should classify the perpetrators as terrorists.
"These things both endanger human life and distract from the Israel Defense Forces’ main mission," Barak told Army Radio. "In terms of their conduct, there is no doubt that this is the conduct of terrorists – terrorism, albeit Jewish."
Israel’s Justice Ministry announced that it had convened a meeting Wednesday to discuss its classification of terrorists, and some officials are urging that Israel broaden its meaning of the word.
Former Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said Israeli soldiers "clearly" should open fire on stone-throwers, branding them as terrorists regardless of religion.
[…]
2) Financial Transaction Tax Sparks Hopes That Obama Will Play Robin Hood In 2012
Dan Froomkin, Huffington Post, 12/16/11
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/16/financial-transaction-tax-obama-2012_n_1153841.html
Washington — Advocates of a tiny but lucrative tax on financial transactions are increasingly hopeful that President Barack Obama’s need to more firmly establish himself as the Main Street candidate in 2012 will lead him to back the measure.
The tax — though nearly inconsequential on a per-trade basis — would reap billions in revenue from Wall Street’s most rapacious institutions while also cutting down on their incentive to engage in the high-stakes, lightning-fast gambling that has proven particularly lucrative for them, at the expense of others.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) introduced legislation last month that would impose a 0.03 percent fee on financial transactions, an amount so small that its sting would only be felt by speculators who rapidly move vast sums in and out of trading positions.
But because of the enormous volume of transactions, the new tax would still raise $350 billion in next 10 years, according to nonpartisan congressional scorekeepers.
The bill is "generating some interest in the White House, and I’m hopeful that the president will pick up on this," said Harkin, a fifth-term senator.
"I think there’s interest in the White House at looking at sources of revenue, and I think this is one that’s got their interest," Harkin said. "They haven’t said yes, they haven’t said no."
Mike Lux, a progressive strategist, said he thinks that despite some internal opposition within the administration — most notably from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner — the tax may be an idea whose time has come.
"I know that Geithner remains adamantly opposed to it, but I also get the sense that the political folks in the White House understand that Geithner’s positioning isn’t always the right thing for the president to do politically," Lux said. "There is sort of a growing awareness of that."
[…] DeFazio, who co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said that Obama’s endorsement of the bill "would be great for the country and it would also be very helpful in his reelection bid."
"People are really, really, really angry at Wall Street," DeFazio said. "Wall Street destroyed the real economy of the United States through their gambling and recklessness. They’re profiting handsomely. None of them went to jail and they’re back to doing the same thing all over again."
A transaction tax proposal "would resonate not only with Democratic activists and Occupy Wall Street types, but also with many who affiliated with the Tea Party in the last election because they were real angry about what happened to them and the economy, and they have seen no action by the Justice Department, and bailout after bailout," he added.
The financial transaction tax, sometimes referred to as the financial speculation tax, also has a nickname: The "Robin Hood tax." Its popularity transcends borders, and, as The New York Times reported a few weeks ago, it has "an array of influential champions, including the leaders of France and Germany, the billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates and George Soros, former Vice President Al Gore, the consumer activist Ralph Nader, Pope Benedict XVI and the archbishop of Canterbury."
The bill has also had champions within the Obama administration. Ron Suskind, in his book "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President," described how former budget director Peter Orszag actively pushed the idea with Obama.
Orszag argued that such a move would calm the markets, while showing deficit hawks that Obama was serious about raising more revenue, Suskind reported. And Orszag is hardly the Occupy type. In fact, he’s so Wall-Street friendly that he left his job at the White House to go work for Citigroup.
According to Suskind, Obama embraced the idea, even saying at one meeting that "we are going to do this!" But Larry Summers, then the director of Obama’s National Economic Council, apparently spoke out against the idea.
[…] DeFazio noted that the personnel changes that have occurred within the administration may have an effect. "It may be that finally, with Larry Summers gone, that perhaps the president is able to assert his desires over that of the Wall Street-oriented economic team," he said.
[…] One of the top arguments against the transaction tax has been that it would drive trading away from the U.S. financial markets — thereby hurting the economy and also failing to raise the anticipated revenue. But the respected Joint Tax Committee’s projections that it would bring in $350 billion in the next decade likely settled that argument.
[…] Damon Silvers, policy director for the AFL-CIO, sees the debate over the tax as presenting a simple choice between Wall Street and Main Street.
"A key hidden argument here is about whether or not we ignore hundreds of billions of tax revenue to protect the money that systemically significant financial institutions are getting from high-speed trading while we cut fuel aid for the poor and fire teachers," Silvers said. "The labor movement does not believe that is in the public interest."
Meanwhile, the European Union is proposing a considerably steeper financial transactions tax that would take effect in 2014 — 0.1 percent, rather than the 0.03 percent that Harkin and DeFazio have proposed.
A possible sign that the administration is relaxing its view about the tax came just last month. Geithner, who had previously said that a European transaction tax could create "frictions," reportedly told leaders at the G-20 summit in Cannes in November that while the U.S. was still opposed to the tax, it would not block others from going ahead.
[…]
3) Victoria’s Secret Revealed in Child Picking Burkina Faso Cotton
Cam Simpson, Bloomberg, Dec 15, 2011 12:00 AM ET
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-15/victoria-s-secret-revealed-in-child-picking-burkina-faso-cotton.html
Clarisse Kambire’s nightmare rarely changes. It’s daytime. In a field of cotton plants that burst with purple and white flowers, a man in rags towers over her, a stick raised above his head. Then a voice booms, jerking Clarisse from her slumber and making her heart leap. "Get up!"
The man ordering her awake is the same one who haunts the 13-year-old girl’s sleep: Victorien Kamboule, the farmer she labors for in a West African cotton field. Before sunrise on a November morning she rises from the faded plastic mat that serves as her mattress, barely thicker than the cover of a glossy magazine, opens the metal door of her mud hut and sets her almond-shaped eyes on the first day of this season’s harvest.
She had been dreading it. "I’m starting to think about how he will shout at me and beat me again," she said two days earlier. Preparing the field was even worse. Clarisse helped dig more than 500 rows with only her muscles and a hoe, substituting for the ox and the plow the farmer can’t afford. If she’s slow, Kamboule whips her with a tree branch.
This harvest is Clarisse’s second. Cotton from her first went from her hands onto the trucks of a Burkina Faso program that deals in cotton certified as fair trade. The fiber from that harvest then went to factories in India and Sri Lanka, where it was fashioned into Victoria’s Secret underwear — like the pair of zebra-print, hip-hugger panties sold for $8.50 at the lingerie retailer’s Water Tower Place store on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile.
"Made with 20 percent organic fibers from Burkina Faso," reads a stamp on that garment, purchased in October.
Forced labor and child labor aren’t new to African farms. Clarisse’s cotton, the product of both, is supposed to be different. It’s certified as organic and fair trade, and so should be free of such practices.
Planted when Clarisse was 12, all of Burkina Faso’s organic crop from last season was bought by Victoria’s Secret (LTD), according to Georges Guebre, leader of the country’s organic and fair- trade program, and Tobias Meier, head of fair trade for Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation, a Zurich-based development organization that set up the program and has helped market the cotton to global buyers. Meier says Victoria’s Secret also was expected to get most of this season’s organic harvest, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its February issue.
The leader of the local fair-trade cooperative in Clarisse’s village confirmed that her farmer is one of the program’s producers. A telltale green flag, given to its growers, flies at the edge of the field she works.
As Victoria’s Secret’s partner, Guebre’s organization, the National Federation of Burkina Cotton Producers, is responsible for running all aspects of the organic and fair-trade program across Burkina Faso. Known by its French initials, the UNPCB in 2008 co-sponsored a study suggesting hundreds, if not thousands, of children like Clarisse could be vulnerable to exploitation on organic and fair-trade farms. The study was commissioned by the growers and Helvetas. Victoria’s Secret says it never saw the report.
Clarisse’s labor exposes flaws in the system for certifying fair-trade commodities and finished goods in a global market that grew 27 percent in just one year to more than $5.8 billion in 2010. That market is built on the notion that purchases by companies and consumers aren’t supposed to make them accomplices to exploitation, especially of children.
In Burkina Faso, where child labor is endemic to the production of its chief crop export, paying lucrative premiums for organic and fair-trade cotton has — perversely — created fresh incentives for exploitation. The program has attracted subsistence farmers who say they don’t have the resources to grow fair-trade cotton without forcing other people’s children into their fields — violating a key principle of the movement.
[…]
Afghanistan
4) Secret U.S., Taliban talks reach turning point
Missy Ryan, Warren Strobel and Mark Hosenball, Reuters, December 19, 9:57am EST
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/19/us-usa-afghanistan-idUSTRE7BI03I20111219
Washington – After 10 months of secret dialogue with Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, senior U.S. officials say the talks have reached a critical juncture and they will soon know whether a breakthrough is possible, leading to peace talks whose ultimate goal is to end the Afghan war.
As part of the accelerating, high-stakes diplomacy, Reuters has learned, the United States is considering the transfer of an unspecified number of Taliban prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay military prison into Afghan government custody.
It has asked representatives of the Taliban to match that confidence-building measure with some of their own. Those could include a denunciation of international terrorism and a public willingness to enter formal political talks with the government headed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
[…] U.S. officials have held about half a dozen meetings with their insurgent contacts, mostly in Germany and Doha with representatives of Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban’s Quetta Shura, the officials said.
The stakes in the diplomatic effort could not be higher.
Failure would likely condemn Afghanistan to continued conflict, perhaps even civil war, after NATO troops finish turning security over to Karzai’s weak government by the end of 2014.
[…] There are slightly fewer than 20 Afghan citizens at Guantanamo, according to various accountings. It is not known which ones might be transferred, nor what assurances the White House has that the Karzai government would keep them in its custody.
Guantanamo detainees have been released to foreign governments – and sometimes set free by them – before. But the transfer as part of a diplomatic negotiation appears unprecedented.
[…] Obama will likely face criticism, including from Republican presidential candidates, for dealing with an insurgent group that has killed U.S. soldiers and advocates a strict Islamic form of government.
But U.S. officials say that the Afghan war, like others before it, will ultimately end in a negotiated settlement.
[…] If the effort advances, one of the next steps would be more public, unequivocal U.S. support for establishing a Taliban office outside of Afghanistan.
U.S. officials said they have told the Taliban they must not use that office for fundraising, propaganda or constructing a shadow government, but only to facilitate future negotiations that could eventually set the stage for the Taliban to reenter Afghan governance.
On Sunday, a senior member of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council said the Taliban had indicated it was willing to open an office in an Islamic country.
[…]
5) U.S. military acknowledges abuse by Afghan militias it trains
Ernesto Londoño, Washington Post, December 15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/us-military-acknowledges-abuse-by-afghan-militias-it-trains/2011/12/15/gIQA6zzqwO_story.html
Kabul – Members of local police forces that the United States sees as vital to ending the Afghan war have committed human rights abuses, the U.S. military acknowledged in a report issued late Thursday.
The report summarized the findings of an investigation carried out in response to a Human Rights Watch probe that implicated members of Afghan Local Police, or ALP, units in killings, rapes, arbitrary detentions and land grabs.
U.S. military officials recently announced plans to triple the ranks of the village paramilitary groups, which are trained by U.S. Special Forces, from their current strength of nearly 10,000. American commanders say the groups are uniquely qualified to secure areas that would otherwise be run by insurgents. But their creation has raised concerns about the empowerment of armed militias in a country with a long history of tribal feuds and weak government institutions.
Air Force Brig. Gen. James R. Marrs’s investigation substantiated some of the 32 allegations detailed in the human rights group’s report, although not the most serious of them.
Marrs said his team was unable to corroborate several of the allegations in the rights group’s report because of a lack of evidence and witnesses.
One case deemed credible involved an ALP member who was stabbed by two members of a separate ALP unit in May. In another case, ALP members detained Afghan police officers. "The suspects were roughed up by the ALP, but not to the point where they required medical attention," the military report said, referring to the detained officers.
Human Rights Watch on Thursday called on the Obama administration to abandon its plan to expand the paramilitary groups until the military takes significant steps to enhance oversight.
"The Afghan Local Police needs to be fixed before it can be expanded," Brad Adams, the group’s Asia director, said in a statement.
[…]
Bahrain
6) Repressing Democracy, With American Arms
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, December 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/kristof-repressing-democracy-with-american-arms.html
Sitra, Bahrain – When President Obama decides soon whether to approve a $53 million arms sale to our close but despotic ally Bahrain, he must weigh the fact that America has a major naval base here [which the New York Times previously called a "convenience" – JFP] and that Bahrain is a moderate, modernizing bulwark against Iran. [It’s hard to square "moderate" with the abuses that Kristof describes – JFP.]
Yet he should also understand the systematic, violent repression here, the kind that apparently killed a 14-year-old boy, Ali al-Sheikh, and continues to torment his family.
Ali grew up here in Sitra, a collection of poor villages far from the gleaming bank towers of Bahrain’s skyline. Almost every day pro-democracy protests still bubble up in Sitra, and even when they are completely peaceful they are crushed with a barrage of American-made tear gas.
People here admire much about America and welcomed me into their homes, but there is also anger that the tear gas shells that they sweep off the streets each morning are made by a Pennsylvania company, NonLethal Technologies. It is a private company that declined to comment, but the American government grants it a license for these exports – and every shell fired undermines our image.
In August, Ali joined one of the protests. A policeman fired a shell at Ali from less than 15 feet away, according to the account of the family and human-rights groups. The shell apparently hit the boy in the back of the neck, and he died almost immediately, a couple of minutes’ walk from his home.
The government claims that the bruise was "inconsistent" with a blow from a tear gas grenade. Frankly, I’ve seen the Bahrain authorities lie so much that I don’t credit their denial.
Jawad al-Sheikh, Ali’s father, says that at the hospital, the government tried to force him to sign papers saying Ali had not been killed by the police.
King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has recently distanced himself from the killings and torture, while pledging that Bahrain will reform. There have indeed been modest signs of improvement, and a member of the royal family, Saqer al-Khalifa, told me that progress will now be accelerated.
Yet despite the lofty rhetoric, the police have continued to persecute Ali’s family. For starters, riot policemen fired tear gas at the boy’s funeral, villagers say.
The police summoned Jawad for interrogation, most recently this month. He fears he will be fired from his job in the Ministry of Electricity.
Skirmishes break out almost daily in the neighborhood, with the police firing tear gas for offenses as trivial as honking to the tune of "Down, Down, Hamad." Disproportionately often, those tear gas shells seem aimed at Ali’s house. Once, Jawad says, a shell was fired into the house through the front door. A couple of weeks ago, riot policemen barged into the house and ripped photos of Ali from the wall, said the boy’s mother, Maryam Abdulla.
[…] The repression is ubiquitous. Consider Zainab al-Khawaja, 28, whose husband and father are both in prison and have been tortured for pro-democracy activities, according to human rights reports. Police officers have threatened to cut off Khawaja’s tongue, she told me, and they broke her father’s heart by falsely telling him that she had been shipped to Saudi Arabia to be raped and tortured. She braved the risks by talking to me about this last week – before she was arrested too.
Khawaja earned her college degree in Wisconsin. She has read deeply of Gandhi and of Gene Sharp, an American scholar who writes about how to use nonviolent protest to overthrow dictators. She was sitting peacefully protesting in a traffic circle when the police attacked her. First they fired tear gas grenades next to her, and then handcuffed her and dragged her away – sometimes slapping and hitting her as video cameras rolled. The Bahrain Center for Human Rights says that she was beaten more at the police station.
[…] Since the government has now silenced her by putting her in jail, I’ll give her the last word. I asked her a few days before her arrest about the proposed American arms sale to Bahrain. "At least don’t sell them arms," she pleaded. "When Obama sells arms to dictators repressing people seeking democracy, he ruins the reputation of America. It’s never in America’s interest to turn a whole people against it."
Libya
7) Libya’s Civilian Toll, Denied By NATO
C. J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, December 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/world/africa/scores-of-unintended-casualties-in-nato-war-in-libya.html
Tripoli, Libya – NATO’s seven-month air campaign in Libya, hailed by the alliance and many Libyans for blunting a lethal crackdown by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and helping to push him from power, came with an unrecognized toll: scores of civilian casualties the alliance has long refused to acknowledge or investigate.
By NATO’s telling during the war, and in statements since sorties ended on Oct. 31, the alliance-led operation was nearly flawless – a model air war that used high technology, meticulous planning and restraint to protect civilians from Colonel Qaddafi’s troops, which was the alliance’s mandate.
"We have carried out this operation very carefully, without confirmed civilian casualties," the secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said in November.
But an on-the-ground examination by The New York Times of airstrike sites across Libya – including interviews with survivors, doctors and witnesses, and the collection of munitions remnants, medical reports, death certificates and photographs – found credible accounts of dozens of civilians killed by NATO in many distinct attacks. The victims, including at least 29 women or children, often had been asleep in homes when the ordnance hit.
In all, at least 40 civilians, and perhaps more than 70, were killed by NATO at these sites, available evidence suggests. While that total is not high compared with other conflicts in which Western powers have relied heavily on air power, and less than the exaggerated accounts circulated by the Qaddafi government, it is also not a complete accounting. Survivors and doctors working for the anti-Qaddafi interim authorities point to dozens more civilians wounded in these and other strikes, and they referred reporters to other sites where civilian casualties were suspected.
Two weeks after being provided a 27-page memorandum from The Times containing extensive details of nine separate attacks in which evidence indicated that allied planes had killed or wounded unintended victims, NATO modified its stance.
"From what you have gathered on the ground, it appears that innocent civilians may have been killed or injured, despite all the care and precision," said Oana Lungescu, a spokeswoman for NATO headquarters in Brussels.
[…] The failure to thoroughly assess the civilian toll reduces the chances that allied forces, which are relying ever more heavily on air power rather than risking ground troops in overseas conflicts, will examine their Libyan experience to minimize collateral deaths elsewhere. Allied commanders have been ordered to submit a lessons-learned report to NATO headquarters in February. NATO’s incuriosity about the many lethal accidents raises questions about how thorough that review will be.
NATO’s experience in Libya also reveals an attitude that initially prevailed in Afghanistan. There, NATO forces, led by the United States, tightened the rules of engagement for airstrikes and insisted on better targeting to reduce civilian deaths only after repeatedly ignoring or disputing accounts of airstrikes that left many civilians dead.
In Libya, NATO’s inattention to its unintended victims has also left many wounded civilians with little aid in the aftermath of the country’s still-chaotic change in leadership.
These victims include a boy blasted by debris in his face and right eye, a woman whose left leg was amputated, another whose foot and leg wounds left her disabled, a North Korean doctor whose left foot was crushed and his wife, who suffered a fractured skull.
[…] The alliance’s apparent presumption that residences thought to harbor pro-Qaddafi forces were not occupied by civilians repeatedly proved mistaken, the evidence suggests, posing a reminder to advocates of air power that no war is cost- or error-free.
The investigation also found significant damage to civilian infrastructure from certain attacks for which a rationale was not evident or risks to civilians were clear. These included strikes on warehouses that current anti-Qaddafi guards said contained only food, or near businesses or homes that were destroyed, including an attack on a munitions bunker beside a neighborhood that caused a large secondary explosion, scattering warheads and toxic rocket fuel.
NATO has also not yet provided data to Libyans on the locations or types of unexploded ordnance from its strikes. At least two large weapons were present at sites visited by The Times. "This information is urgently needed," said Dr. Ali Yahwya, chief surgeon at the Zlitan hospital.
Moreover, the scouring of one strike site found remnants of NATO munitions in a ruined building that an alliance spokesman explicitly said NATO did not attack.
That mistake – a pair of strikes – killed 12 anti-Qaddafi fighters and nearly killed a civilian ambulance crew aiding wounded men. It underscored NATO’s sometimes tenuous grasp of battle lines and raised questions about the forthrightness and accuracy of the alliance’s public-relations campaign.
The second strike pointed to a tactic that survivors at several sites recounted: warplanes restriking targets minutes after a first attack, a practice that imperiled, and sometimes killed, civilians rushing to the wounded.
[…] Organizations researching civilian deaths in Libya said that the alliance’s resistance to making itself accountable and acknowledging mistakes amounted to poor public policy. "It’s crystal clear that civilians died in NATO strikes," said Fred Abrahams, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. "But this whole campaign is shrouded by an atmosphere of impunity" and by NATO’s and the Libyan authorities’ mutually congratulatory statements.
Mr. Abrahams added that the matter went beyond the need to assist civilians harmed by airstrikes, though he said that was important. At issue, he said, was "who is going to lose their lives in the next campaign because these errors and mistakes went unexamined, and no one learned from them?"
Human Rights Watch and Civic also noted that the alliance’s stance on civilian casualties it caused in Libya was at odds with its practices for so-called collateral damage in Afghanistan. There, public anger and political tension over fatal mistakes led NATO to adopt policies for investigating actions that caused civilian harm, including guidelines for expressing condolences and making small payments to victims or their families.
"You would think, and I did think, that all of the lessons learned from Afghanistan would have been transferred to Libya," said Sarah Holewinski, the executive director of Civic, which helped NATO devise its practices for Afghanistan. "But many of them didn’t."
[…] NATO’s planning or restraint did not protect the family of Ali Mukhar al-Gharari when his home was shattered in June by a phenomenon as old as air-to-ground war: errant ordnance.
A retiree in Tripoli, Mr. Gharari owned a three-story house he shared with his adult children and their families. Late on June 19 a bomb struck it squarely, collapsing the front side. The rubble buried a courtyard apartment, the family said, where Karima, Mr. Gharari’s adult daughter, lived with her husband and two children, Jomana, 2, and Khaled, 7 months.
All four were killed, as was another of Mr. Gharari’s adult children, Faruj, who was blasted from his second-floor bed to the rubble below, two of his brothers said. Eight other family members were wounded, one seriously.
[…] Initially, NATO almost acknowledged its mistake. "A military missile site was the intended target," an alliance statement said soon after. "There may have been a weapons system failure which may have caused a number of civilian casualties."
Then it backtracked. Kristele Younes, director of field operations for Civic, the victims’ group, examined the site and delivered her findings to NATO. She met a cold response. "They said, ‘We have no confirmed reports of civilian casualties,’ " Ms. Younes said.
The reason, she said, was that the alliance had created its own definition for "confirmed": only a death that NATO itself investigated and corroborated could be called confirmed. But because the alliance declined to investigate allegations, its casualty tally by definition could not budge – from zero.
"The position was absurd," Ms. Younes said. "But they made it very clear: there was no appetite within NATO to look at these incidents."
[…]
El Salvador
8) Protestors Condemn Mining Corporation Suing El Salvador
Barbara Doherty, Inter Press Service, Dec 15, 2011
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=106237
Washington – Protestors rallied in front of World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C. today hoping to persuade a tribunal housed there to dismiss a case brought by Pacific Rim Mining Corporation against the government of El Salvador.
Pacific Rim is suing El Salvador for more than 77 million dollars over the government’s refusal to approve a permit for a cyanide-leach gold mining project along the Lempa River, which is the main water source for a majority of the nation’s population.
"The case before the World Bank tribunal is a travesty," said Cecil W. Roberts, president of United Mine Workers of America. "A ruling in favour of the Pacific Rim gold mining company would represent a threat to workers’ rights and the environment."
When initial explorations begun by Pacific Rim in 2002 turned up a promising vein of ore, the pro-business Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) government encouraged it to apply for a mining license.
But a grassroots movement of farmers and activists argued that such a project posed serious environmental and public health threats, setting off a major national debate. It is a discussion that should be left to that nation and its people, said the project’s critics.
Pacific Rim, which has long insisted that it would use the most up-to-date environmental technology and methods to ensure the integrity and health of the river, brought its suit under an "investor-state" provision of the 2005 Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA).
That provision allows corporations to sue governments over actions that allegedly reduce the value of their investments. The provision and others like it were first crafted for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and are now included in dozens of U.S. trade and investment treaties.
The Bank-based International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) grew from these provisions and is the tribunal that is deciding the Pacific Rim case.
"This tribunal is illegitimate and it shouldn’t exist," said John Cavanagh, director of the Institute for Policy Studies and a rally organizer. "It’s an attack on democracy."
The World Bank protestors, numbering about 100 and accompanied by an 18-foot inflatable "fat cat", are supporters of 243 labour, environmental, faith and civil-society organizations representing millions of members. The group delivered an open letter to World Bank officials and ICSID members.
DR-CAFTA is an agreement strictly between the U.S. and Central American countries. Because Pacific Rim is based in Canada, which is not party to DR-CAFTA, it created a U.S. subsidiary in Nevada in 2009 to press its case before the tribunal, after it could not persuade the Salvadoran government to back the mining plan.
In that same year, the ARENA lost the presidency for the first time in 25 years to the centre-left Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), the former guerrilla organisation with close ties to the grassroots groups that have led the anti-mining campaign.
"Pacific Rim is using ICSID and the investor-state rules in a free-trade agreement to subvert a democratic nationwide debate over mining and sustainability in El Salvador," states the open letter. "These matters should not be decided by an ICSID arbitration tribunal."
[…] Patricia Keefer, deputy director of international affairs for the American Federation of Teachers, added, "Our teachers and our organisation feel that it’s the (Salvadoran) people who should be making the decisions about the environment, not having such dictates thrust on them by the World Bank."
[…]
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