Video: Indian Army Raped Two More Kashmiri Women:

The report of the pro-Indian government of Kashmir claimed that the two women – a 17-year-old and her 22-year-old sister-in-law – died by drowning, and not rape and murder at the hands of Indian occupation soldiers. The events of Dec. 15, 2009, mark another Kashmiri uprising against oppressive Indian rule. This is embarrassing for New Delhi and its allies in Washington and London, especially Pakistan cannot be blamed for this and after the move by China to stop treating Kashmiris as Indian citizens and World Bank’s decision to decline treating Kashmir as Indian territory.

Thousands of angry Kashmiris took to the streets on Dec. 15, a day after federal police investigating the deaths of two women said they "drowned" and were not raped and killed, triggering claims of a cover-up.

The deaths of Neelofar Jan, 22, and her sister-in-law, 17-year-old Asiya Jan, in May had sparked protests in the disputed Himalayan region. Locals said they had been sexually abused and killed by the security forces.

Four police officers were later arrested on charges of suppressing and destroying evidence in the case. The officers were freed in September, a move that further angered residents.

Dr. Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s former envoy to Washington and a potential replacement for the incumbent ambassador there, wrote in her column in today’s The News:

“In the month that marked 20 years of the uprising against Indian rule, occupied Kashmir once again erupted in anger. The shutters came down and life was paralyzed by a strike across the Valley on Dec 15. This time the protest was ignited by the findings of a federal police investigation into the rape and murder in May of two women in Shopian, a town 35 kilometers from Srinagar.”

Even more interesting is the reaction of pro-Indian Kashmiris who are part of the Indian puppet government in the occupied region. This is how Dr. Lodhi referred to one of those Kashmiri ‘leaders’, Mehbooba Mufti:

“Mehbooba Mufti, the opposition leader in the state assembly, had this to say: "The whole charade of investigations by multiple agencies was aimed at shielding the culprits rather than bringing them to book." She was referring to the bizarre sequence of events since May when local officials initially claimed that the girls had drowned, then retracted this in the face of mass protests and agreed they might have been murdered.”

In September after weeks of protests, India's Central Bureau of Investigation or CBI took over the case.

In a report for India's high court Monday, the federal agency concluded that the two had "drowned", ruling out rape and murder.

"International probe" :
On Tuesday, thousands of people gathered in the main square in Shopian chanting, "We want freedom" and "Sisters, we are ashamed that your killers are still free."

In both Shopian and Srinagar, shops and businesses stayed shut and public transport remained off the streets in response to a strike called by the Majlis-e-Mashawarat, a local group demanding justice for the two women.

The strike is also supported by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, head of the All Parties' Hurriyat Conference, an alliance of pro-independence groups in the region.

On Tuesday, Farooq called the CBI report politically motivated and said that he supported the Majlis-e-Mashawarat's call for an independent international probe into the deaths.

Veteran Kashmiri Hurriyet leader, Syed Ali Gilani also strongly condemned the CBI report, terming it as "an attempt to shield the men in uniform".

Tens of thousands of Muslims have been killed since simmering discontent against Indian rule turned into a full opposition in 1989.

In 1948, the United Nations adopted a resolution calling for a referendum for Kashmir to determine whether the Himalayan region should be part of India and Pakistan. But India has rejected to hold referendum in Kashmiri territory. Kashmiris see India as an "occupier state".

===

Source:http://www.worldbulletin.net/ , Printed on 15.12.2009

Democracy is impossible without destroying native oppressors parasitic on imperialism.
   Maulana Bhashani
   
   Democracy cannot consist solely of elections that are nearly always fictitious    and managed by rich landowners and professional politicians.
   Che Guevara
   
   ‘Democracy,’ in a way, names the political figures of the conjunction between particular situations and politics. In this case, and in this case only, ‘democracy,’ can be recaptured as a philosophical category. Hereafter democracy will designate what can be termed as the effectiveness in politics.
   Alain Badiou

IF CULTURE is political and politics is cultural—as they surely are in ways in which they are dialectically envisaged and enacted not only by the Italian theorist-activist Antonio Gramsci, but also by our Maulana Bhashani—we might try to seek certain crucial connections between Qazi Nazrul Islam and Bhashani himself, between poetics and politics, to address and even reconfigure the question of democracy in our part of the world. And we might make those connections at a time when democracy itself turns out to be a concept in crisis not only in Bangladesh but also on a global scale. True, Nazrul can by no means be reckoned a hard theorist of democracy as such; but his poetic insights into the question of total emancipation from colonialism and imperialism—as articulated boldly and even repeatedly in the pages of Dhumketu—can be fruitfully yoked together with Bhashani’s principle and praxis of a mass-line in both politics and culture to frame our discussion surrounding the question ‘Whose democracy is it, any way?’

Admittedly, the question posed above is an old one—and we might even detect Leninist registers in this question, while remaining attentive to the difference between what Lenin calls ‘proletarian democracy’ and ‘bourgeois democracy’—but the question keeps returning with a vengeance in the era of what some political theorists have meanwhile called ‘over-democratisation.’ This idea of over-democratisation does not, however, suggest that we have already begun to inhabit a topographically even democratic landscape as such—in fact, we are far from it—but over-democratisation is an idea predicated on the phenomenon that everyone today wants to speak and act in the name of the ‘people’ themselves. So the epistemologically and politically enabling questions for me always are: The people? Which people? What people? Whose people? The people as subjects? Or the people as objects? The people as a mobilising trope? Or the people as even sheer fiction? The tropological or fictional or rhetorical people? Or the people within the horizon of the materiality of class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality, for instance? It is this particular constellation of questions that I intend to keep in mind and even mobilise while thinking and talking about the political culture and cultural politics of democracy in Bangladesh.

Let me then return to the question of the invocation and appropriation of the people. We know that even theocratic and fundamentalist politics have long justified their raison d’être in the name of the people. And, of course, what has come to be known as ‘bourgeois democracy’ has routinely rehearsed the so-called Lincolnesque prepositional principle of ‘a government of, by, and for the people.’ Even colonial governances, imperial rule, and military dictatorships have all historically justified and legitimised their theories and practices in the name of the people or the demos—the Greek for ‘people,’ one of the etymological roots of the Greek word demokratía or democracy. Of course, the politics of nationalism—its converging and conflictual versions notwithstanding—cannot simply ontologise or reproduce itself without invoking the people as a collective. 

There is, then, the case of socialism, whose entire theoretical horizon decisively embraces, and continues to re-constellate, the question of the people, positing that it is nothing short of ‘radical democracy’, or ‘people’s democracy’, or ‘proletarian democracy’—these terms themselves have a history of interesting variations and nuances within the Marxian tradition itself—which comes to constitute the initial stage of socialism. For a number of socialists, if not all, ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’—to the degree that the figure of the ‘proletariat’ here names the majority of the people as well as the most advanced and conscious section of them—is itself democracy radicalised, and democracy certainly rescued from the bourgeoisie, while marking the first stage of socialism. This is an idea that is by no means dead yet, the equation of ‘socialism’ and ‘dictatorship’ manufactured by bourgeois hegemony notwithstanding.

For instance, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez—taking his cues from none other than Lenin himself (given Chavez’s own account)—keeps that idea alive. Although Chavez is no Leninist in the strictest sense of the term, his Lenin-inspired experimentations with both democracy and socialism—and their mutual imbrications—have inaugurated a specifically promising chapter in the history of democratic and socialist movements in Latin America, as Tariq Ali rightly points out in his influential book on Latin America called Pirates of the Caribbean. Also, at a very recent festival called ‘Marxism Festival’ held in England—a festival that, among other things, renewed hope about our ‘new Marxian times’ at a moment when the current stage, and for that matter, the most advanced stage, of capitalism has reached its unprecedented dead-end, even in Francis Fukuyama’s version—there was this rhetorical question gathering the force of a gripping idea: ‘How can there be even a semblance of socialism without democracy itself?’ But, then, democracy itself is to be re-invented.

Thus, it is not for nothing that the young Australian philosopher and film-maker Daniel Ross—also the author of a relatively recent and sensational book called Violent Democracy, and one whose pet project seems to be a critique and a rehabilitation of the German high-priest of ontology Martin Heidegger by way of re-reading the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben—goes on to identify a paradoxical condition in which democracy finds itself. Taking cues and clues from Agamben, Ross suggests that democracy on the one hand remains ‘the unsurpassable horizon of our time’ and, that, on the other, democracy remains ‘a concept in crisis.’ I don’t disagree at all with Ross here, while I also enthusiastically follow the heterologics of democracy Ross tends to chart out in the global context, maintaining that ‘from the Left to the Right “democracy” is the concept governing political imagination.’

What, however, Ross and Agamben both leave out are the complex and interconnected configurations of class struggle, national liberation, and decolonisation, as they have variously informed and affected and even renewed the struggles for democracy in the ‘third world’—in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—within the larger contexts of capitalism and imperialism—those structures of production relations and power relations that influence, inflect, implicate, and even produce the practice of everyday life in today’s world.

In fact, Agamben and Ross—both—are not even ready to get this simple but crucially dialectical idea, a global calculus of political economy in fact: no discussions of the advanced zones of capital can be reckoned adequate today without a rigorous engagement with the peripheral formations in the world.

But let me now at least briefly dwell on democracy-as- a-concept- in-crisis in the Western context. It is important that we make sense of this crisis unfolding in the West, because it is still the West that continues to inform and even jazz up the so-called civil-societal concept of democracy in peripheral formations like ours—the kind of democracy that was exemplarily rehearsed by the last interim government in Bangladesh, a military-backed government that came to impose itself on the people without their mandate, a government that also invoked the ‘people’, thereby forging an unprecedented historical irony. It is instructive to remind ourselves that Fakhruddin’s military-backed interim government even slavishly adopted and mobilised the discursive practices of the US establishment in an attempt to promote ‘democracy’ in Bangladesh: ‘one-eleven’, ‘roadmaps’, ‘ID’, and so on. On the other hand, our traditional national ruling classes and their ideologues or intellectuals have hardly grappled with the question of democracy vis-à-vis the West at the theoretical and ideological—let alone practical—levels, while their role as the lumpen-bourgeoisie has not even enabled them to attain the level of bourgeois democratic consciousness in our part of the world.

Yet there have been both material and ideological ties—both conjunctural and organic as they are—between foreign capital and the national ruling classes, or between US imperialism and the national ruling classes, the history of which can certainly be traced as further back as the days of even Sheikh Mujibur Rahman himself, one who was known for his almost consistent pro-American stance (subsequently enacted by Ziaur Rahman, of course). Indeed, like the uneven development of capitalism itself, there has been an uneven development of democratic consciousness in Bangladesh. Against this background, then, the struggle for democracy in our country today cannot meaningfully move forward by remaining narrowly or merely political—a point that was anticipated long ago by a poet like Qazi Nazrul Islam, whose repeated and rebellious invocation of the ‘equality of the people’ fiercely foregrounds the questions of class, race, gender, and nationality underlying imperialist- capitalist domination, while underscoring the need for ‘decolonising the mind,’ to use the Kenyan writer-theorist- activist Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Fanon-inflected phrase. It is from Nazrul that I derive this crucial formulation: without decolonisation there is no democratisation in our part of the world. And it is from Bhashani that I derive this dialectical injunction: the struggle for democracy must, then, be cultural in the best political sense of the term.

Before I unpack further some of the loaded ideas that I have relatively quickly enunciated above, let me briefly point out certain aspects of the crisis of democracy in the West. It is significant that the most formidable and influential contemporary trinity of European or continental philosophers—the French philosopher Alain Badiou, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and the Slovenian philosopher Salvoj Žižek—all have been fiercely critical of liberal democracy in the West, whose contemporary crisis is today starkly evident in the crisis of capitalism itself for the simple reason that liberal democracy has continued to equate ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’ for quite some time now. It is this equation that is now backfiring for ‘democracy’ itself, suggests Alain Badiou in a recent interview, while Agamben suggests that as the French revolution marks the beginning of modern democratic thought in the West, modern democracy itself since then has been undermining its radical character and content by embracing, reproducing, and legitimising the thoughts of ‘necessity’ and ‘emergency’. Daniel Ross provides a gloss on this: ‘Whatever pockets of democratic radicalism have flourished momentarily here and there in the West, the tendency has not been an increase of popular control over government, but rather of increasing governmental control over populations.’ One might certainly say that today’s US imperialism remains hell-bent on globalising the thoughts of ‘necessity’ and ‘exception’ and ‘emergency’ in the name of democratising Iraq, Afghanistan, and by extension, the entire ‘third world’, targeted for nothing short of re-colonisation.

Now Žižek on liberal democracy: ‘“Democracy” is not merely the “power of, by, and for the people,” it is not enough just to claim that, in democracy, the will and the interests (the two in no way automatically coincide) of the large majority determine the state decisions. Democracy—in the way this term is used today—concerns, above all, formal legalism: its minimal definition is the unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the agonistic game. “Democracy” means that, whatever electoral manipulation took place, every political agent will unconditionally respect the results. In this sense, the US presidential elections of 2000 were effectively “democratic”: in spite of obvious electoral manipulations, and of the patent meaninglessness of the fact that a couple hundred of Florida voices will decide who will be the president, the Democratic candidate accepted his defeat.’

I have numerous local disagreements with Žižek, but I quote him here at some length because I think he symptomatically exposes the hollowness of today’s liberal democracy in the West—one that all three of them, Badiou-Agamben- Zizek, want us not only to critique but also to reject once and for all, while cautioning us that the entire circuits of NGOs-civil society-the World Bank/the IMF/the WTO are continuing to bury politics—and the ‘politics of the people’—beneath the ideas of good governance and effective administration and efficient management in an attempt to inaugurate a post-political society. It is this model of what might also be called ‘post-political democracy’ that the past ‘emergency’ government and the members of our so-called civil society have hitherto unabashedly privileged, while evincing clear signs of what the Chicana feminist theorist Emma Perez calls ‘ideological slavery’.

Of course, Badiou, Agamben, and Žižek make sense with regard to their trenchant critiques of liberal democracy in their parts of the world, but a whole host of ‘third-world’ theorists from the African American WEB Du Bois and the Caribbean CLR James, through the Latin American Jose Carlos Mariategui and the African Kwame Nkrumah, to our Maulana Bhasani—in their different ways and contexts—emphasise the need for re-inventing both politics and democracy in the land of the natives themselves. But how do we re-invent them? First of all, we need to reject completely the tradition of mainstream politics in Bangladesh that has routinely invoked the people without radically centring them and their agendas—a tradition that has never made decolonisation one of their central tasks, a tradition that has long been known for its ideological slavery, a tradition that continues to equate democracy with ‘free and fair elections’ instead of taking democracy as the equality of rights and opportunities, a tradition that remains tied to and even dictated by corporate interests and US imperialism, and, in short, a tradition that has reached its creative dead-end.

This tradition can never offer democracy for the people—for the majority who are working-class people and peasants in Bangladesh. The rejection in question then constitutes an indispensable condition for the re-invention of democracy—a re-invention that further calls for a permanent cultural struggle against capitalism, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy, profoundly interconnected as they are. There can never be a real democracy for the exploited and the oppressed under conditions of today’s late capitalism and late imperialism that routinely reduce the ‘people’ to ‘bare lives’ or even statistical numbers in the name of necessity and emergency, while also re-forging new hegemonic and oppressive blocs in the interests of both profit and power. And there can never be a democracy for the majority of our people in Bangladesh, when our legal system, our administrative system or our bureaucracy, our police and military systems, and, no less significantly, our educational system all remain still colonialist in character and content. And there can never be a real democracy in our country, if its people cannot claim and access their own national and natural resources. And there can be no democracy under the conditions of patriarchy—patriarchy that obtains and operates both micro-structurally and macro-structurally in our lives. Our permanent cultural struggle for democracy needs to target all those hegemonic blocs, even destroy them, through the production of new knowledges, new consciousness, and even new democratic beings in the interest of the total emancipation of the people. As our Maulana Bhasani—like the Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti—put it once: ‘The telling is in doing.’

Indeed, every moment can be a moment of rebellion and creation in the service of democracy.

 Azfar Hussain 

Born in Bangladesh— “the biggest ghetto of the world,” as some political economists put it—Azfar Hussain had grown up in landless peasant and working-class communities before he moved to the capital of Bangladesh to attend his first college and Dhaka University. There he received his B.A. (Honors) as well as his M.A. in English with distinction. He had worked as a magazine editor, as a member of a national-level left activist alliance, and as a university teacher of English before he came to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship to do his M.A. at Washington State University (WSU). He wrote his Master’s thesis on the Italian Marxist-Leninist theorist-activist Antonio Gramsci and earned his second M.A. in English, again with distinction, while he received from WSU his Ph.D. in English. His interdisciplinary dissertation titled “The Point is to (Ex)Change It: Toward a Political Economy of Land, Labor, Language, and the Body” earned him the WSU English Department’s Postdoctoral Blackburn Fellowship in 2003. 

By Henry Lowi

Henry Lowi argues the case for a democratic revolution to overcome partition, to decolonize Palestine, to overthrow the Zionist regime, and to open up the prospects for peace, democracy and coexistence.

”All the ‘friends of Palestine’ have made their peace with Partition. They do not challenge it. They can live with it. They can agitate politically without reference to it. But the workers and farmers of Palestine, and the refugees in the camps, need a programme to overcome Partition, to decolonize Palestine, to overthrow the Zionist regime, and to open up the prospects for peace, democracy and coexistence.”

Sunday 29 November was the anniversary of United Nations General Assembly Resolution (UNGAR) 181, the “Partition Resolution”. Partition remains the elephant in the room. No one wants to talk about it.

The supporters of the so-called “two-state solution” don’t talk about Partition because they don’t question the justice of Partition or its inevitable consequences. They recognize the State of Israel’s “right to exist”. Like the supporters of UNGAR 181, they deny the right of the people of Palestine to exercise sovereignty over Palestine.

What about the dissident supporters of the so-called “one-state solution”? They don’t turn their minds to how one gets from here to there. They somehow believe that a democratic one-state solution will fall from the sky, peacefully, without revolution. That is why these same well-meaning people attribute no role to the actual social and class forces living under Israeli rule and suffering from Israeli rule in besieged Gaza and the refugee camps. By not recognizing the need for revolution, the one-staters take no interest in the people who have an interest in revolution, those who can and will make a revolution, those for whom the daily struggle contains within it the unripe seeds of that revolution.

Partition – a pretext for ethnic cleansing

As a result of Partition, only the Zionist state was formed in former Mandate Palestine. For the Zionists, Partition presented a sh’at kosher – an opportunity, a pretext – to carry out what was always inherent and implicit in the Zionist programme – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. First, incrementally and reactively starting in December 1947, then deliberately, proactively and following a plan, one-third of the indigenous people of Palestine were driven out before the target date for the implementation of Partition. After the target date, the newly-formed Jewish state, legitimized by Partition, acted aggressively to carry out its political programme: settler colonialism, racist discrimination and ethnic cleansing.

When British imperialism retreated from Palestine, it left behind not an independent secular republic, but a new colonial-settler regime. In that sense, the State of Israel, proclaimed on 15 May 1948, is the direct heir of the colonial British Mandate regime made possible by Allenby’s conquest of Ottoman Palestine. Unlike other former British colonies, Palestine never underwent de-colonization and democratization. Thanks to Partition, colonialism was reorganized in Palestine, and took a new form: the State of Israel.

At the time, some of the most prominent Jewish intellectuals opposed the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine. These “soft Zionists” projected a Jewish or Hebrew homeland, in which Jewish people did not exercise sovereignty, certainly not state hegemony, over the Holy Land. The soft Zionists were swept aside by the hard Zionists of Mapai and Herut, who have been taking turns at the helm of the State of Israel and the Zionist movement ever since.

Partition was supported by the democratic imperialist United States and by the counter-revolutionary Stalinist Soviet Union, and both supported the Zionist Yishuv’s unilateral proclamation of statehood. So did their respective satellites and allies. The majority of the members of the United Nations General Assembly fell into line. The people of Palestine were left alone to face the Zionist onslaught, poorly organized, poorly armed, poorly led and lacking a democratic revolutionary political programme.

The isolated forces within the Palestinian working class movement, Arabs and Hebrews, who opposed Partition and proposed working class unity, did not have a snowflake’s chance in hell. They, too, were swept aside by triumphant counter-revolution.

Partition could have been prevented only by a successful revolution.

Israeli “soft Zionists” oppose decolonization

On the weekend of 29 November Israeli radicals celebrated in Old Yafa the 80th birthday of veteran activist Reuven Kaminer. Reuven can look you in the eye and, keeping a straight face, assert that the 1947-48 war was, for the Zionist Yishuv, a “just war of national defence”. Israeli Communist Party leader Benjamin Gonen can describe with pride his role in the conquest of Haifa as part of the Hagana. Gush Shalom leader Uri Avnery will never say there was anything wrong – from the point of view of democracy or solidarity – with his participation in a Zionist militia in that war. We are not talking about personal accountability for personal choices and youthful errors. We are talking about a political tradition that treats as axiomatic the perpetuation of the bitter fruits of Partition – the Israeli state on one hand, and denial of the right of return of the Palestine refugees on the other. All of today’s “soft Zionists” work hard and make sacrifices for a better, more peaceful, more democratic State of Israel, but they will not admit that the Zionist regime is the number one obstacle to peace and coexistence. Re-considering Partition, formulating a political strategy for the de-colonization of Palestine – that, for them, is beyond the pale.

On 27 November 2009, the Friday before the Partition anniversay, Gush Shalom published its weekly advertisement in Haaretz as follows:

DO IT!

Freeing

Gilad Shalit
Is a
Moral

Act

Freeing
Marwan Barghouti
Is a
Wise

Act

From the point of view of democracy, release of Fatah-Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti would be the “moral” act, as would be the release of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine leader Ahmad Saadat, as would be the release of all the political prisoners. But, when one places oneself politically and morally in the Zionist camp (albeit “soft Zionist”) one gets things confused. One is then compelled to treat the Palestinians as objects of she’at kosher, objects of an “opportunity” that one should be “wise” enough to exploit. Real solidarity with Marwan Barghouti and Ahmad Saadat and their followers and their Palestinian political rivals would require a completely different political morality, one that breaks free from the “morality” of Partition.

Need for democratic revolutionary strategy

Where does this leave the heroes of the alternative “one-state solution”? Without exception, all are working hard to support the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign”. But what is the purpose of BDS as advertised by its most prominent supporters? I have heard two goals articulated for BDS. One is “to punish the Israelis”. The other is “to pressure Israel to recognize Palestinian rights”. Both goals presume the continued existence of the Zionist regime. One seeks to punish the Israelis, the other seeks to force the regime to self-reform. Neither sees any role for the people actually living, suffering, and struggling under the Zionist regime. No one offers any analysis of these social forces. No one discusses these human beings as agents of regime change and beneficiaries of regime change. No one believes that, from within the oppressed people, Hebrew Israelis and Arab Palestinians will come the forces that will overthrow the Zionist regime and replace it with a democratic regime. I have never heard BDS promoted as part of a strategy of SUPPORTING the people of Palestine, of STRENGTHENING their struggle, of HELPING them gather the forces for a democratic revolution.

All the “Friends of Palestine” have made their peace with Partition. They do not challenge it. They can live with it. They can agitate politically without reference to it. But the workers and farmers of Palestine, and the refugees in the camps, need a programme to overcome Partition, to decolonize Palestine, to overthrow the Zionist regime, and to open up the prospects for peace, democracy and coexistence.

Partition could have been prevented only by revolution. Peace, democracy and coexistence can be achieved in the foreseeable future only by revolution. That is the perspective that needs to be discussed seriously and acted upon resolutely.

Since 1999, the government of President Hugo Chávez has established key legal and institutional guarantees for women’s rights in Venezuela.  These new measures are placing Venezuela at the vanguard of global struggles to promote gender equality. 

Perhaps even more importantly, the active participation of women in political and economic processes has been prioritized as a key part of the broader movement for social justice that is Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution.

Though this transformation is still incomplete, it has already made impressive strides.  An example of the commitment to gender equality at the official level was the creation of a new Ministry for Women’s Issues on March 8^th, 2008.  Meanwhile, in their daily lives, Venezuelan women particularly in low-income communities are increasingly empowered through state-funded initiatives in micro-lending, food provision, and nutrition, as well as programs in daycare, health, education, and other areas.

LEGAL STRIDES FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS

The 1999 Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is the product of a Constituent Assembly which allowed diverse sectors of society to participate in the drafting of new laws, including women and other minority groups. 

Nora Castañeda, now the President of the Women's Bank of Venezuela (Banmujer), recalls: "We were invited to submit proposals and we did.  The women's movement and the Indigenous movement picketed every day for four months while the Constitutional Assembly was sitting, and we got what we wanted.  The members of the Assembly, women and men, recognized the historic importance of our struggle."[1]

Because of the participation of women’s rights advocates in the development of the 1999 Constitution, the charter is now among the most progressive in the Western Hemisphere on gender issues.  Significantly, it was composed with the use of non-sexist language so as not to make assumptions when referring to the gender of citizens or holders of political office – i.e. instead of “he,” and “his,” it reads “he or she” and “his and her.”

Venezuela’s 1999 Constitution states that all persons are entitled to full citizenship rights and prohibits gender discrimination.  In terms of economic rights, the Constitution guarantees full equality between men and women in employment, and is unique among Latin American legal codes in recognizing housework as an economically productive activity for which housewives are owed social security benefits.  In doing so, the law demonstrates a powerful recognition of the historical debt owed to women by society.[2]

Several other pieces of federal legislation were designed to protect women.  The 1999 Law on Violence Against Women and Families addresses issues of sexual harassment and domestic violence.  The 2000 Law for the Protection of Children is also relevant in this regard.  Additionally, under the 2001 Law on Land and Agricultural Development, women were made more able to support their families through provisions allowing them to qualify as heads of household, spearhead agricultural projects, and hold preferential property rights.  President Chávez also opened all branches of the armed forces to women, removing legal limits to a woman’s ability to develop a career in the military in Venezuela.

WOMEN’S PARTICIPATION IN POLITICS

In a particularly dramatic transformation of Venezuela's political demography, 4 out of 5 branches of government are now headed by women – in fact, all but the executive office: women hold the top posts in the National Assembly, Supreme Court, National Electoral Council, and the Human Rights Office.  The head of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Cilia Flores, is pictured at left with President Chávez.

On the whole, Women's participation in government in Venezuela has increased significantly in recent years.  A new study by International IDEA finds that 18.6% of seats in Venezuela's National Assembly are held by women, giving that country the 8^th highest level of women's participation in congress in Latin America, just above the regional average and surpassing many nations including Chile, Brazil, and Colombia.  Back in 1997, before President Chávez was elected, only 5.9% of Venezuela's members of congress were women, the 3rd lowest rate in the region.   This means that the rate of women in congress in Venezuela has more than tripled in the last decade.[3]  In local government, the numbers also illustrate definite shifts, but indicate that more progress is needed.  Women account for 8.3% of all governors in Venezuela – the 3^rd-highest rate in the region. 

WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT IN LOCAL POLITICS

One reason for optimism is that local-level politics in Venezuela are being transformed by new forms of participation such as communal councils, and women are quickly assuming positions of leadership in that process. 

The system of communal councils was set up in 2001 to channel popular participation by citizens in local and national political life.  These groups give communities the opportunity to identify and address local needs through the model of “popular power,” which is considered the 5^th motor of the Bolivarian Process in Venezuela and is guided by the constitutional Law of Popular Participation.  As of August 2007, some 25,000 Communal Councils existed, and total membership was around 2.2 million. 

Studies of the communal councils are still in their infancy.  However, a recent study of low-income communities in Venezuela by U.S. Sociologist Sujatha Fernandes concluded that: "barrio women in Chávez's Venezuela… have sought to take the initiative at the local level to make decisions regarding their community and the implementation of local programs. … these women are agents who are building new spaces of democratic community participation."[4]

BANMUJER: CREATING A ‘CARING ECONOMY’

In addition to making strides in local and national politics, women in Venezuela are also quickly achieving unprecedented levels of economic empowerment under the administration of President Chávez.  The 1999 Constitution set out important legal measures, including a provision that makes women who work at home eligible for social security benefits.  Institutions supporting women’s full participation in the economy have also been key to this process; for example, Banmujer, the Women's Development Bank of Venezuela.

The only national financial institution of its kind in the world, Banmujer gives small, low-interest loans to women in order to help them form business ventures.  The chief goals of the bank are to create employment and reduce poverty among women, and to encourage women's participation in the economic and social transformations that are taking place as part of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution.  Banmujer was established in honor of International Women's Day on March 8, 2001, and disbursed its first micro-credit loans in September of 2001.  On the fifth anniversary of that first loan, President Chavez announced another investment in Banmujer of about $65 million U.S. dollars.[5]  As of late 2007, nearly 2 million women had benefited from the bank’s loans as well as its training programs and counseling services.

Nora Castañeda, President of Banmujer, said in an interview with the Guardian: "We are creating an economy at the service of human beings instead of human beings at the service of the economy."[6]  She has toured the U.S. and Europe to describe the Venezuelan success story.  The bank’s achievements are explained in part by the fact that it was designed in consultation with poor Venezuelans in both rural and urban areas, and specifically tailored to meet their needs. 

Castañeda explained: “Since 70 per cent of Venezuelans living in poverty are women, we decided to target them. Banmujer tries to create a level playing field by empowering these women not just economically, but also politically and socially. It’s a social development bank that assesses the viability of projects, and provides training in citizenship, organization, leadership, education, health and self-esteem as well as personal development. We are not building a bank – we are building a different way of life.”[7]

“MOTHERS OF THE BARRIO”: SOCIAL MISSIONS IN VENEZUELA

The economic and social needs of women are also being met by a set of development programs called “social missions” that began operating in 2003 using revenues from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA.  There are now over 2 dozen social missions operating on a national scale, including a nutrition and food distribution program, another that sponsors adult literacy and education, and a third and very successful campaign to provide universal healthcare through a network of free clinics primarily in economically depressed areas.  Because poverty in Venezuela affects women the most, the social programs are having their greatest impact among women and female-headed households.  They have helped to raise the standard of living significantly, contributing to a 27.6% drop in poverty rates in Venezuela since the missions began in 2003.[8]

One of the newest social missions, the “Mothers of the Barrio” Mission, was launched in March of 2006 to provide a monthly stipend to poor women with children who lack full-time employment.  This is also based on Article 88 of the Constitution recognizing women’s work in the home as an economically productive activity.  By August of 2006, “Mothers of the Barrio” was providing some 200,000 women with stipends averaging around $176 per month, or 60-80% of the current minimum wage.  The funds are allotted according to need, and rotate so that more beneficiaries may be covered.[9]

REVOLUTIONIZING WOMEN’S ROLES

For women in Venezuela, the first decade of the 21^st century has already brought many long-awaited advancements in the areas of law, politics, and the economy.  At a local level as well as an administrative one, women’s roles are truly undergoing a profound transformation. 

This transformation is, of course, an ongoing one.  What has become clear thus far is that, under President Chávez, the government of Venezuela has become dedicated to helping women assume and sustain active roles in the process of their own empowerment, and that the peaceful and democratic Bolivarian Revolution will not – and cannot – exclude or proceed without them.

Venezuela’s state owned-oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), has embarked on an impressive campaign of corporate responsibility and social charity in the past few years.  Alongside initiatives by the Venezuelan government to increase social service provision including universal access to healthcare and education, tens of thousands of lives have been saved and countless more improved as the country experiences a dramatic decline in poverty.[i]     

When President Chávez was first elected, social inequality in Venezuela had reached nearly insurmountable levels; in 1999, almost half of all households (43%) were living in poverty. Despite its great oil wealth, Venezuela’s representative democracy had, under previous administrations, failed almost half of the population.  To address this historical deficit, the President, supported by the National Assembly and the electorate, began to think seriously about a multifaceted method to ameliorate poverty.  Social welfare programs funded by the profits of Venezuela’s lucrative oil business were delivered as the solution.  Today, these programs exist, and are known as "social missions."     

The first social missions were instituted in 2003, at which point PDVSA increased its annual spending on social programs from $40 million to $249 million, and then again to reach a staggering $1.2 billion the following year.[ii]  Social development expenses have more than doubled each year since then, bringing expenditures in this area to a grand total of $21.7 billion dollars over the last four years.  PDVSA’s 2007 Financial Report, which has been evaluated by a member of the widely respected auditing firm KPMG International, confirms these figures.

With such large injections of social spending by PDVSA, 22 social missions have been created in Venezuela to date.  They range from cultural and environmental projects to broad-reaching efforts in healthcare and education.  The most important are outlined in the table below. ___________________________________

PDVSA's Annual Social Development Expenditures

2003:  $249 million

2004:  $1.24 billion

2005:  $6.91 billion
2006:  $13.26 billion

Total: $21.7 billion

____________________________________

MISSION IDENTITY: BOOSTING VOTER PARTICIPATION

Among the first and most successful initiatives has been Mission Identity, or Mision Identidad in Spanish.  Established in October 2003 and fully operational in 2004, this mission was carried out with the help of the National Office of Identification and Immigration (ONIDEX). It aims to implement Article 56 of the Venezuelan Constitution, which states:

All persons have the right to be registered free of charge with the Civil Registry Office after birth, and to obtain public documents constituting evidence of their biological identity, in accordance with law.[iii]

Essentially a massive citizenship and voter registration campaign rolled into one, Mission Identity has given millions of Venezuelans national ID cards, granting them full citizenship rights for the first time.  The first two phases of the program took place between October 2003 and the first half of 2006, during which time an estimated 18 million people received new or updated ID cards, and more than 5.5 million Venezuelans registered to vote for the first time in their lives.[iv]  Indigenous and immigrant populations were touched also, with 430,000 immigrants naturalized and almost 274,000 indigenous persons issued IDs.[v]  As of February 2007, the Mission estimated that it had served a total of 23 million people.[vi]

Mission Identity has also resulted in increased rates of electoral participation, especially during presidential elections.  In 2000, 11 million Venezuelans were registered to vote, but only a little over half (6 million) actually went to the polls.  In contrast, in the 2004 referendum that took place less than one year after the project was launched, 14 million Venezuelans were registered to vote and 9 million exercised that right, dropping the abstention rate from 43.6% in 2000 to 30.1% in 2004.[vii]  As a result of this ongoing effort, in May 2006, more than half of Venezuela’s 26 million citizens were registered to vote, and even more held official national ID cards.  Presidential elections in December 2006 saw the highest voter turnout in Venezuelan history, with nearly 75% participation, rates that have not been matched in the U.S. since 1820.[viii]

MISSION BARRIO ADENTRO: UNIVERSALIZING HEALTHCARE

Another key sector in need of massive improvements was Venezuela’s health system.  Under Article 83 of the 1999 Constitution, the government was made responsible for ensuring universal access to healthcare.  A few years later, Venezuela embarked upon an aggressive strategy to provide a medical doctor to every neighborhood in need.  This mission began out of necessity, after too few Venezuelan doctors responded to calls by the government to provide medical services to vulnerable populations in the country.  Due to the failure of the Venezuelan medical community to respond to domestic health needs, the government turned to Cuba, a nation well-known for its medical missions.

Since Barrio Adentro (Inside the Barrio) began, an estimated 20,000 Cuban doctors have come to Venezuela to deliver free medical care in poor communities, sometimes even living with residents until a community health clinic equipped with a housing unit could be built.  Thousands of community-based health committees have also been established to organize door-to-door surveys to determine the needs of each neighborhood and develop a comprehensive plan for improving health.  According to the Pan American Health Organization, since 2003, doctors in Venezuela have conducted over 40 million free consultations, and health professionals have held millions of educational activities that focus on improving nutrition and preventing high-risk behaviors.[ix]  Barrio Adentro now has 1,600 community consultation centers throughout the country[x] and the average Venezuelan’s access to free healthcare has grown tremendously with an increase in primary care physicians throughout the country from 1,628 in 1998 to 19,571 in 2007.[xi]

The mission estimates that as of May 2007, almost 50,000 lives had been saved.[xii]  Venezuelans have also been training to become community doctors; in April 2007, about 2,000 Venezuelans were awarded medical degrees.[xiii]

Barrio Adentro II was formed in June of 2005 to construct 35 high tech centers, 600 diagnostic centers, and 600 rehabilitations centers throughout the country.  Progress to date includes the construction of 175 diagnostic centers (29%), 183 rehabilitation centers (31%), and 6 high technology centers (17%), all of which are functioning today.  Most recently, Barrio Adentro III was initiated with the goal of modernizing the nation’s hospitals by updating technology and medical equipment and remodeling, improving, and expanding the hospital infrastructure.[xiv]  

MISSION ROBINSON: IMPROVING LITERACY AND EDUCATION

In addition to poor healthcare, Venezuela has also been historically plagued by illiteracy.  To address this problem, Mission Robinson was founded to equip the population with essential literacy skills.  On May 23, 2003, pilot programs began in the capital city of Caracas, as well as in the heavily populated states of Vargas, Miranda and Aragua.  Overwhelmingly positive results in these initial programs prompted the official inauguration of the mission on July 1st of that year.  The mission has targeted Venezuelans over 15 years of age who are unable to read or write, and draws on a Cuban methodology known as Yo Si Puedo or "Yes I Can," which utilizes audiovisual equipment and local volunteers to implement the vigorous program.

The results have been tremendous; 1.5 million citizens have been taught to read and write, increasing the literacy rate in Venezuela to 96%.  The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has applauded Venezuela’s efforts, calling the country a leader in the region at reaching UN Millennium Development Goals for literacy.  Several related missions have also been created to promote education.  Mission Robinson II provides basic elementary education up to the 6^th grade, while Mission Ribas targets those who did not enter or complete high school.  As of June 2006, Mission Ribas had graduated 168,253 from high school with another 943,000 Venezuelans actively participating in the program.[xv]  A variety of scholarship programs and university missions also exist.

MISSION ALIMENTATION: PROVIDING PROPER NUTRITION

To further confront extreme poverty and hunger, the Venezuelan government created a subsidized food program and distribution system that provides high quality food and commodities at reduced prices. The Agricultural Supply and Services Corporation (CASA), and a chain of subsidized food markets (MERCAL) work in conjunction to meet daily nutritional requirements for all citizens.

Additionally, food banks have been set up to provide free meals to the most disadvantaged.  Requirements set by the Venezuelan National Institute for Nutrition afford all adults a daily diet of 2,600 calories.[xvi]  MERCAL specializes in reaching out to indigenous and rural communities through mobile markets, or fleets of trucks, that deliver affordable food through rugged terrain to remote areas. 

In 2005 food subsidies benefited an average of 67% of the population and 43% in 2006.[xvii] Today, over 8 million people are benefiting from a network of 6,000 markets that distribute more than 7 million pounds of food daily.[xviii]  Testament to the success of the program, an estimated 150,000 people living in extreme poverty in Venezuela are now able to eat a healthy diet each day at no cost.[xix]  Not only has this mission reduced hunger in Venezuela, it has employed more than 51,000 citizens from poor communities who staff the food centers and nutritional programs.[xx]

THE IMPACT OF THE SOCIAL MISSIONS

A recent survey on the impact of the social missions conducted by the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) shows that almost half of all Venezuelan households (47.4%) have received benefits from the government-sponsored missions.  Among low-income families, the number benefiting from the missions is even higher, at 62.3%.[xxi]

Another report released in late July of 2007 by the Washington, DC-based Center for Economic and Policy Research shows similar results and notes that:

• Venezuela’s household poverty rate has decreased by 31% between 2003, when the first missions began, and the end of 2006.
• Unemployment in Venezuela is at its lowest level in a decade, at 8.3% as of June 2007.
• The combined social spending per person by PDVSA and the State has increased by 314 percent from 1998 to 2006.[xxii]

By all measures, Venezuela’s state initiated social missions have played an integral role in reducing poverty in Venezuela.  With plans to expand their reach, it is likely that poverty and social exclusion will continue to be on the decline in Venezuela.

By Rick Rozoff

Yemen will become a battleground for a proxy war between the United States and Saudi Arabia – whose state-to-state relations are among the strongest and most durable of the entire post-World War II era – on one hand and Iran on the other.

It is perhaps impossible to determine the exact moment at which a U.S.- supported self-professed holy warrior – trained to perpetrate acts of urban terrorism and to shoot down civilian airliners – ceases to be a freedom fighter and becomes a terrorist. But a safe assumption is that it occurs when he is no longer of use to Washington. A terrorist who serves American interests is a freedom fighter; a freedom fighter who doesn’t is a terrorist.

Yemenis are the latest to learn the Pentagon’s and the White House’s law of the jungle. Along with Iraq and Afghanistan which counterinsurgency specialist Stanley McChrystal used to perfect his techniques, Yemen is joining the ranks of other nations where the Pentagon is engaged in that variety of warfare, fraught with civilian massacres and other forms of so-called collateral damage: Colombia, Mali, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia and Uganda.
———-

BBC News reported on December 14 that 70 civilians were killed when aircraft bombed a market in the village of Bani Maan in northern Yemen.

The nation’s armed forces claimed responsibility for the deadly attack, but a website of the Houthi rebels against whom the bombing was ostensibly directed stated “Saudi aircraft committed a massacre against the innocent residents of Bani Maan.” [1]

The Saudi regime entered the armed conflict between the (eponymous) Houthis and the Yemeni government on behalf of the latter in early November and since has been accused of launching attacks inside Yemen with tanks and warplanes. Even before the latest bombing scores of Yemenis have been killed and thousands displaced by the fighting. Saudi Arabia has also been accused of using phosphorous bombs.

Moreover, the rebel group known as Young Believers, based in the Shi’ite Muslim community of Yemen which comprises 30 percent of the country’s population of 23 million, claimed on December 14 that “US fighter jets have attacked Yemen’s Sa’ada Province” and “US fighter jets have launched 28 attacks on the northwestern province of Sa’ada.” [2]

The previous day’s edition of Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported on discussions with U.S. military officials, stating “Fearful that Yemen is in danger of becoming a failed state, America has now sent a small number of special forces teams to improve training of Yemen’s army in reaction to the threat.”

One unnamed Pentagon official was quoted as saying “Yemen is becoming a reserve base for al-Qaeda’s activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” [3]

The conjuring up of the al-Qaeda bogey, however, is a decoy. The rebels in the north of the nation are Shi’ites and not Sunnis, much less Wahhabi Sunnis of the Saudi variety, and as such are not only not linked with any group of groups that could be categorized as al-Qaeda, but instead would be a likely target thereof.

In service to American designs in the region, the British and American press lately has been referring to Yemen as the “ancestral homeland” of Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden comes from a prominent billionaire Saudi Arabian family, of course, but as his father had been born in what is now the Republic of Yemen over a century ago the Western media are exploiting an insignificant historical accident to suggest Osama bin Laden’s active role in the nation and to establish a tenuous link between the South Asian war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Saudi and American armed intervention in a civil conflict in Yemen.

In 2002 the Pentagon dispatched an estimated 100 soldiers, by some accounts Green Beret special forces, to Yemen to train the country’s military. In that instance, coming as it did two years after the suicide bombing attack against the Navy destroyer USS Cole in the southern Yemeni port of Aden, attributed to al-Qaeda, and accompanied by drone missile attacks against identified leaders of the same, Washington justified its actions as retaliation for that incident as well as the attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. the year before.

The present context is different and a U.S.-backed counterinsurgency war in Yemen will have nothing to do with combating alleged al-Qaeda threats, but will in fact be an integral part of the strategy to expand the Afghan war into yet wider concentric circles taking in South and Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Persian Gulf, Southeast Asia and the Gulf of Aden, the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The eagerly awaited departure of President George W. Bush may have led to the end of the official global war on terror, now referred to as overseas contingencies operations, but nothing except the name has changed.

On December 13 the top commander of the Pentagon’s Central Command in charge of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, General David Petraeus, told the Al Arabiya television network that “that U.S supports Yemen’s security in the context of the military cooperation provided by America for its allies in the region” and “stressed that U.S. ships in the territorial waters of Yemen [are there] not only to control but to impede the infiltrations of weapons to Houthi rebels.” [4]

To be recalled the next time the al-Qaeda/bin Laden canard is used to justify expanding U.S. military involvement on the Arabian Peninsula.

The Yemen Post of December 13 wrote that the Houthi media office “accused the U.S. of participating in the war against Houthis” and released photographs of what were identified as U.S. warplanes “involved in bombing operations in Sa’ada province [in] Northern Yemen.”

The source estimated there have been twenty U.S. bombing raids coordinated with satellite surveillance. [5]

The Western press is again leading the charge in linking the Houthis, whose religious background of Zaydi Shi’ism is quite distinct from the Iranian version, to sinister machinations imputed to Tehran. Even U.S. government officials have to date acknowledged no evidence that Iran is supporting much less arming the Yemeni rebels. That will change if the script goes according to precedent as is indicated by Petraeus’s comment above, and Washington will dutifully echo the Yemeni government’s claim that Iran is arming its Shi’ia brethren in Yemen as it is accused of doing in Lebanon.

Yemen will become a battleground for a proxy war between the United States and Saudi Arabia – whose state-to-state relations are among the strongest and most durable of the entire post-World War II era – on one hand and Iran on the other.

In an editorial of five days ago the Tehran Times accused all parties to the Yemeni conflict – the government, the rebels and Saudi Arabia – of recklessness and issued a warning: “History provides a good example. Saudi Arabia funded extremist groups in Afghanistan and still, two decades since the withdrawal of the Soviet army from the country, the flames of war in Afghanistan are overwhelming the allies of Saudi Arabia.

“And a similar scenario is emerging in Yemen.” [6]

The comparison between Yemen and Afghanistan alluded in particular to Riyadh, in the second case hand-in-glove with the United States, exporting Saudi-based Wahhabism to expand its political influence.

Saudi Arabia is attempting to promote its own version of extremism in Yemen as it did earlier in Afghanistan and Pakistan and is currently doing in Iraq. Far from the U.S. and its Western allies expressing any objection, the Saudis and their fellow Persian Gulf monarchies will be in the forefront of what is estimated to be $100 billion worth of Middle East arms purchases from the West over the next five years. “The core of this arms-buying spree will undoubtedly be the $20 billion U.S. package of weapons systems over 10 years for the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council – Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain.” [7] Saudi Arabia is also armed with state-of-the-art British and French warplanes as well as U.S. missile defense systems.

What the earlier cited Iranian commentary warned about regarding “the flames of war” in Afghanistan is perfectly confirmed by the Commander’s Initial Assessment of August 30, 2009 issued by top American and NATO military commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal and published by the Washington Post on September 21 with the redactions demanded by the Pentagon. The 66-page document served as the blueprint for President Barack Obama’s December 1 announcement that 33,000 more American troops are headed to Afghanistan.

In the report McChrystal stated, “The major insurgent groups in order of their threat to the mission are: the Quetta Shura Taliban (05T), the Haqqani Network (HQN), and the Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HiG).”

The last two are named after their founders and current leaders, Jalaluddin Haqqanni and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Mujahideen darlings of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980s when the Agency’s deputy director (from 1986-1989) was Robert Gates, now U.S. Secretary of Defense in charge of prosecuting the war in Afghanistan. And in Yemen.

In his 1996 book From the Shadows, Gates boasted that “CIA had important successes in covert action. Perhaps the most consequential of all was Afghanistan where CIA, with its management, funnelled billions of dollars in supplies and weapons to the mujahideen….” [8]

The New York Times in 2008 divulged these details:

“In the 1980s, Jalaluddin Haqqani was cultivated as a ‘unilateral’ asset of the CIA and received tens of thousands of dollars in cash for his work in fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, according to an account in ‘The Bin Ladens,’ a recent book by Steve Coll. At that time, Haqqani helped and protected Osama bin Laden, who was building his own militia to fight the Soviet forces, Coll wrote.” [9] Coll is also the author of the 2001 volume Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.

Haqqani’s colleague Hekmatyar “received millions of dollars from the CIA through the ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence]. Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin received some of the strongest support from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and worked with thousands of foreign mujahideen who came to Afghanistan.” [10]

This past May the (superlatively) pro-American president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, told the American NBC news network that Taliban is “part of our past and your past, and the ISI and CIA created them together….It (the Taliban) was (a) monster created by all of us….” [11]

On September 11, 2001 there were only three nations in the world that recognized Taliban rule in Afghanistan: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. U.S. President George W. Bush immediately afterward singled out seven so-called states supporting terrorism for potential retaliation: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. Only Sudan, which expelled Osama bin Laden in 1996, had any conceivable connections to al-Qaeda. Of the nineteen accused September 11 airline hijackers, fifteen were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt and one from Lebanon.

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia remain highly-valued American political and military allies and the United Arab Emirates has troops serving under NATO command in Afghanistan.

It is perhaps impossible to determine the exact moment at which a U.S.-supported self-professed holy warrior – trained to perpetrate acts of urban terrorism and to shoot down civilian airliners – ceases to be a freedom fighter and becomes a terrorist. But a safe assumption is that it occurs when he is no longer of use to Washington. A terrorist who serves American interests is a freedom fighter; a freedom fighter who doesn’t is a terrorist.

For decades the African National Congress of Nelson Mandela and the Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat were at the top of the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist groups. No sooner had the Cold War ended than both Mandela and Arafat (and Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams) were invited to the White House. The first shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 and the second in 1994.

If a hypothetical self-styled jihadist left Saudi Arabia or Egypt in the 1980s for Pakistan to fight against the Afghan government and its Soviet ally, he was a freedom fighter in the U.S.’s eyes. If he then went to Lebanon he was a terrorist. In the early 1990s if he arrived in Bosnia he was a freedom fighter again, but if he showed up in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank a terrorist. In the Russian North Caucasus he was a reborn freedom fighter, but if he returned to Afghanistan after 2001 a terrorist.

Depending on how the wind is blowing from Foggy Bottom, an armed Baloch separatist in Pakistan or a Kashmiri one in India is either a freedom fighter or a terrorist.

Contrariwise, in 1998 U.S. special envoy to the Balkans Robert Gelbard described the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighting the government of Yugoslavia as a terrorist organization: “I know a terrorist when I see one and these men are terrorists.” [12]

The following February U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright brought five members of the KLA, including its chief Hashim Thaci, to Rambouillet, France to offer an ultimatum to Yugoslavia that she knew would be rejected and lead to war. The next year she escorted Thaci on a personal tour of the United Nations Headquarters and the State Department and invited him as a guest to the Democratic Party presidential nominating convention in Los Angeles.

This November 1st Thaci, now prime minister of a pseudo-state only recognized by 63 of the world’s 192 nations, hosted former U.S. President Bill Clinton for the unveiling of a statue honoring the latter’s crimes. And vanity.

Washington supported armed separatists in Eritrea from the mid-1970s until 1991 in their war against the Ethiopian government.

Currently the U.S. is arming Somalia and Djibouti for war against independent Eritrea. The Pentagon has its first permanent military base in Africa in Djibouti, where it stations 2,000 troops and from where it conducts drone surveillance over Somalia. And Yemen.

In the words of Balzac’s character Vautrin, “There are no such things as principles, there are only events; there are no laws, there are only circumstances….”

Yemenis are the latest to learn the Pentagon’s and the White House’s law of the jungle. Along with Iraq and Afghanistan which counterinsurgency specialist Stanley McChrystal used to perfect his techniques, Yemen is joining the ranks of other nations where the U.S. military is engaged in that variety of warfare, fraught with civilian massacres and other forms of so-called collateral damage: Colombia, Mali, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia and Uganda.

1) BBC News, December 14, 2009
2) Press TV, December 14, 2009
3) Daily Telegraph, December 13, 2009
4) Yemen Post, December 13, 2009
5) Ibid
6) Tehran Times, December 10, 2009
7) United Press International, August 25, 2009
8) BBC News, December 1, 2008
9) New York Times, September 9, 2008
10) Wikipedia
11) Press Trust of India, May 11, 2009
12) BBC News, June 28, 1998

Take action now:

1. Endorse this statement; demand "U.S./Israeli hands off Iran!" - http://stopwaroniran.org/iran2009endorse.shtml
2. Forward this message to your listserves, or link to it from your Facebook, MySpace, and other sites (use http://stopwaroniran.org/iranstatement.shtml)
3. Please consider making an emergency donation.  Stop War on Iran was founded in early 2005 as an international campaignto oppose a U.S. military attack on Iran and other acts of war, including sanctions and covert destabilization.  Initial signers included former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, author and activist Leslie Feinberg, Michael Parenti, Larry Holmes of the Troops Out Now Coalition, Howard Zinn, George Galloway, Harold Pinter, former First Lady of Greece Margarita Papandreou,  and hundreds more.  Since that time we have organized meetings and forums from coast to coast, and brought Stop War On Iran placards, banners, buttons, and literature to antiwar demonstrations across the country.  Stop War On Iran does not receive funds from U.S. government agencies or corporate-run foundations, which means we need your help to continue to mobilize in the face of the latest threats against Iran.   You can donate online at http://stopwaroniran.org/donate.shtml
4. Consider organizing a local action on August 1 to demand "U.S./Israeli Hands Off Iran." List your action at http://stopwaroniran.org/iran2009volorgcent.shtml
5. Volunteer!  The Stop War On Iran Campaign relies entirely on volunteers to get things done, and we need your help - http://stopwaroniran.org/iran2009volorgcent.shtml
   

• Why the U.S. anti-war movement should stand firmly against any military attack, sanctions or demonization of Iran.
• Boycott the Phony State Department/NED pro-war events on July 25
• Nationally-coordinated actions on August 1 to say "U.S. Hands Off Iran!"

U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden’s new public threat against Iran underlines the dangers of a new war in the Middle East and the desperate need for political clarity within the anti-war movement concerning Iran.

With his June 6 comments on ABC's This Week, Biden opened the door to a military attack when he said that the U.S. would not stand in the way of an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, calling such an attack is Israel’s “sovereign right.” Israel, he said, was “free to do what it needed to do.”  
 
The Geneva Conventions call it a war crime even to threaten to attack another state. This is not just rhetoric. Only with U.S. satellite, radar and the use of air space over U.S.-occupied Iraq could the Israeli bombing raid take place. Biden should be denounced as a war criminal for making such a reckless and dangerous encouragement of unprovoked war against Iran.
 
A U.S.-funded Israeli attack would immediately unleash a wider war. It would have catastrophic results for the whole Middle East and the Iranian people, even beyond what has already been done to the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine.

Biden’s new threat comes during a full corporate media offensive against Iran. Its timing should serve as an alert to the entire progressive and anti-war movement. U.S. aircraft carriers, destroyers, nuclear submarines, jet aircraft and drones clog the seas that wash up on Iranian shores.

In this dangerous war climate the entire U.S. and Western corporate media is again demonizing the Iranian government. It is using the media and well-funded, subversive organizations in a massive effort of destabilization and sabotage. Too often in the past this same combination of phony “human rights” organizations, who are given endless coverage in a corporate media frenzy, have helped to create a war climate through demonization, frauds and fabricated charges. This has happened before every U.S. attack or invasion, along with a concerted campaign of psychological warfare and internal destabilization in the target country.
 
One such organization leading this effort is the newly formed “United 4 Iran,” a fraudulent “left cover” for organizations funded by the U.S. government and big corporations. It is designed to use “human rights” and “democracy” to justify U.S. threats to attack Iran. This group has called phony “human rights” internationally coordinated protests for July 25. United 4 Iran is a front for organizations awash in money from the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cover organization for intervention, subversion, covert action in countries around the world. These same groups are supported by funds from Rockefeller, Soros, and Mellon foundations.  
 
It is telling that United 4 Iran makes NO mention of the U.S. wars currently ripping apart the entire region. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops along with an army of private military contractors and mercenaries have created havoc in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan. U.S. funds and equipment have supported Israeli occupation and war on Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. Nor does this group mention the decades of U.S. military encirclement, sanctions, sabotage, attempted and actual coups against the people of Iran. 

If these organizations were genuinely concerned with democracy, human rights and respect for elections why have they not called emergency actions in defense and support of the democratic elections in Gaza? In Gaza there was a democratic election overseen by Western international monitors. Hamas won overwhelmingly. The U.S. funded Israeli response was blockade and starvation against an entire people. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli bombardment.

Why the movement must reject anti-Iran provocations -
UFPJ should withdraw support of anti-Iran actions.

How we respond to these actions is a crucial question for the movement.  Are we for another brutal U.S. war or against it?
 
It is profoundly disturbing that United for Peace and Justice UFPJ and other anti-war organizations have chosen to add their endorsement to these actions targeting the Iranian government. These anti-war groups should be in the forefront of opposing current U.S. wars and threats of wider war.

Stop War On Iran urges them and other honest anti-war forces to reconsider their endorsement of the anti-Iran actions.   Anti-war activists in the United States, while demanding an end to the occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, have an additional responsibility to oppose any military moves by the Pentagon or its allies against Iran and to oppose any moves by the former colonial powers to weaken Iran’s sovereignty. 

 
The U.S. imperialist wars throughout the region are an effort by U.S. corporations to gain strategic domination of the vast oil and energy resources.

Since its 1979 revolution, Iran’s independence has been a thorn in the side of corporate billionaires in the U.S. and Britain and of the U.S.-funded Israeli settler state. When the Iranian people overthrew the brutal U.S.-backed shah dictatorship they finally regained control of their rich oil and gas resources. In 30 years time Iran developed industrially and vastly improved the educational and health level of the entire population.
 
Any intervention by the imperialist powers in Iran and any weakening of Iranian sovereignty will only diminish the rights of women, workers, and the access to democratic institutions there, just as it has happened in the rest of the region. Any intervention by the imperialists in Iran’s internal struggles is aimed either at aiding the side the imperialists see as more conciliatory to their plans, or to exacerbate the internal conflict in order to compromise and weaken the Iranian government.

U.S. wars and occupations from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan have never brought democracy or human rights. They have brought only oppressive military dictatorships, massive refugee crises, torture and millions of deaths.

Also, we cannot forget that it is U.S. troops, military equipment, and bases that keep corrupt feudal anti-woman monarchies in power in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan, as well as the brutal dictatorship in Egypt.

The hypocrisy of U.S. politicians is staggering, as they condemn the actions of the Iranian government while sweeping their own crimes under the rug. Iran’s elections and disputes are an internal matter, to be resolved by the Iranian people and not the governments of imperialist countries with agendas of dominating Iran and a track record of using internal issues to justify military invasion.

Money for jobs and benefits, not for more war

In this time of global capitalist crisis, when millions are unemployed and millions more facing evictions and foreclosures, we must demand that the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on current U.S. wars and the trillions that would criminally wasted in a new war be spent for jobs, health care and housing for poor and working people in the U.S. and around the world.

We urge your endorsement and support of these simple demands.

1. We oppose military aggression by the U.S., Britain, or Israel against Iran.
 
2. We oppose economic, diplomatic or other sanctions against Iran whatever their excuse.
 
3. We demand an end to subversion, de-stabilization, covert actions instigated by the U.S. and its military or spy agencies directed at Iran.

Endorse here: http://stopwaroniran.org/iran2009endorse.shtml
 
We urge you NOT to march in the anti-Iran event, which is designed to give humanitarian cover to U.S. threats of war against Iran. Instead, come out AGAINST current U.S. wars and the threats of a new war on the following week in a National Day of Coordinated Actions on Saturday, August 1.
 
Contact Stop War On Iran if you are interested in organizing or supporting an action opposing U.S. threats on Iran on Saturday, August 1

In NYC join us at Times Square, 42nd & 7th Ave at 1pm, August 1 for a march to the Israeli Mission.

STOP WAR ON IRAN
55 W. 17th St. 5th Fl., NY NY 10011
www.StopWarOnIran.org   212.633.6646

Water is considered as one of the most crucial non-traditional security issues. Water security is an elusive concept,but consensus is beginning to emerge in the world community.Water security is essential for human access for health, well-being,economic and political stability.It is essential to limit risks of water related hazards. A complete and fair valuation of the resource,sustainability of ecosystems at all parts of the hydrologic cycle and an equitable and cooperative sharing of water resources is very necessary.

It is a great irony that our planet that has 70% of its surface covered with water is facing an acute water crisis. It is alleged that the next world conflict would be for water. Water is very important for a nation to survive and to ensure their existence. Water is a strategic resource in the globe and an important element in many political conflicts. The world civilization started from the bank of Tigris, Euphrates and Nile rivers. To sustain a civilization water is the basic need. That is why it has been synonym as “life”. Among the 70% water that our planet contains 97.5% water is ocean water which is salty. Among the remaining 1.725% is in glaciers, snow and permafrost. 0.075% is ground water, and 0.025% is in the lakes, swamps and rivers.

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URL:http://www.bipss. org.bd/download/ water_security. pdf

The Early Day Motion George has tabled can be accessed here -If this could be circulated far and wide with the encouragement for people to contact their local MP to support.

Early Day Motion

EDM 1572

That this House notes that the Indian government intends to proceed with the building of the Tipaimukh Dam near the border with Bangladesh; further notes that there is widespread and justified concern amongst many Bangladeshis, people of Bangladeshi origin, environmentalists and naturalists about the implications of this project and in particular for the future of Sylhet; further notes that many British citizens have family and property in Sylhet; and believes that the British Government should make urgent representations to the Indian government not to proceed with this project until such time as there are sufficient reassurances about water supply, the security of the dam and its full environmental impact, and that the project should be abandoned if such reassurances are not forthcoming.

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Source:http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=38750&SESSION=899