Palash Speaks

"Multinationals on Trial"
Palash Biswas

Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashbiswaskl@gmail.com">palashbiswaskl@gmail.com

http://www.lrb. co.uk/v27/ n06/print/ zize01_.html
The Two Totalitarianisms
Slavoj

"Multinationals on Trial"

Palash Biswas

Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashbiswaskl@gmail.com">palashbiswaskl@gmail.com

http://www.lrb. co.uk/v27/ n06/print/ zize01_.html
The Two Totalitarianisms
Slavoj Žižek
A small note – not the stuff of headlines, obviously – appeared in the newspapers on 3 February. In response to a call for the prohibition of the public display of the swastika and other Nazi symbols, a group of conservative members of the European Parliament, mostly from ex-Communist countries, demanded that the same apply to Communist symbols: not only the hammer and sickle, but even the red star. This proposal should not be dismissed lightly: it suggests a deep change in Europe’s ideological identity.
Till now, to put it straightforwardly, Stalinism hasn’t been rejected in the same way as Nazism. We are fully aware of its monstrous aspects, but still find Ostalgie acceptable: you can make Goodbye Lenin!, but Goodbye Hitler! is unthinkable. Why? To take another example: in Germany, many CDs featuring old East German Revolutionary and Party songs, from ‘Stalin, Freund, Genosse’ to ‘Die Partei hat immer Recht’, are easy to find. You would have to look rather harder for a collection of Nazi songs. Even at this anecdotal level, the difference between the Nazi and Stalinist universes is clear, just as it is when we recall that in the Stalinist show trials, the accused had publicly to confess his crimes and give an account of how he came to commit them, whereas the Nazis would never have required a Jew to confess that he was involved in a Jewish plot against the German nation. The reason is clear. Stalinism conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, according to which, truth being accessible to any rational man, no matter how depraved, everyone must be regarded as responsible for his crimes. But for the Nazis the guilt of the Jews was a fact of their biological constitution: there was no need to prove they were guilty, since they were guilty by virtue of being Jews.
In the Stalinist ideological imaginary, universal reason is objectivised in the guise of the inexorable laws of historical progress, and we are all its servants, the leader included. A Nazi leader, having delivered a speech, stood and silently accepted the applause, but under Stalinism, when the obligatory applause exploded at the end of the leader’s speech, he stood up and joined in. In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, Hitler responds to the Nazi salute by raising his hand and saying: ‘Heil myself!’ This is pure humour because it could never have happened in reality, while Stalin effectively did ‘hail himself’ when he joined others in the applause. Consider the fact that, on Stalin’s birthday, prisoners would send him congratulatory telegrams from the darkest gulags: it isn’t possible to imagine a Jew in Auschwitz sending Hitler such a telegram. It is a tasteless distinction, but it supports the contention that under Stalin, the ruling ideology presupposed a space in which the leader and his subjects could meet as servants of Historical Reason. Under Stalin, all people were, theoretically, equal.
We do not find in Nazism any equivalent to the dissident Communists who risked their lives fighting what they perceived as the ‘bureaucratic deformation’ of socialism in the USSR and its empire: there was no one in Nazi Germany who advocated ‘Nazism with a human face’. Herein lies the flaw (and the bias) of all attempts, such as that of the conservative historian Ernst Nolte, to adopt a neutral position – i.e. to ask why we don’t apply the same standards to the Communists as we apply to the Nazis. If Heidegger cannot be pardoned for his flirtation with Nazism, why can Lukács and Brecht and others be pardoned for their much longer engagement with Stalinism? This position reduces Nazism to a reaction to, and repetition of, practices already found in Bolshevism – terror, concentration camps, the struggle to the death against political enemies – so that the ‘original sin’ is that of Communism.
In the late 1980s, Nolte was Habermas’s principal opponent in the so-called Revisionismusstreit, arguing that Nazism should not be regarded as the incomparable evil of the 20th century. Not only did Nazism, reprehensible as it was, appear after Communism: it was an excessive reaction to the Communist threat, and all its horrors were merely copies of those already perpetrated under Soviet Communism. Nolte’s idea is that Communism and Nazism share the same totalitarian form, and the difference between them consists only in the difference between the empirical agents which fill their respective structural roles (‘Jews’ instead of ‘class enemy’). The usual liberal reaction to Nolte is that he relativises Nazism, reducing it to a secondary echo of the Communist evil. However, even if we leave aside the unhelpful comparison between Communism – a thwarted attempt at liberation – and the radical evil of Nazism, we should still concede Nolte’s central point. Nazism was effectively a reaction to the Communist threat; it did effectively replace class struggle with the struggle between Aryans and Jews. What we are dealing with here is displacement in the Freudian sense of the term (Verschiebung): Nazism displaces class struggle onto racial struggle and in doing so obfuscates its true nature. What changes in the passage from Communism to Nazism is a matter of form, and it is in this that the Nazi ideological mystification resides: the political struggle is naturalised as racial conflict, the class antagonism inherent in the social structure reduced to the invasion of a foreign (Jewish) body which disturbs the harmony of the Aryan community. It is not, as Nolte claims, that there is in both cases the same formal antagonistic structure, but that the place of the enemy is filled by a different element (class, race). Class antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; Fascism displaces this essential antagonism.
It’s appropriate, then, to recognise the tragedy of the October Revolution: both its unique emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. We should have the honesty to acknowledge that the Stalinist purges were in a way more ‘irrational’ than the Fascist violence: its excess is an unmistakable sign that, in contrast to Fascism, Stalinism was a case of an authentic revolution perverted. Under Fascism, even in Nazi Germany, it was possible to survive, to maintain the appearance of a ‘normal’ everyday life, if one did not involve oneself in any oppositional political activity (and, of course, if one were not Jewish). Under Stalin in the late 1930s, on the other hand, nobody was safe: anyone could be unexpectedly denounced, arrested and shot as a traitor. The irrationality of Nazism was ‘condensed’ in anti-semitism – in its belief in the Jewish plot – while the irrationality of Stalinism pervaded the entire social body. For that reason, Nazi police investigators looked for proofs and traces of active opposition to the regime, whereas Stalin’s investigators were happy to fabricate evidence, invent plots etc.
We should also admit that we still lack a satisfactory theory of Stalinism. It is, in this respect, a scandal that the Frankfurt School failed to produce a systematic and thorough analysis of the phenomenon. The exceptions are telling: Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942), which suggested that the three great world-systems – New Deal capitalism, Fascism and Stalinism – tended towards the same bureaucratic, globally organised, ‘administered’ society; Herbert Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism (1958), his least passionate book, a strangely neutral analysis of Soviet ideology with no clear commitments; and, finally, in the 1980s, the attempts by some Habermasians who, reflecting on the emerging dissident phenomena, endeavoured to elaborate the notion of civil society as a site of resistance to the Communist regime – interesting, but not a global theory of the specificity of Stalinist totalitarianism. How could a school of Marxist thought that claimed to focus on the conditions of the failure of the emancipatory project abstain from analysing the nightmare of ‘actually existing socialism’? And was its focus on Fascism not a silent admission of the failure to confront the real trauma?
It is here that one has to make a choice. The ‘pure’ liberal attitude towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ – that they are both bad, based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the rejection of democratic and humanist values etc – is a priori false. It is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’ than Communism. The alternative, the notion that it is even possible to compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the conclusion – explicit or implicit – that Fascism was the lesser evil, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat. When, in September 2003, Silvio Berlusconi provoked a violent outcry with his observation that Mussolini, unlike Hitler, Stalin or Saddam Hussein, never killed anyone, the true scandal was that, far from being an expression of Berlusconi’s idiosyncrasy, his statement was part of an ongoing project to change the terms of a postwar European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity. That is the proper context in which to understand the European conservatives’ call for the prohibition of Communist symbols.

From the LRB letters page: [ 31 March 2005 ] Clive James [ 21 April 2005 ] Phil Edwards.
Slavoj Žižek is a dialectical- materialist philosopher and psychoanalyst. He also co-directs the International Centre for Humanities at Birkbeck College. The Parallax View appeared last year.

"Multinationals on Trial"
Review of James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer
by Stephen Lendman
Global Research, November 28, 2007
http://www.globalre search.ca/ index.php? context=va& aid=7463

James Petras is Binghamton University, New York Professor Emeritus
of Sociology whose credentials and achievements are long and
impressive. He's a noted academic figure on the left and a well-
respected Latin American expert. He's also a prolific author of
hundreds of articles and 64 books including his latest one
titled "Multinationals on Trial: Foreign Investment Matters," co-
authored with Henry Veltmeyer, and subject of this review.

Henry Veltmeyer has collaborated with Petras before on previous
books. They include "Globalization Unmasked," "Social Movements and
State Power," "A System in Crisis" and others. He's Professor of
Sociology and International Development Studies at Saint Mary's
University, Canada and Universidad Autonoma de Zacatecas, Mexico.
He's also Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of International
Development Studies and, like Petras, is a prolific author of many
books and articles focused mainly on Latin American issues,
globalized trade, alternative models and approaches and progressive
social movements.

"Multinationals on Trial" deals with a core issue of our time - the
economic power of giant corporations, their dominant role as agents
and partners of imperialism, and the way they plunder developing
nations. The book is a powerful indictment of unfettered "free
market" capitalism and how foreign direct investment (FDI) is its
main exploitive tool. Below is a detailed review of its compelling
contents.

The authors state upfront how controversial corporate giants are,
especially with regard to their "type of capital," how they use it
operationally, and "the conditions associated with it."
Specifically, the book deals with foreign direct investment (FDI)
and debunks the following commonly held notions:

-- that it's "indispensable" to accessing essential financial
resources;

-- that it brings with it "collateral benefits" like "technology
transfers" and job creation; and

-- that overall it's a "catalyst of development" and thus
an "indispensable" vehicle of growth and way for developing nations
to integrate into the "new world economic order."

Rather than aiding these nations, the authors call FDI "a mechanism
for empire-centred capital accumulation, a powerful lever for
political control and for reordering the world economy." They offer
an alternative approach in the final chapter, free from FDI imperial
bondage.

Chapter 1 - Empire and Imperialism

The oldest empires go back centuries before the better known ones in
ancient Rome, Persia and the one Alexander the Great built, but the
authors deal only with the modern post-WW II era dominated by the
US. Imperial Britain was shattered, colonialism was unraveling,
Soviet Russia was devastated, and America stood alone as the world's
preeminent economic, political and military superpower with every
intention to keep it that way.

It did so going back to when US delegates dominated the Bretton
Woods, NH UN Monetary and Financial Conference to establish a
postwar international monetary system of convertible currencies,
fixed exchange rates, free trade, the US dollar as the world's
reserve currency linked to gold, and those of other nations fixed to
the dollar. In addition, an institutional framework was designed to
establish a market-based capital accumulation process that would
ensure (post-war) that newly liberated colonial nations would pursue
capitalist economic development beneficial to the victorious
imperial powers that would soon include the Axis ones as well.

Post-war, the "US foreign policy establishment" began an unending
debate on how America could stay preeminent and solidify its
dominance. It began with NATO, OECD and other formal alliances with
our western European partners that were "built on the foundation of
the transnational corporation (as the) economic 'shock-troops' of
the system." Tactics varied along the way, but the goals remained
unchanged - "to enhance US hegemony and its domination of the new
world order." This requires having supportive allies and the US
public willing to go along with overseas adventurism like the Bush
administration' s foreign wars that became overreach and "a major
impediment to empire building."

The authors state that wherever imperial power is projected in any
form it generates diverse resistance in "every 'popular' sector
of 'civil society.' " They also stress that its "omnipresence" can
be a weakness, not a strength, and may lead to its impotence. This
is the condition of America today under the Bush administration. Its
plan for imperial dominance is in tatters, or as the authors put
it, "wishful thinking or imperial hubris." It failed in the Middle
East, Central Asia, Venezuela and may be unraveling in Pakistan
under Musharraf's dictatorship. The country is a rogue nuclear state
in unresolved turmoil that has a lot to do with deep social unrest
and a very unpopular US alliance in the "war on terror."

Nonetheless, the US remains strong and resilient, and today's
defeats don't spell its demise or even signal retrenchment. With its
power and resources, it can blunder often as it has in the past,
then rebound, and again go on the attack as its doing in Somalia,
continues against Cuba, and against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela as it
seeks a way to oust its Latin American nemesis despite past failed
efforts.

So despite setbacks, America's imperial agenda persists, and here's
how it functions:

-- through "unequal" bilateral and multilateral trade and other
agreements;

-- with lots of help from willing "outside collaborators and
subsidized clients;"

-- through a "divide and conquer" strategy that worked in
Yugoslavia, did at first in Afghanistan (under tribal warlords) and
apparently is the scheme in Iraq with the Kurdish North already
separate;

-- - political destabilization, assassinations or coup d'etats to
remove opposition regimes and install compliant ones; and

-- proxy or direct war as a last resort when others fail to
accomplish regime change; but even conquest doesn't guarantee
success as Iraq and Afghanistan prove; resistance builds, military
costs mount, public support wanes, allies withdraw support and the
whole effort may fail but not deter new ones at other times in other
places.

Chapter 2 - Imperialisms, Old and New

The authors note that capital accumulation is the "fundamental
driving force of economic growth," has been for over 100 years, and
occurred in six phases:

-- capitalist industrialization in the 19th century up to around
1870;

-- the fusion of industrial and finance capital and emergence of
monopolies and territorial divisions among imperial powers (the US,
Europe and Japan) up to 1914;

-- imperial war, depression, Fordism-type mass production, "taming
of capitalism" social reform and defeat of fascism to 1945;

-- the "golden age" of capitalist high growth, decolonization,
nation-building and state-led "international development to 1973;"

-- transitional crisis and restructuring in the 1970s; and

-- the age of Washington Consensus neoliberalism, globalized trade,
free market "reforms" and "neoimperialism" to the present.

The authors note that incomes across the world converged somewhat
during the "golden age of capitalism" post-WW II up to 1970 after
which things changed. Now after a generation under Washington
Consensus neoliberalism, no such convergence exists and the Global
North-South disparity keeps widening to the detriment of developing
nations. North-based corporate giants have grown so huge and
dominant that the largest of them represent half or more of the
world's 100 largest economies. In addition, multinational
corporations (MNCs) "as a global entity" account for over 90% of
world trade with 30 - 40% of it being intra-firm. The authors argue
that these institutions operate as "functional units and an agency
of economic imperialism. "

Post-WW II, the US alone held the "commanding heights" of the world
economy. Compared to today, the authors cite statistics that are
staggering. With 6% of world population, the US had over 59% of its
developed reserves. It generated 46% of its electricity, 38% of its
production, and it held half or more of world gold and currency
reserves. Twenty-five years later all that changed, and by 1971 a
dwindling supply of gold and growing trade deficit got Richard Nixon
to close the gold window, abandon the Bretton Woods system, and let
the US dollar float freely in world markets. Ever since, the
greenback has been faith-based with no intrinsic value and no
longer "good as gold." Since it's uncollateralized paper or fiat
currency, it's strong when it's in demand but weak, like today, when
it's out of favor.

During the troubled 1970s, the US manipulated exchange and interest
rates to improve its export position, and in the Reagan era began a
generational assault on labor that ended the long-standing practice
of industry sharing productivity gains with its workers.
Corporations also began relocating labor-intensive production abroad
to low wage countries that in the 1980s "became a cornerstone of a
new global economy." With it came foreign direct investment (FDI)
with the rest of the book focusing on its harmful effects.

The authors point out that in 1970 a "triadic structure" (in the US,
Europe and Japan) characterized the world economy. However, after
two decades of restructuring, a different picture emerged with China
and a group of newly industrialized countries in Southeast Asia
becoming the most dynamic center of world growth with the US
struggling to hang on to its economic dominance even while its major
corporations continue to prosper because they operate worldwide.

A critical corporate issue is productivity growth and how to
overcome its pronounced sluggishness. Solutions used
embrace "technological conversion" that includes new production,
communication and transportation technologies. It also involves an
assault on labor that caused a sharp reduction in its share of
national income (10% alone from 1974 - 1983). It means loss of jobs
as well because businesses downsize and shift operations abroad to
low wage markets where workers are usually unorganized and more
easily repressed.

The authors point out that by the 1980s "a new international
division of labour and a global production system were in place" in
what emerged as a "new world order" of global capitalism. New
governance rules were established that were embodied in the 1994-
formed World Trade Organization (WTO). By 1990, Washington Consensus
neoliberalism became the "new imperialism" with big demands that
developing states privatize public assets, deregulate their markets
and open them to allow free trade and financial flows.

Under this system, MNCs are the world capitalist system's "basic
operating unit" and "key agents of US imperialism" that all too
often involves the projection of military power in the form of war.
Their success and profitability are vital to a healthy economy and a
thriving imperial project. The authors explain that the "US state
identifies the interests of corporate capital with the 'national
interest,' " and it freely commits the state's resources on its
behalf for that dual benefit.

Chapter 3 - Foreign Investment at Work

Until the 1980s, MNCs were constrained under host country rules. But
the "new economic model" freed them to move almost at will as
developing nations began opening their markets, deregulating them,
and welcoming MNCs for the perceived benefits their capital and
technological expertise could provide. The authors explained the
process and what happened under it.

They began by noting capital flows are public and private. The
former is between governments in the form of "foreign aid" gifts or
most often loans from the US-dominated IMF, World Bank and Inter-
American Development Bank that come with unpleasant strings. The
private kind consists of three main types: foreign bank lending from
commercial banks or international lending agencies, portfolio
investment (PI) financial instrument purchases like stocks and
bonds, and foreign direct investment (FDI) that itself comes in two
forms.

FDI involves the purchase of at least 10% of a foreign business
enterprise's assets. "Greenfield" FDI involves the creation of a new
facility like a factory while the "Brownfield" type buys assets of
existing firms through mergers or acquisitions. In Latin America in
the 1990s, over half of FDI was the latter kind.

The subject of debt financing is then discussed with the authors
noting at reasonable levels it's vital for enhancing growth. But not
to excess that got developing countries in trouble for the past
three decades. Even in the 1980s, it became clear that debt levels
were so high in Latin America they made economic growth impossible.
They also caused a debt crisis by mid-decade that especially
affected Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.

The Global North thus needed Plan B to reduce the debt bomb to
manageable proportions, avoid default and allow troubled countries
to maintain their payment obligations. One measure taken was the so-
called "Brady Plan," named for Ronald Reagan and GHW Bush's Treasury
Secretary, Nicholas Brady. The scheme was to forgive a small part of
the debt and convert the rest into Brady IOU Bonds repayable in the
long term to make the burden less onerous. It worked as no heavily
indebted nation defaulted, but they had to adopt fiscal discipline
to do it: structural adjustment privatizations, cuts in social
spending, deregulation and more. These nations also suffered zero
economic growth, a sharp reduction of living standards for its
working people and producers, increased social inequity and greater
unemployment and poverty.

Along with burdensome debt levels, FDI has also been a repressive
instrument, especially in Latin America with its investment-friendly
climate. The amount of it (as well as PI) was small until the 1990s
but then grew dramatically as part of a shift from debt to equity
financing with the largest portion of it going to large developing
countries like Brazil, Argentina and Mexico and to the eight largest
ones in the world overall getting 84% of it, according to World Bank
figures. China got the most attracting 22% of all FDI since 1989
while Sub-Saharan Africa got nothing except for South Africa. Post-
2004, manufacturing in China, India and Mexico got the largest FDI
amounts, but natural resources and especially energy are also
important, and a trend toward investing in services (especially
telecommunications) is growing as well.

Latin America became the most favored destination for FDI inflows in
the 1990s that hit their peak in the 1997 - 2001 period because
friendly regimes like Cardoso's Brazil "bent over backwards" to
accomodate it, mostly through merger and acquisition privatizations.
The authors review facts they call "startling" and show how
the "imperial-centered neoliberal model has led to the long term,
large-scale pillage of every country in Latin America." In dollar
terms, it amounted to $585 billion in interest payments and profits
remitted mostly to US-based MNCs. More revenue was gotten from
royalty payments, shipping, insurance, other fees plus billions of
illegal monetary transfers by Latin American elites to offshore
accounts.

This explains the sluggish regional growth in the 1990s - 3% a year,
then 0.3% in 2001 and 0.9% in 2002. It's because of exploitive
resource transfers and capital flows large enough to have made Latin
America "one of the economic pillars of the US empire." Some of the
transfers are hidden, and the authors put them in two categories:

-- one-way neoliberal structured international trade with open Latin
American markets for US exports and reciprocal controlled ones in
the US; the formula the authors describe is to export capital to the
region in the form of FDI and import raw materials in return.

-- structured capital-labor relations with workers very much on the
short end; the authors note how the "organization and export of
labour" is used to pillage a country's resources and transfer them
north; they cite one 2003 study estimating the net gain for the US
and corresponding loss to Mexico of about $29 billion a year because
of migration - indirectly through repatriated maquillardora profits
and directly through exported farm labor and educated Mexicans who
represent 40% of the nation's migrants benefitting the US at
Mexico's expense.

Chapter 4 - The Social Dimension of Foreign Investment

The authors cite the justification "development economists" give for
keeping labor's share of national income low. They claim it's
because economic growth depends on capital accumulation, and
households have a "low capacity to save and invest" since they spend
all they get. The rich, in contrast, have a high propensity to save
and invest so the more income they have the greater the economic
benefit. In the 1970s and 80s, this kind of reasoning led to a class
war between capital and labor with wages in the US losing 10% of
their value from 1974 to 1984 and in Latin America and Sub-Saharan
Africa even more - 40% in Chile and Mexico and 50% in many other
countries.

Then consider economic growth under the neoliberal economic model
centered around FDI. It promised prosperity but delivered failure.
After 20 years at the end of the 1990s, average per capita growth
overall was cut in half from the earlier period of "state-led
development. " It was reduced to 1.5% from 3% in industrialized
countries and in developing ones (excluding China and India) to 1.2%
from 3.5%. For the poorest countries, it was even worse going from
1.9% to a negative 0.5% per year. The only exceptions were a group
of eight Asian "rapidly growing countries" whose governments
followed a policy of state intervention outside the neoliberal model
and proved their way works best.

The authors cite data to show, aside from China and India, that
the "neoliberal era of globalizing capital and neoimperialism" led
to rising worldwide income inequality between richer and poorer
countries and between higher and lower income classes within
countries. They explained that "Of the countries with the highest
indices of poverty, social exclusion, and income inequality 41 are
in Africa; 10 in Asia; and six in the Americas," and per capital
income in all developing regions (except South and East Asia)
declined compared to industrialized OECD states. During the two
decade neoliberal period, inequality between rich and poor nations
nearly doubled. It proves how false the notion is that unfettered
free market forces create a "trickle down" effect to the poor that
lets them benefit from economic growth. Just the opposite happened
and it continues.

The authors show how the "magnitude of the global income divide and
associated problems is staggering" with the richest population
quintile consuming 86% of all products and services and the poorest
one only 1.3%. And the social inequality fallout is even worse -
high unemployment, desperate poverty, malnutrition, untreated
illnesses and low life expectancy with hundreds of thousands of
needless daily children's deaths. And yet economists at the IMF and
World Bank continue to tout the benefits of neoliberal "structural
reforms" in spite of clear evidence they fail. In the pre-neoliberal
1950s, 60s and 70s, income inequality decreased overall but has
increased in most countries since then. Again, the culprits are
privatization, financial "liberalization, " deregulation and
downsizing with governments exploiting working people for capital.

Take Mexico, for example. It has 11 billionaires with combined
incomes exceeding the total for the country's 40 million poorest.
But the same thing is true everywhere with developing nations faring
the worst. It affects 2.5 billion people in the world who are unable
to meet their basic needs of food, shelter, clothing and medical
care let alone education, clean water, adequate sanitation and other
goods and services people in the West consider essential and take
for granted.

Using Latin America as an example, the authors show how capitalists
in the region sustained their profits by exploiting ordinary
workers. During the neoliberal period, labor's share of national
income was cut from 40% to less than 20%. Even today in countries
like Venezuela (with all its social gains under Hugo Chavez since
1999) and Argentina, worker wages are still below their 1970 levels.
It's because of market deregulation that give employers arbitrary
power to fire workers, cut wages and hire temporary and casual
labor. It's gotten bad enough to hit the middle class as well and
cause a rising level of urban poor. A "new urban poor" has emerged
who aren't simply "rural migrants" but include "socially excluded
and downwardly mobile workers and the lower middle class (who've
been fired) and have found (other) employment in the burgeoning
(lower-paying, less secure) informal sector."

These people, the unemployed and "rural-to-urban migrants"
constitute a reserve army of labor that keeps wages in the formal
sector down and workers' bargaining power weak. Then there's the
notion of "social exclusion" reflecting the condition of the poor
with the authors identifying its six "major pillars:"

-- social production dispossession showing up in landlessness and
rural outmigration;

-- no access to urban and rural markets or for wage employment;

-- no access to "good quality" employment;

-- reduced access to government social services;

-- no access to adequate income; and

-- no political power.

In contrast, 15 - 20% of Latin Americans enjoy a "First World"
lifestyle with the authors citing their array of luxuries that are
unimaginable to the poor and most middle income earners. And
whatever the economic condition, they benefit from the imperial
system regardless because neoliberalism works by taking from the
exploited many and giving generously to the privileged few. Put
another way, it's a hugely out of balance give and take, and it was
set up that way despite its proponents denial.

The authors review the period when the World Bank discovered poverty
and carried on its kind of three-decade war against it that was the
equivalent of fighting fire by throwing fuel on it. Readers know the
drill by now - governments getting out of the way and promoting
unfettered free market policies, pro-growth, structural adjustments
and the rest of

Musharraf Minus the Uniform

Palash Biswas

Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashbiswaskl@gmail.com">palashbiswaskl@gmail.com

28-Nov.-2007
Musharraf Minus the Uniform
By B. Raman
http://www.saag. org/papers25/ paper2479. html

Gen. Pervez Musharraf has at long last become Gen.(retd) Pervez
Musharraf , a little more than nine years after Mr. Nawaz Sharif,
the then Pakistani Prime Minister, appointed him as the Chief of the
Army Staff (COAS) in October,1998, after sperseding two Lt. Gens who
were senior to him. They had reportedly better record as
professionals, but had the reputation of not being amenable to
political pressure. Nawaz thought that Musharraf would be more
submissive as the chief than the two officers senior to him and
hence made him the chief.

2. In doing so, he committed the same mistake as the late Zulfiquar
Ali Bhutto, as the Prime Minister, did in 1976, when he appointed
Zia-ul-Haq as the COAS after superseding two Lt. Gens. senior to
him, who had the reputation of being independent and assertive.
Shortly after Zia took over as the Chief, the Shah of Iran had
visited Pakistan. While introducing Zia to the Shah, the flamboyant
Bhutto was reported to have remarked: "Meet my new Army Chief. He is
totally loyal to me. If I ask him to stand, he will stand. If I ask
him to sit, he will sit. If I ask him to salute, he will salute.
With him as the chief, the Army is in safe hands." Zia gave Bhutto
one of his sheepish grins and saluted him. In 1977, he overthrew
Bhutto and sent him to the gallows in 1979 tied to his cot

3. Nawaz too thought that Musharraf would be totally loyal to him
and that with him as the chief, he would not have to fear any threat
to his position from the Army. He was proved wrong just as Bhutto
was. Musharraf had him overthrown in October 1999, and sent on long
exile to Saudi Arabia after having got him convicted by a rubber
stamp court as a terrorist and a hijacker under the Anti-Terrorism
Act.

4. As Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani (his name is spelt as Kiyani as well
as Kayani) starts functioning as the COAS, Musharraf must be
wondering whether Kiyani could one day do to him what he himself did
to Nawaz and what Zia, his mentor, did to Bhutto.

5. In the early 1990s, when Mrs. Benazir Bhutto was the Prime
Minister for a second time, the "Economist" of London had described
Pakistan as the land of Aurangazebs. Its children are taught in
schools that Aurangazeb was the greatest ruler the Indian sub-
continent had ever produced in its history. There is an Aurangazeb
lurking inside every Pakistani ruler----political or military. Is
there an Aurangazeb lurking inside Kiyani, who may one day stab
Musharraf in the back?

6. That fear is for the future. Today, Kiyani has the reputation of
being totally loyal to Musharraf. That was why Musharraf selected
him to succeed him as the chief. However, it must be said to the
credit of Musharraf that he did not supersede any officers senior to
Kiyani in order to promote him. He went purely by seniority and
merit. Kiyani was on the top of the seniority list and had the
reputation of being a professional to his finger tips. Moreover, he
enjoyed the total confidence of the US, where he had done some
training courses, and was a well-known and well-liked figure in the
corridors of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

7. At a time when the so-called war against Al Qaeda and the Neo
Taliban has not been going well and when Osama bin Laden and his
No.2 Ayman al-Zawahiri are proving to be as elusive as ever,
Washington DC needs in Islamabad political and military leaders who
would not be detrimental to the US agenda of preventing another 9/11
in the US homeland emanating from the tribal lands of Pakistan and
Afghanistan. It has high hopes that, acting in tandem with
Musharraf, Kiyani would deliver where Musharraf was not able to
despite his supposedly best efforts. To give a cloak of political
acceptability to the US agenda, it wants Benazir as a "duly elected"
Prime Minister, who would provide political backing to the US
agenda.

8. Will Kiyani be able to deliver if not bin Laden and Zawahiri at
least others such as Mulla Mohammad Omar, the Amir of the Neo
Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, who is the de facto ruler of South
Waziristan, and Maulana FM Radio Fazlullah,the de facto ruler of the
Swat Valley?

9. Kiyani comes to office as the COAS with impeccable credentials.
He has the distinction of being the first Director-General of the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to be appointed as the COAS since
Pakistan became independent in 1947.Ehsanul Haq was also the DG,
ISI, before he became the Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee.
Kiyani is the son of a non-commissioned officer (NCO) of the Army.
His humble background as the son of an NCO has endeared him to the
junior ranks of the Army. At a time, when there are signs of some
demoralisation in the junior ranks fighting against Al Qaeda and
other jihadi organisations in the Pashtun belt, high hopes will be
placed on him for reversing the process of demoralisation.

10. Kiyani is also a non-controversial officer, who had in the past
not come to notice for any dubious association with the Taliban or
Al Qaeda or any of Pakistan's fundamentalist organisations. He was
liked by the political leaders, who were attracted by his unassuming
nature and humble demeanour. A man of few words, he is quite a
contrast to Musharraf, a braggart. His reputation as an apolitical
officer went up during the recent controversy over Musharraf's
suspension of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhury of the
Pakistan Supreme Court. Knowledgeable sources said that at the
meeting held at Musharraf's office in March, 2007, at which the
decision to suspend him was taken, Kiyani was the only person, who
kept quiet and did not utter a word either in support of Musharraf's
decision or in criticism of the Chief Justice. It was also reported
that he kept the ISI out of this unsavoury controversy and that it
was the Directorate- General of Military Intelligence and the
Intelligence Bureau, which played the leading role in the campaign
to denigrate the former Chief Justice, which ultimately boomeranged
on Musharraf.

11. Kiyani, who joined the Pakistan Army in 1970, started his
career in the Baloch Regiment as an infantryman. He did not come to
public notice till Mrs. Benazir Bhutto, during her first tenure as
the Prime Minister (1988-90), chose him as her Deputy Military
Secretary. The two have since maintained their personal friendship
despite the ups and downs in her political career.

12. Kiyani is believed to have a wide network of contacts in the US
Armed Forces, but he really attracted the attention of the US'
political and military leadership at the time of the Indo-Pakistan
military confrontation in 2002 after the terrorist attack on the
Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001. He was the Director-General,
Military Operations (DGMO), at that time and the US was reportedly
impressed by the cool manner in which he handled the crisis.

13. In September 2003, he was appointed the Corps Commander of the
X Corps at Rawalpindi. It was the X Corps that had launched the coup
of October 1999 which brought Musharraf to power. No military coup
in Pakistan could be successful without the X Corps being in the
forefront of the coup. All military chiefs chose their most trusted
officer to head it. The fact that Musharraf chose him for this key
post spoke of his confidence in him as a trustworthy officer, who
would do his bidding.

14. As Corps Commander, Musharraf made him responsible for co-
ordinating the investigation into the two attempts to assassinate
him in Rawalpindi in December, 2003. Apart from identifying some of
the jihadi terrorists responsible for the attempts, Kiyani also
managed to establish the involvement of some junior officers of the
Army and the Air Force in the attempts and had them arrested.

15. In October next year, he was appointed the DG of the ISI and
once again impressed the US by his success in having Abu Faraj al-
Libbi, an al Al Qaeda operative allegedly involved in the attempts
to assassinate Musharraf, arrested in the tribal belt. He was
immediately handed over to the US without properly interrogating him
in connection with the attempts to kill Musharraf. Many Pakistani
sources, however, have not accepted the claim of the ISI and that of
the US that Abu Faraj was the No.3 of Al Qaeda and had masterminded
the attempts to kill Musharraf. Subsequent evidence has not proved
their claims.

16. Even though Kiyani was projected as a highly successful DG of
the ISI, facts speak otherwise. It was during his tenure as the DG
of the ISI that the Neo Taliban staged a come-back with a bang, the
Pakistan Army practically lost control over the Pashtun belt and Al
Qaeda established its sanctuaries in Pakistani territory.

17. The US has strongly backed his elevation as the COAS because of
his known loyalty to Musharraf, his friendship with Benazir Bhutto
and its hopes that he would improve the morale of the Army and
vigorously pursue Al Qaeda & co. Its hopes in him may ultimately be
belied just as its hopes in Musharraf were. The US has never been a
good judge of Pakistanis and particularly of Pakistani Army
officers. Will it be different this time? Let us wait and see.

18. Since he took over as the Vice-Chief of the Army Staff on
October 8, 2007, Kiyani has been co-ordinating the military
operations to re-establish the writ of the Government over the Swat
Valley. He has not been very successful so far. The tribals of the
Swat Valley, ably led by Maulana Fazlullah and backed by Al Qaeda,
the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), the Neo Taliban and the
Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) have been putting up a stiff fight against
the Pakistani Army, despite its use of helicopter gunships and heavy
artillery. Kiyani's policy of over-relying on helicopter gunships
and heavy artillery and avoiding ground confrontations has already
come in for criticism in Pakistani military circles. Faced with this
criticism, he has only now sent his troops to engage the terrorists
in ground confrontations. Kiyani has promised that he would eject
the terrorists from the Swat Valley before the elections and re-
establish the writ of the state. If he does not succeed, his
reputation as the COAS could take a beating.

19. Till the elections in the beginning of January next, Musharraf
is expected to handle the political management of the country and
Kiyani the operational management and the fight against terrorism. A
new Prime Minister would join the Government after the elections
constituting a triumvirate. Who will be the Prime Minister? Benazir,
who is preferred by the US, but intensely disliked by many Corps
Commanders because of her confrontational style? Nawaz or his
brother Shahbaz Sharif, who have many friends among the Punjabi
Corps Commanders despite Nawaz's confrontation with the Army in
October,1999, but are distrusted by Musharraf and the US? Shujjat
Hussain or someone else from the rubber-stamp Pakistan Muslim
Leaague (Qaide Azam), who were the creations of Musharraf and will
remain his poodles as they were during Musharraf's first tenure as
the President?

20. Whoever joins the triumvirate after the elections, power will be
shared unequally with Musharraf as the President, the Commander-in-
Chief of the Armed Forces and the Chairman of the National Security
Council (NSC) retaining the bulk of it in his hands. There are
elements of potential conflict and instability. Musharraf can assume
special powers as he did after imposing the Emergency on November 3,
2007, but only Kiyani as the COAS can help him enforce his powers.
Otherwise, they will remain only on paper. Till now, Musharraf
assumed the special powers as the President and had them enforced as
the COAS. With the second hat gone, he will have to depend on Kiyani
to keep his teeth biting sharp.

21.Even if they do very well in the elections, neither Benazir nor
Nawaz can become the Prime Minister unless Musharraf issues an
ordinance removing the present ban imposed by the previous National
Assembly on anyone holding office as the Prime Minister for more
than two terms. Will he oblige them?

22. Kiyani, as the COAS, will have under him over 30 Lt. Gens., who
owed their rise to this position to Musharraf. Will they transfer
their total loyalty to Kiyani or will they have divided loyalty?
Will Musharraf resist the temptation to encourage them to look up to
him for favours and orders thereby reducing Kiyani to a figure-head
COAS? Will he give Kiyani a free hand in running the Army by not
interfering with his powers of promotion and postings of senior
officers?

23. The future course of events in Pakistan in 2008 would depend on
the answers to these questions.Even after shedding his uniform,
Musharraf will be on paper one of the most powerful Presidents
Pakistan has had. He has seen to that by repeatedly fiddling with
the Constitution and the laws of the land. But he may find himself
reduced to a paper tiger if Kiyani asserts himself and insists on
playing his due role as the COAS.

24. As the dramatis personae in Islamabad play out the drama, there
is a man up there in the tribal north waiting and watching, hoping
that Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal would ultimately fall into his
hands. His name is Osama bin Laden. He wears no hats and is not part
of the triumvirate, but his threatening shadow will continue to
hover over Pakistan till Al Qaeda is defeated and neutralised. That
is not for tomorrow.

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat,
Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For
Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@ gmail.com
November 28, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Caution: Taliban Crossing
By ARTHUR KELLER
Albuquerque
http://www.nytimes. com/2007/ 11/28/opinion/ 28keller. html

["Arthur Keller is a former C.I.A. case officer in Pakistan"]

IN the early 1900s, a crusty British general, Andrew Skeen, wrote a
guide to military operations in the Pashtun tribal belt, in what is
now Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. His first piece of
advice: "When planning a military expedition into Pashtun tribal
areas, the first thing you must plan is your retreat. All
expeditions into this area sooner or later end in retreat under
fire." This was written decades before the advent of suicide
bombers, when the Pashtuns had little but rifles yet nevertheless
managed to give their British overlords fits.

These same tribal areas are now focus of Pakistan's struggle with
the Pakistani Taliban, particularly the North Waziristan and South
Waziristan tribal areas on the Afghan border and the Swat region
further north. The government trumpets it has more than 80,000
troops in the tribal areas, fighting bravely to root out the Taliban
and Al Qaeda. Unfortunately, these troops — supported with tens of
millions of dollars in American aid — appear even less able to
police this wild frontier than were the canny British.

Despite the government's claims of a successful offensive over last
weekend, for the most part the Pakistani Army is totally on the
defensive and doing almost nothing to bring the fight to the
militants. Yes, there have been heavy casualties in recent months,
but this is very misleading: they are largely coming from roadside-
bomb attacks against convoys and Taliban assaults against Pakistani
military bases and checkpoints. There are relatively few reports of
casualties during foot patrols, raids or any offensive assaults.

The only consistent reports of offensive action by the Pakistani
Army involve the use of helicopter gunships and artillery to attack
militant compounds. Aerial assaults, when carried out without
support from "boots on the ground," serve but one purpose: they help
sustain the illusion that the Pakistani government is taking
effective action.

The truth is that the soldiers have lost the will to fight. Reports
in the Indian press, based on information from the very competent
Indian intelligence agencies, describe a Pakistani Army in disarray
in the tribal areas. Troops are deserting and often refusing to
fight their "Muslim brothers."

Nothing illustrated this apathy more clearly than the capture of
hundreds of troops in August by the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud
with nary a shot fired in resistance.

While the Pakistani Army has been giving up, the Taliban has been on
the offensive, and not just in combat operations. The Pakistani
Taliban churns out a stream of propaganda videos and radio
broadcasts from "black" stations, aimed at undermining morale within
the army while cutting away support for the military within wider
Pakistani society. If the Pakistani Army is too weak to act
effectively, what about cooperation on the intelligence front? After
all, most major Qaeda members now in United States custody were
captured with Pakistani cooperation. Unfortunately, that
relationship, too, now appears to be losing steam.

This year has seen a notable lack of Qaeda members killed or
captured in Pakistan. The Afghan government has turned over detailed
lists of names and addresses for Taliban members residing in
Pakistan, particularly in the city of Quetta. Not only has this
information not led to arrests, Pakistan has routinely continued to
deny that the Taliban's leadership is in Quetta. A Pakistani
military officer told me last year (in an uncharacteristic fit of
honesty): "If we are not catching the Taliban, it is not because the
Taliban is so clever, or so good at hiding. We just aren't trying."

So what is America's retreat strategy? We should not divert our
attention from the frontier, which is home to so much Qaeda and
Taliban activity. We should, however, stop blindly supporting
President Pervez Musharraf, his army and intelligence services.

As in Iraq, we should make financial support contingent on
benchmarks. If the Pakistani Army claims it is effectively battling
militants in Waziristan and elsewhere, great — but such claims need
to be verified by military observers accompanying the Pakistani
troops on offensive raids.

Likewise, the Bush administration and Congress could demand concrete
measures of Qaeda or Taliban members killed and captured, proof that
actionable intelligence passed to the Pakistanis by American or
Afghan sources is being acted on rather than ignored.

Yes, this may well weaken President Musharraf, whom we have given a
great deal of support over the years. But our expensive investment
in him has yielded little in the way of tangible results. We need
policy based on what is actually happening along the Afghan
frontier, not on wishful thinking that someday Pakistan will become
an effective partner in the war against terrorism.

'Hundreds dead' in Chad fighting
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashbiswaskl@gmail.com">palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
'Hundreds dead' in Chad fighting
Arab World
By Agencies

President Deby is accused of ordering attacks on rebel groups in Chad [AFP]
The Chadian army says it has killed several hundreds of rebels during clashes near an area bordering Sudan's Darfur region - ending a lull in fighting.
The army said on public radio there were "several hundred dead" and "several injured" among the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD) fighters.

Abakar Tollimi, secretary-general of the UFDD, disputed the army toll, saying only 17 armed men had been killed.

"We have killed more than 100 from among the army ranks," he said of Monday's clashes.

Fears for refugees
The clashes took place near a major camp for Darfurian refugees, aid groups said, in a zone where European Union peacekeepers are scheduled to be deployed.
Mahamat Nouri, UFDD leader, said the fighting erupted near the main eastern city of Abeche and the frontier with Sudan.
Humanitarian workers at the Farchana refugee camp said they had heard heavy artillery being fired.
The unrest came after this weekend's collapse of a month-old peace accord between the government, the UFDD and the Rally of Forces for Change (RFC), another armed group.
'No ceasefire'
Nouri has accused Idriss Deby Itno, the Chadian president, of ordering the attack on his fighters, saying: "Now that the fire has started, there is no more ceasefire."
His remarks appeared to contradict a joint statement from the groups released on Monday in Khartoum in which they said they wanted to "save" the October 25 peace deal which expired midnight on Saturday.
In the statement, the UFDD, the RFC and the UFDD-F (UFDD-Fundamental) claimed "their readiness to renew with all the arrangements that Sudan and Libya, the mediators, deem necessary to save the accord" and save lives.
The rebels said they would hold the Chadian government responsible for whatever followed due to its "irresponsible attitude."
The government accused the UFDD and the RFC of breaking the preliminary peace accord, signed in Syrte, Libya, on October 25, by crossing the Sudan border to attack the gendarmes.
Nouri and Timam Erdimi, the RFC chief, in turn accused Deby's government of failing to keep promises in the peace accord.
New Attacks in Chad Documented | Print | E-mail
By HRW
Human Rights
Cross-Border Raids Threaten Thousands of Civilians
Militias based in Darfur are launching cross-border raids on villages in Chad on an almost daily basis, killing civilians, burning villages, and stealing cattle in a pattern of attacks that show signs of ethnic bias, Human Rights Watch said today.
Human Rights Watch researchers documented numerous cross-border attacks on Chadian villages along the border between Adré, Adé, and Modoyna in eastern Chad since early December 2005. Most of the attacks were by Sudanese and Chadian militiamen from Darfur, some with apparent Sudanese government backing, including helicopter gunship support. You may have thought the terrible situation in Darfur couldn’t get worse, but it has. Sudan’s policy of arming militias and letting them loose is spilling over the border, and civilians have no protection from their attacks, in Darfur or in Chad.
Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the Africa division

Tens of thousands of people are now displaced internally within Chad by the violence. Most of the victims are from the Dajo and Masalit ethnic groups, which live on both sides of the international border. Chadian Arabs living in the same area appear to enjoy immunity from attack, although some have left their homes and taken refuge in Sudan, apparently for fear of reprisals.

Human Rights Watch also documented a new influx into Chad of refugees from Darfur, people already displaced by attacks in Darfur in 2003 who had been living in the Mornei and Misterei camps in West Darfur. Many of these people said that they fled to Chad to escape continuing attacks on the camp residents by the Sudanese government-sponsored Janjaweed militia.
“You may have thought the terrible situation in Darfur couldn’t get worse, but it has,” said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the Africa division at Human Rights Watch. “Sudan’s policy of arming militias and letting them loose is spilling over the border, and civilians have no protection from their attacks, in Darfur or in Chad.”

Human Rights Watch said that the situation had increased the need for an expanded, robust international force not only in Darfur but along the Chadian border, with a mandate to protect civilians and disarm the armed groups.

Earlier this week, Human Rights Watch called on the U.N. Security Council to authorize, on an urgent basis, a transition of the African Union force in Darfur to a U.N. mission. That mission should have a strong and clear mandate to protect itself and civilians by force if necessary, and to disarm and disband the Sudanese government-sponsored militia forces that have confiscated land or threaten the civilian population.

The border area south of Adré became more vulnerable to militia attacks following a December 18, 2005 attack on Adré by Chadian rebels opposed to the government in N’Djamena. The Chadian rebels operate from bases in Darfur and are allegedly supported by the Sudanese government. The attack on Adré prompted the Chadian government to redeploy its forces away from border villages south of the town, leaving large areas at the mercy of uniformed militiamen riding horses and camels who have attacked and looted dozens of villages in the past six weeks.

The increasing attacks on villages in Chad, as well as on camps and aid workers in West Darfur in the past few months, have made the region extremely dangerous for international humanitarian groups. Therefore, only a few are currently operating in the border area.

Many of the people displaced in Chad lost most of their harvest and cattle as a result of the attacks, and are living in makeshift straw huts, dependent on handouts from host villagers. Food shortages may become critical in the coming weeks as food stocks are depleted.

“Security in Eastern Chad and West Darfur are closely interconnected. If no preventive action is taken it may only be a matter of time before the refugee camps in Chad are also threatened,” said Takirambudde. “The Security Council must act at once to prevent more Chadian civilians from suffering the nightmare next door.”

Human Rights Watch researchers in the Chadian region of Borota, south of Adré, documented several attacks by Janjaweed militia since mid-December. Forty of the 85 villages comprising Borota have been attacked, and all forty have been abandoned by villagers, who are now homeless. In several attacks between December 16 and January 20, sixteen villagers were killed and six were wounded. The latest attack, on January 20, occurred at night while Human Rights Watch researchers were staying in the village. One villager was injured by gunfire.

The central village of Borota has a population of 6,850, but since the attacks began, it has swollen to more than 10,000. The village has only one working well and food stocks are severely depleted.

Dozens of witnesses, who were interviewed separately, described the attackers as ethnic Arabs visibly different from the local population, wearing Sudanese army khakis and speaking Sudanese Arabic. They wore green, white, or yellow turbans, rode horses or sometimes camels, and came from over the Sudan border to the east.

Approximately 10,000 people from twenty-six border villages have sought refuge in Koloy, a village 45 kilometers southeast of Adé that normally has a population of 1,904. A majority of the displaced arrived since mid-December, when Janjaweed raids increased in frequency. Victims interviewed by Human Rights Watch in Koloy said that recent militia raids have reached the edge of the village. Individuals who have returned to the border areas to recover food from their fields report being attacked; many fear that they will go hungry if they continue to be denied access to their villages.

Human Rights Watch researchers also documented an attack by Sudanese army forces on the region of Goungor, about 45 kilometers south of Adré, in early December. Between December 5 and 11, the region of 8,315 inhabitants was attacked on four separate occasions, the first two times by Sudanese army and Janjaweed forces, and the next two times by the Janjaweed alone.

At first villagers believed that the Sudanese forces were pursuing Darfur rebels who had retreated to Goungor after skirmishes in Darfur. But the soldiers and Janjaweed directly attacked civilians in twenty-two villages in the Goungor area. At least two individuals were confirmed dead from the attacks. Although Human Rights Watch was told that a total of forty-five people were killed, that number could not be verified.

Aid groups dispute Chad 'orphans' | Print | E-mail
Arab World
By Agencies

Idriss Deby expects the journalists and flight crew arrested to be released soon [AFP]
Humanitarian workers have disputed claims by a French charity at the centre of kidnapping allegations that it was seeking to help orphans in Chad by flying them to Europe.
Seventeen Europeans are being held in Chad after the Zoe's Ark charity was stopped as it tried to fly 103 children from the African country to France.

Zoe's Ark, which has said on its website that it planned to remove 10,000 children from the region, has denied any wrongdoing and said it was operating under international law.

But comments by the charity that is was helping orphans from war-torn Darfur have been questioned.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, Unicef, and the UNHCR, said in a joint statement that most of the "orphaned" children actually appeared to have at least one parent.

After several days of talks with 21 girls and 81 boys aged between one and 10, the agencies said: "Ninety-one of the children referred to a family environment made up of at least one adult person whom they consider as a parent."
Doubts cast

They also said the interviews "suggest that 85 of them come from villages in the border region between Chad and Sudan, in the area of Adre and Tine".
Adre and Tine are both in Chad.
The French foreign ministry has also joined the aid agencies in casting doubt on the claims by Zoe's Ark that the children were from Darfur.
But the nationalities of the children are still in question as thousands of people from Darfur have sought refuge in camps and villages in eastern Chad.
According to Annette Rehrl, a spokesman for the UNHCR, the children interviewed said "that they were living in Chadian villages for years, so they may turn out to be Chadian citizens, but until we go to their villages, we can't be sure".
Meanwhile, Idriss Deby, the president of Chad, said on state television that the journalists and flight crew among the 17 people who were arrested should be freed after a judicial process.
Pending release
He said: "I hope that Chadian justice can very quickly shed light on this affair and that the journalists and the air hostesses, and those not involved, can be freed without delay."
Three of the nine French who are detained are journalists, and seven Spaniards are known to be part of the flight crew.
It was not clear if Deby was referring to the pilots of the plane who were meant to transfer the children to Europe.
A Belgian pilot is also being held.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, called Deby on Thursday and according to David Martinon, the president's spokesman, the conversation "took place in an extremely positive atmosphere".
When asked about Deby's latest remarks, Martinon said: "We welcome this statement as an encouraging sign."
In a telephone conversation on Wednesday, Sarkozy urged Deby to free the French journalists.
Adoption controversy
The Republic of Congo has suspended all international adoptions following the events in Chad as "a preventive measure," Emmanuel Aime Yoka, the justice minister said.
Yoka said the Chad incident occurred only a few days after 17 children from the Republic of Congo were adopted by Spanish families.
He said the two events were not connected, but said the coincidence of timing led the government to re-examine its policies.
The government is taking measures to verify the situation of the children in Spain, he said.
Sudan to sue 'orphan' charity | Print | E-mail
Arab World
By Agencies

Six members of Zoe's Ark are in custody in Chad [AFP]
The Sudanese government is taking legal action against a French charity that reportedly tried to fly 103 children from neighbouring Chad to Europe last month, the country's interior minister has said.
Zubair Bashir Taha accused Zoe's Ark of violating international laws saying: "This is not abduction or the luring of children, but a war crime."

He said on Monday that the ministry was suing Zoe's Ark charity through a French law firm, in an announcement posted on the interior ministry's website.

Zoe's Ark have claimed the children were from Sudan's war-torn Darfur region.

Hard labour
Six members of Zoe's Ark are in custody in Chad after trying to fly 103 children presented as orphans from Darfur to host families in Europe.
If convicted, they face up to 20 years in prison with hard labour.
Chadian and French officials say most of the children had parents or close family and have cast doubt on claims they were from Darfur.
Zoe's Ark maintains its intentions were humanitarian.
Violence erupted in Darfur in 2003, when rebels from Darfur's ethnic African Muslims took up arms against the Arab-led government.
More than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million forced to flee their homes - many to neighbouring Chad.

The Nowhere People
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashbiswaskl@gmail.com">palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
[ =>> Jharkhand <<= ] The Nowhere People
Jharkhand News to Jharkhand, jharkhandi, chhattisgarh-n., west-bengal, assam-network, orissa-network
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*Forgotten by their governments and their people, tens of thousands of
people who were uprooted from their homes and villages by waves of ethnic
violence are living hopeless lives in makeshift camps in Assam for more than
a decade. In a region that has near-fatally imploded with the politics of
competing persecutions, as oppressed groups arm and organise themselves to
drive away other wretched and deprived people, in pursuit of dangerous,
impossible (and unconstitutional) aspirations of ethnically cleansed
homelands. Their plight is aggravated by bankrupt and opportunistic
politics and state policy, and equivocal rationalisations by civilian
observers. In the past, strife in the region was manifested in clashes
between armed groups and security forces of the state. Since the 1980s,
dispossessed people have increasingly turned against each other. In battles
between indigenous inhabitants and settlers, many of the region's poorest
people are living out their lives in fear, confined to camps, people who no
one wants and who have nowhere to go. *
*The camps in the Bodo heartland of Kokrajhar and Bongaigaon are of people
of East Bengali Muslim and Jharkhandi tribal origin. They were driven out of
the villages, which they shared with indigenous Bodo people in surrounding
hills and forests, in a series of attacks and slaughters in the 1990s.
Today, an estimated 50,000 people, of whom a third are children, still live
in camps, surviving on erratic supplies of rice rations for registered camp
dwellers for ten days a month. They are unable to return to their lands and
homes, boycotted from seeking work and attacked if they stray back to
indigenous habitations.*
*At a Bengali Muslim camp in Salabila, for instance, we found people barely
surviving in flimsy thatch hovels that are flooded with water when it rains;
what passes for a school is a thatched roof held up by wooden stumps with
only one untrained teacher paid a thousand rupees monthly. There are no
markers of even elementary citizenship: no mid-day meals, no pre-school
feeding centres, no ration shops, no health centres and no pensions for the
aged. The mosque where a few devout men were offering prayers is the
humblest I have seen anywhere, just straw walls and an uncovered earth
floor. A silence shrouds the sombre reality of many girls and women
trafficked to other parts of the country, as the only option of shameful
survival. A young man who grew up in the camps mourned, "We have lost 14
years of our lives. It is like living in a jail. We too have dreams for our
futures, but how can we ever fulfil them?" An elder testifies: "The
government assures us that they will do something for us every few years,
then nothing happens." He adds sadly but truthfully, "People do not want us
anywhere."*
*Conditions at the Deosri Santhal camp of descendants of 19th century tea
garden workers from central India in the foothills of Bhutan are no better.
The ethnic central Indian tribal people (locally called adivasis, to
contrast them from the indigenous tribal people) were driven out by in 1996
from villages they had peacefully shared for generations with Bodo, Bengali
Muslim and Nepali residents. They were attacked one night with guns and
knives by their Bodo neighbours, and their homes and houses burnt down. Like
the Muslim settlers, few had legal titles to the lands they cultivated,
since land records in the region are perfunctorily maintained. The lands
they cultivated are now occupied by indigenous tribal people. They too
survive only on occasional rice doles (only for duly registered camp
residents) and on dwindling hope. Even today, years later, they are fearful
to stray too far from the camp, and young men take turns to stand vigil
every night to protect their settlements from attacks. They have long lost
all contact with their original villages in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.
Assam is the only home they have ever known. Yet, it is not accepted to be
their 'homeland': militants want only to see them gone, and the state
government, in a political alliance with the leadership of the Bodo
Autonomous Council, looks the other way.*
*Assam through its history has been welcoming to migrants from South-East
Asia and other parts of India. But after its annexation to British colonial
authority in the 19th century, migration increased manifold as an integral
part of colonial economic interests. Adivasi families from Jharkhand and
Chhattisgarh migrated in tens of thousands to power the tea gardens, and
with the railways, East Bengali landless and poor peasants driven by land
hunger penetrated the forested interiors of inner Assam. They were far more
experienced agriculturists than the indigenous Bodos, who still relied on
slash-and-burn cultivation. In post-colonial India, Assam became the
increasingly less welcoming home for large numbers of East Bengali political
and economic refugees. Today, as pointed out by scholar Monirul Hussain,
Assam has gradually morphed from a major host of displaced people to a major
generator of displacement fuelled by conflict. Large numbers subsist in
state-sponsored relief camps for long years, deprived of basic life supports
and public amenities, and with little hope or real support to return. *

*Although the largest majority of East Bengali Muslims migrated to Assam in
pre-colonial times, the continued migration due to poverty after
Independence has been misused to fuel chauvinistic hatred against the whole
community. Thousands were killed at the peak of the 'anti-foreigners'
agitation from 1979 to 1985 in organised slaughters. in one of the most
brutal forgotten communal massacres in India, in Nellie in 1983, more than
two thousand lives were taken. Its survivors are still haunted by the
savagery of the attack a quarter century later.*
*But the militant Bodo agitation from 1987 was originally not targeted
against the East Bengali Muslims: it saw them as allies in a fight against
the dominant Hindu Asamiya people. The situation changed in 1993 when the
government brokered the Bodo accord, which watered down the demand for Bodo
self-determination, but laid down that only settlements with populations of
more than 50 per cent Bodo people would be included in Bodoland. The die was
thus cast by state policy itself for violent ethnic cleansing.*
*The local militants organised themselves to drive out the settlers. In 1993
itself, the Muslims were killed and their homes looted and burnt. The
terrified survivors went to camps that were to be their homes for years.
Attacks were launched against the adivasis in 1996, and at its peak around
three lakh people were displaced by the violence. In 1997, some returned,
but returned after fresh clashes in 1997. In 2000, the Muslims were forced
to vacate their camps, but were subject to attacks and set up their own
camps, on the side of the National Highway, or on private land. That is
where they continue until today.*
*The Assam government says it can do nothing for the people in camps, who
must return to their homes from where they were expelled. The displaced
people plead that to return is to live daily in the shadow of fear of the
assured next attack, by a people determined to reclaim their 'homeland' from
the settlers, spurred by the Bodo accord which recklessly incentivised such
'cleansing'. *

*These are just some of India's 'nowhere people'. Unwanted, they live
without hope or rights only because of their ethnicity or faith. The country
needs urgently to redeem to them its pledge of a secular democratic
constitution.*

hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=1306d40a-28da-4827-84d7-2d8f288b547b&&Headline=The+Nowhere+People
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Preventing the Impending War on Iran
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashchandrabiswas@gmail.com">palashchandrabiswas@gmail.com
Preventing the Impending War on Iran
Editorial
By Marjorie Cohn
Translation

Preventing the Impending War on Iran

Carlos Latuff/ MWC NEWS
Rhetoric flowing out of the White House indicates the Bush administration is planning a military attack on Iran. Officials in Saudi Arabia, a close Bush ally, think the handwriting is on the wall. "George Bush's tone makes us think he has decided what he is going to do," according to Rihab Massoud, Prince Bandar ben Sultan's right-hand man. Saudi Social Affairs Minister Abdel Mohsen Hakas told Le Figaro, "We are getting closer and closer to a confrontation."
As Bush and Cheney try to whip us into a frenzy about the dangers Iran poses, their argument comes up short. They say Iran is developing nuclear weapons, but Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), says there is "no evidence" of this. They say Iran is sending deadly weapons into Iraq to kill U.S. troops, but those devices can be manufactured in any Iraqi machine shop. Now the New York Times reports most of the foreign fighters in Iraq come, not from Iran, but from two Bush allies - Saudi Arabia and Libya. An estimated 90 percent of suicide bombings are carried out by foreign fighters. And senior U.S. military officials believe the financial support for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia comes primarily from Saudi Arabia.
Yet the Bush/Cheney polemics about Iran continue to escalate. In light of the lack of evidence Iran is actually developing nukes, Bush equated Iranian "knowledge" to make nuclear weapons with World War III. "If you’re interested in avoiding World War III," he said recently, "it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." This substantially lowers the bar for a U.S. attack on Iran.
A few days after Bush warned of World War III, Cheney called Iran “the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism,” adding, "The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences . . . We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” These threats are eerily reminiscent of his rants in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
In an unprecedented move, the Bush administration labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. It appears the administration applied that label in an effort to trigger language in the 2002 Congressional authorization for the use of military force in Iraq. That authorization says, "The President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States."
Like Bush's invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran would violate international and U.S. law. The U.N. Charter prohibits the use of military force except in self-defense or with the approval of the Security Council. Iran, which has not attacked any country for 2,000 years, hasn't threatened to invade the United States or Israel. Rather than protecting Israel, U.S. or Israeli military force against Iran will endanger Israel, which would invariably suffer a retaliatory attack.
In making its case against Iran, the administration points to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's alleged comment that Israel should be wiped off the map. But this is an erroneous translation of what he said. According to University of Michigan professor Juan Cole and Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini, who said the "regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." Cole said this "does not imply military action or killing anyone at all." Journalist Diana Johnstone points out the quote is not aimed at the Israeli people, but at the Zionist "regime" occupying Jerusalem. "Coming from a Muslim religious leader," Johnstone wrote, "this opinion is doubtless based on objection to Jewish monopoly of a city considered holy by all three of the Abramic monotheisms."
It seems significant that support for Ahmadinejad may be waning among the real power brokers in Iran, particularly the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Jomhouri Eslami daily in Iran, which has close ties to Khamenei, has denounced Ahmadinejad's characterization of those opposed to his nuclear program as traitors.
"Now the New York Times reports most of the foreign fighters in Iraq come, not from Iran, but from two Bush allies - Saudi Arabia and Libya. An estimated 90 percent of suicide bombings are carried out by foreign fighters. And senior U.S. military officials believe the financial support for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia comes primarily from Saudi Arabia."
If the United States attacks Iran, the results would be catastrophic. Three Europeans, including former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard and Yehuda Atai, a member of the Israeli Committee for a Middle East without Weapons of Mass Destruction, wrote in Libération, "We are being warned about it from all sides: The United States is at the brink of war, ready to bombard Iran. The only thing lacking is the presidential order." Drawing parallels with the U.S. war in Iraq, they caution, "An attack against Iran, whatever its targets, its methods and its initial scope, will significantly aggravate the situation, achieving similar results, without even talking about the disastrous impact on the global economy." They add, "It would be still worse if the insane idea of using tactical nuclear weapons - which exist - to prevent Iran from building, in spite of its denials, the nuclear weapons that recent IAEA inspections have found no trace of, were implemented."
The threats against Iran appear to be politically motivated. Seymour Hersh's extensive research has convinced him that Bush/Cheney will invade Iran. They likely think embroiling us in Iran will ensure a GOP victory in 2008. It will certainly make it harder for the next President to withdraw from Iraq once we are mired in Iran.
If Hillary Clinton becomes that next President, she will likely continue Bush's foreign policy. Clinton, who favors leaving a large contingent of U.S. troops in Iraq, says nothing about disbanding the huge U.S. military bases there. Clinton is also rattling the sabers in Iran's direction. She voted to urge Bush to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization and she, too, misquotes Ahmadinejad about Israel.
As we go to the polls in the coming months, it is imperative we scrutinize the candidates' positions on Iraq and Iran. The security of the United States, as well as the Middle East, is hanging in the balance.
Marjorie Cohn, MWC News Magazine senior editor, is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. Her new book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law is published by PoliPointPress.
Other articles by this author
Visit her web site at: http://www.marjoriecohn.com/

Yet another rat joins the mass exodus from the sinking ship! -T
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashbiswaskl@gmail.com">palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
Just heard that "Talk of the Nation" a national phone in radio show,
will be discussing Marx's Capital.
Wednesday, Nov. 28 · On the next Talk of the Nation: In the latest
installment of the Books That Changed the World series, Francis Wheen
argues that as long as there's capitalism, Karl Marx's masterwork, Das
Kapital, will be required reading.
On NPR stations at 11-1 Pacific 2-4 Eastern.
Available on-line at npr.org

Yet another rat joins the mass exodus from the sinking ship! -T

Bush economic adviser Hubbard resigns
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top White House economic adviser Allan Hubbard resigned on Wednesday and will be replaced by his deputy, Keith Hennessey, the latest in a string of departures as President George W. Bush's term winds down.
His departure comes at a difficult time for the Bush administration, which is facing a crisis in the mortgage industry that has led to an increase in housing foreclosures as well as jittery global stock and currency markets.
Hubbard, 60, will leave as director of the National Economic Council by the end of the year and his announcement comes a day after he said the risks of the U.S. economy slipping into a recession were growing.
"Al Hubbard has led the economic policymaking process in my administration for some of the most challenging economic issues confronting our nation," Bush said in a statement.
Hubbard said in his resignation letter that he was leaving to spend more time with his children. Other top White House officials who have left this year include political adviser Karl Rove, communications director Dan Bartlett and budget director Rob Portman.
Hubbard's replacement, Hennessey, has served as deputy director for the National Economic Council for five years and previously worked for Republican Sen. Trent Lott and at the Senate Budget Committee.
"He comes to this job with a great wealth of experience and is as prepared for the challenges of this job as anyone could possibly be having been the deputy for so many years," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.
The collapse of the U.S. market for subprime mortgages has touched off a global financial credit crunch and unnerved investors who fear that a recession is looming.
"Obviously the chances of a recession are higher now than they were a year ago, but we still think it's less than 50-50," Hubbard said on CNBC television on Tuesday.
"We obviously have problems in the housing sector and we have problems in the financial sector, but ... real America is doing just fine," he said.
The United States last suffered a recession between March and November 2001, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, a 10-year gap from the previous episode.
More:
http://www.reuters. com/article/ topNews/idUSN285 6208420071128? pageNumber= 2&virtualBrandChannel =0
--
Together, We Can Change The World, One Mind At A Time!
Have a great day,
Tommy
CITI FT Financial Education Summit 2007, Interview with President of Positive Women Network, Awards... Inbox
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CITI FT Financial Education Summit 2007, Interview with President of Positive Women Network, Awards...
P Kousalya - President of Positive Women Network
1st December is World AIDS Day. We present you an interview with an extraordinary woman
P Kousalya is a rare tale of courage & inspiration. Infected with HIV within months of her marriage in 1995, she lost her husband after seven months of her marriage. Her husband- responsible for transmitting the disease to her was repressed by his parents when they came to know about his HIV status- consequently committed suicide. Twenty two then, with just twelfth standard certificate, any other woman could wilt under pressure. Not Kouslaya. She gathered her energy, formed a small group with her friends, which later culminated into Network of Positive Women. In 1996, she came out in media advocating for rights of HIV+ women. Twelve years later, she, the President of Positive Women Network, is an Ashoka Fellow & has won several international awards.
Read Kousalya's interview
World Bank Seeks Innovative Ideas to Fight HIV and AIDS Stigma and Discrimination in South Asia
The World Bank with United Nations and private sector partners today launched a competitive Development Marketplace aimed at identifying and funding innovative approaches to reduce stigma and discrimination associated with HIV and AIDS in the South Asia region, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. The Development Marketplace is a World Bank program that uses a competitive and transparent process to support grassroots initiatives with innovative approaches to solving challenging development issues. The program has awarded nearly $34 million to roughly 800 small-scale projects over the last seven years. Proposals can be submitted online through the South Asia Regional Development Marketplace website

PL DO NOT PARTICIPATE IN LITTLE MAGAZINE FAIR AND KOBITA UTSAB
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashbiswaskl@gmail.com">palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
Nandigram aur Musalman: article in Hindi
http://dhaiakhar. blogspot. com/2007/ 11/blog-post_ 6182.html

From: DHAI AKHAR
Date: Nov 23, 2007 11:12 PM
Subject: DHAI AKHARTo: kaaashif@gmail. com

PL DO NOT PARTICIPATE IN LITTLE MAGAZINE FAIR AND KOBITA UTSAB
I would like to request to all the poets of Bengal to not to participate in the Bangla Kobita Utsab organized by the West Bengal Government which will be organized during 6 th to 8th of December. People of Nandigram were slaughtered by the cadres of the ruling party of the Government. They have already made statement to support their brute policy over the people of Nandigram. Even they have made comments and press statements which reflect their fascist attitude. They are trying to stop any kind of democratic voice. Under those circumstances without any kind of shame, they have organized Biswa banga Kobita Utsab at haldia and Calcutta Film Festival at nandan. They will again arrange little magazine fair and Kobita Utsab at nandan, bangla Academy.
We are not politicians. We have only the power of protest through our works. Poetry is our religion. We can not discard the self which is the reason of writing poetry. So please protest against every kind of fascism and do not participate in Kobita Utsab. We are thinking to arrange an alternative poetry festival. We are requesting all of you to not to participate in any festival organized by Westbengal Government. We will declare how and when we shall be able to arrange the Kobita Utsab.
I would like to request to all the poets to send their phone numbers, email ids, and addresses to my id or in the id of sahonagorikder muktomancha. The ids are: hindolbhattacharjee@gmail.com and sahonagorik.muktomancha@gmail.com . Our friends are hereby requested to forward this appeal to all and collect and send the addresses and phone numbers and their 1or2 poems to us so that we can publish them.
Contact Numbers: Hindol Bhattacharjee 9830751535
Prasun Bhowmik: 9830015598

FOR POETRY WE WILL BE AGAINST THE POWER STRUCTURE.FOR POETRY WE NEED HONESTY AND POWER TO PROTEST AND WAITING.HATE ANY KIND OF FASCISM
From: