-Caveat Lector-
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Date sent: Mon, 13 May 2002 04:45:33 +0000
From: robalini <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Konformist: Alternet News
Colombian Tribe Topples Mighty Oil Giant
Gabrielle Banks, AlterNet
May 6, 2002
There's not much good news coming out of war-torn Colombia these
days. Friday was a notable exception. With no great fanfare,
Occidental Petroleum, the multinational giant that has gained infamy
in environmental circles, announced at its annual shareholder meeting
in Santa Monica, Calif. that it was relinquishing control of Siriri,
the oil block in Colombia on the ancestral land of the U'wa people.
The official line was that after exploratory drilling came up dry
last summer, Occidental geologists concluded it was not
scientifically wise to carry on the project. "This was a high-risk
well from a technical standpoint," said Occidental spokesman Larry
Meriage.
But environmentalists had a different take. "It just shows that
drilling for oil in ancestral territories of indigenous communities
in a tropical rainforest region is an unviable and untenable business
plan," said Michael Brune of the Rainforest Action Network.
According to one activist who has closely followed local
developments, when the U'wa realized Occidental intended to proceed
with the drilling, the tribe prayed for the oil to "move." Maybe the
dry well was simply proof that the universe is the best arbiter in
matters of such consequence.
However you spin it, this was a colossal victory for the U'wa, a
tribe of just 5,000 souls, whose scrappy, grassroots struggle against
Occidental began nearly a decade ago. The U'wa said the oil operation
threatened the basic welfare of civilians who would be caught in the
cross-fire of Colombia's civil war.
The battle over power and resources -- perpetrated by the Colombian
military, leftist FARC guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and drug
traffickers -- has ravaged any semblance of normalcy for Colombians.
People are kidnapped and murdered in what amounts to a perpetual,
surreal chess match. (Staking its own territorial claim in the war,
the Bush Administration is pushing the U.S. Congress to authorize $98
million in military aid to defend another Occidental venture, the
Caño-Limon pipeline, a private enterprise which runs through U'wa
land.)
At great odds and at great risk to their survival, the U'wa have
taken a non-violent tack toward self-determination. When Occidental's
plans in Siriri became clear in the early 90s, U'wa tribal leaders
diligently filed lawsuits, lobbied at corporate headquarters, and
mobilized peaceful blockades at well sites to block Occidental. When
the magnitude of the multinational's political muscle proved
insurmountable, the U'wa took their struggle to sympathetic
progressive groups in United States and around the world where it
galvanized an overwhelming response.
In one of the best-covered protests, demonstrators outside the 2000
Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles denounced Al Gore's
insensitivity to the U'wa people. At the time, Gore was a major
stockholder in Occidental and the U'wa had threatened a mass suicide
if the company went forward with its plan to drill.
Occidental -- which banked $14 billion in sales last year -- probably
didn't lose much sleep over the bad press. After six months of
drilling, the company says it decided it was no longer fiscally
worthwhile to continue to explore this "wildcat well," where the
likelihood of striking oil was one in 12.
We may never know why Occidental pulled its operations out of the
Siriri block, but this rare, non-violent triumph of the few offers a
powerful lesson to the mighty armed masses at war in Colombia (and in
many places throughout the world). No matter how daunting the
opponent, true victory can never be attained through bloodshed.
Gabrielle Banks is Activism Editor for AlterNet.
*****
Bush 'Unsigns' War Crimes Treaty
Jim Lobe, AlterNet
May 6, 2002
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The Bush administration Monday formally renounced its obligations as
a signatory to the 1998 Rome Statute to establish an International
Criminal Court (ICC). Critics say the decision to "unsign" the treaty
will further damage the United States' reputation and isolate it from
its allies.
"Driven by unfounded fears of phantom prosecutions, the United States
has hit a new nadir of isolationism and exceptionalism," said William
Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International's U.S. section
(AIUSA).
A simple three-sentence letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan
formally ended U.S. participation in an agreement to create the
world's first permanent tribunal to prosecute war crimes, genocide,
and other crimes against humanity. In the letter, Undersecretary of
State for Arms Control and International Security, John Bolton,
asserted that Washington "does not intend to become a party to the
(Rome Statute of the ICC)" and that it "has no legal obligations
arising from its signature (to the treaty) on December 31, 2000."
The ICC treaty -- which was signed by President Bill Clinton -- has
been signed by almost 140 countries and ratified by 66 and takes
formal effect July 1.
Right-wing hawks in the Bush administration have been gunning for the
ICC even before the inauguration. The author of the U.N. letter, John
Bolton, was perhaps the most outspoken foe of the Rome Statute in
Washington even before his appointment to the State Department. As
vice president of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute
and a trusted adviser of Sen. Jesse Helms, Bolton argued that the
Court compromises U.S. constitutional guarantees, U.S. sovereignty,
and could be used to pursue politically-motivated prosecutions of
U.S. troops stationed overseas.
He also helped draft a pending bill in Congress, the American
Servicemen's Protection Act (ASPA), which not only bars any U.S.
cooperation with the court, but also bars U.S. military aid to other
countries unless they agree to shield U.S. troops on their territory
from ICC prosecution. It also bans U.S. troops from taking part in UN
peacekeeping operations unless the UN Security Council explicitly
exempts them from possible prosecution.
One version of the bill, which is still being discussed in Congress,
would open the way for the president to use force to free U.S.
prisoners hauled before the ICC, which is to be located at The Hague,
in the Netherlands.
The administration endorsed ASPA last fall on the condition that the
president is given the authority to waive any of its provisions if he
determines it is in the national interest to do so. Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, among other unilateralist members of the
administration, also signed a letter endorsing ASPA before Bush was
inaugurated.
The Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman
reiterated concerns about U.S. sovereignty Monday when explaining the
administration's decision. He complained the ICC and its prosecutors
will not be under the control of the UN Security Council, where
Washington has veto power. He expressed concern that citizens of
countries that are not party to the treaty will still be subject to
the Court's jurisdiction. Grossman also warned of a "chilling effect
on the willingness of States to project power in defense of their
moral and security interests" as the United States did in ousting the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The decision to "unsign" the ICC treaty followed a high-level debate
within the administration between unilateralists -- mainly Vice
President Dick Cheney and Bush appointees at the Pentagon -- and
senior State Department officials who argued that the move would
needlessly alienate European allies.
The hawks, who have strong support among Republican right-wingers in
Congress, wanted to go much further by launching a campaign to
undermine the treaty and the Court, as evident in the ASPA bill. One
of the favored measures includes banning U.S. military aid and other
assistance to countries which ratify the treaty or actively co-
operate with the Court.
But EU leaders warned the United States last week that any deliberate
effort by Washington to destroy the Court could do serious damage to
trans-Atlantic ties -- perhaps a reason why cooler heads seem to have
prevailed.
"What (the president) wanted to do today was to make our intentions
clear and to not take aggressive action or wage war, if you will,
against the ICC or the supporters of the ICC," said Pierre-Richard
Prosper, Washington's ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues,
after the announcement.
Prosper, however, stressed that the Court should not expect
Washington to cooperate with it in any way. The U.S. will not provide
funding, witnesses, or evidence, he said. And Washington will seek
assurances from countries where U.S. troops are deployed that they
will not be handed over to the ICC.
Critics and Washington's own allies have been quick to criticize the
administration's decision, dismissing its concerns as largely
unfounded.
"The European Union is an organization that tends to respect
multilateral agreements and we would very much like to see the United
States joining this effort, and we regret that it is not so," said EU
foreign policy chief Javier Solana after the announcement.
In private, Solana has reportedly been far less restrained in voicing
his unhappiness.
All but one of Washington's EU allies have ratified the Statute
(Greece is expected to complete ratification in the coming months),
and several European leaders, including British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, have personally lobbied top administration officials,
including Bush, against renouncing the treaty.
"Our allies do not share our fears, nor do they succumb to them.
British, Canadian and German troops are fighting alongside the U.S.
in Afghanistan, and yet their governments are leaders in forming the
Court." Amnesty International's Schulz said. Britain, Washington's
most important military ally in Afghanistan, has ratified the treaty
with no apparent concern that it is exposing its troops there to
possible prosecution by the ICC.
Schulz and others also claim safeguards against political or
arbitrary prosecutions are built into the treaty. For example, under
the treaty, the ICC can take only cases that national courts are
clearly unable or unwilling to prosecute.
The decision to unsign may also be largely symbolic. Human rights
advocates say that renouncing Clinton's signature will have no legal
effect, since the treaty gives the Court universal jurisdiction.
"'Unsigning' the treaty will not stop the Court," said Human Rights
Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, who called the move "an empty
gesture" and "a triumph of ideology over any rational assessment of
how to combat the worst human rights crimes."
But that does not mean Washington's withdrawal will not have
consequences. Apart from damage to Washington's ties with its
European allies or to its image abroad, the decision may set a
dangerous precedent in international law.
"This unprecedented action suggests to the world that the signature
of a U.S. president lacks enduring meaning," said Mark Epstein, the
director of the World Federalist Association. "At the very time, the
U.S. seeks signatures and ratifications of anti-terrorist treaties,
an 'unsigning' by the Bush administration will undermine the power of
the international treaty system."
And worse, it may encourage others to follow the U.S. lead.
"Other countries might well use this precedent to justify backing out
of international commitments that are important to the U.S.," noted
Michael Posner, director of the New York-based Lawyers Committee on
Human Rights.
Jim Lobe writes on foreign policy issues for Alternet, Inter-Press
Services, and Foreign Policy In Focus.
*****
A Quiet Revolution In Burma
Geov Parrish, WorkingForChange.com
May 7, 2002
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This week, Nobel Peace Prize winner Daw Aung San Suu Kyi walks
freely. Tuesday marked Aung San Suu Kyi's release after 19 months of
house arrest in the Burmese capital of Rangoon -- the result of
patient, quiet negotiation between the pro- democracy movement she
leads and the brutal military dictatorship that has terrorized Burma
for over a decade.
Aung San Suu Kyi called the day a "new dawn" for Burma, a country
renamed Myanmar by the junta that in 1990 invalidated the free
elections that named her the country's leader with over 80 percent of
the vote. Since then, she has spent much of the intervening time in
prison or under house arrest; other members of her National League
for Democracy, elected to parliament at the same time, remain
imprisoned after 12 long years. Their release is Aung San Suu Kyi's
next focus.
Meanwhile, the junta has slaughtered ethnic minorities throughout
Burma's mountainous outbacks; an international pariah, it has funded
its domestic terror primarily through the lucrative drug trade that,
along with every other facet of the country's wretched economy,
Burma's military takes a substantial cut from.
When charlatans like George W. Bush declaim the United States'
commitment to ensuring freedom and democracy around the world, one
wonders why Burma is not on its, or virtually anyone else's, radar.
Like the Taliban before Sept. 11, Burma's military junta practices
its tyranny in relative isolation. Neighboring countries deal with
(or exploit) its refugees, and western democracies look the other
way, preferring to target evil-doers in countries with more
interesting spoils to divvy up.
Which, in the long run, may be a blessing for Burma. Rather than
being carpeted with Washington's humanitarian bombs, Aung San Suu Kyi
has set a course whereby her country's tormentors are slowly,
inexorably losing their grip on their power. When they are,
eventually, supplanted, the lack of bloody warfare -- whether by
armed resistance groups or high-tech Pentagon missiles -- vastly
improves Burma's chances for building a permanent, positive peace.
The alternative is all too familiar. Country after country in past
decades has liberated itself, only to be plunged into yet another era
of pseudo-democracies or kleptocracies or worse, cycles of bloody
factional wrangling and/or illegitimate U.S. puppets or yet more
juntas and guys with foreign weapons and ancient grudges.
For any Third World country, the effort to establish a civil society
that can support democracy, support a wide spectrum of political
views, and improve its peoples' standards of living is a formidable
challenge. Add on top of that the increasing inability of any country
to chart its own course, rather than becoming an economic captive of
the IMF and big transnationals, and the challenge of leaders like
Aung San Suu Kyi is beyond formidable -- it will literally require an
approach nobody has tried before.
The traditional model for Third World liberation in the Cold War era
was the armed guerilla movement. Those still exist, but the most
remarkable grass-roots victories in recent years have been
nonviolent. And there have been dozens. From the former Soviet bloc a
few years ago to the Venezuelan counter-coup a couple of weeks ago,
the preferred method for standing up to forces of Third World
repression has become massive peaceful resistance.
To that approach, Aung San Suu Kyi is adding two more layers -- a
slow, careful cultivation of a resolution, and direct engagement (ala
South Africa) with one's oppressors. The process does not make
headlines, even when there are breakthroughs like her release from
house arrest and newfound ability to move about freely. But the hope
is that over time, fewer people die and more people are free -- and
made free not by the strings-attached intervention of a foreign
power, but by their own hands and hearts. That's worth headlines.
*****
John Adams, Mensch of New England
Marty Jezer, AlterNet
May 7, 2002
David McCullough begins his biography of John Adams with the future
President riding on horseback on a cold, snowy winter night in 1776
("the ground ... frozen solid to a depth of two feet"). Adams is en
route from his farm in Braintree, Massachusetts to consult with
George Washington, the commander of American forces resisting the
British in Boston. From there he will ride to Philadelphia to take a
seat as a representative from Massachusetts to the Second Continental
Congress.
As a student of American history I never thought much of Adams, but
McCullough grabbed my interest immediately. Any rural New Englander
who has driven a wooded back road in the heart of a real New England
winter knows the physical feeling of chill and isolation that John
Adams was experiencing. But what we cannot experience is the heat of
excitement that Adams was feeling. We, in our cars with the heaters
going, have a country with a national identity and a political
history of more than 200 years. Adams was off to Philadelphia to help
create that country and invent its political system.
In the pantheon of founding fathers, John Adams is the least
appreciated. Even his second cousin, Sam Adams, gets better press.
Not only for the beer that celebrates his name but because he was an
activist (the Abbie Hoffman of the American Revolution), a political
organizer who rallied the people of Boston on behalf of American
independence.
John Adams, by contrast, was a stolid small-town farmer and lawyer;
bookish, talkative, opinionated, definitely uncool (i.e., rude in
manner) and with no dash of political charisma. He's the forgotten
President between Washington and Jefferson but, as McCullough shows,
his accomplishments were extraordinary.
It was Adams who conceptualized the revolutionary idea of "no
taxation without representation." His patriotism was steeped in
justice, even when justice went against narrow jingoism and political
passion. After the Boston Massacre, in which British troops fired
upon a patriotic gathering, Adams rose to defend the British soldiers
in a Boston court because he believed that even they deserved the due
process of a fair trial.
Within the Continental Congress, Adams was the most effective
advocate of American independence. In 1777 he began the first of his
European diplomatic missions, securing recognition and financial aid
from Holland that was decisive to the success of American
independence. Back home, he drafted the Massachusetts Constitution,
which became a model for the federal constitution and the
constitution of other states. As President, he defied popular
passions and kept the country out of a war with France, thus making
it possible, McCullough argues, for his successor, President
Jefferson, to make the Louisiana Purchase.
Proof of Adams' eminence was his marriage to Abigail Adams. Theirs is
a great love story, passionate and egalitarian. "I must go to you or
you must come to me. I cannot live without you," he wrote her during
one of their long separations when he was representing revolutionary
America in France.
Separated for years because of his political duties, she ran their
farm, and through their extensive correspondence, was his political
confidante and chief advisor. "Remember the ladies," she
counseled, "....If particular care and attention is not paid to the
ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold
ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or
representation." Abigail was a little premature in her prediction,
but the feminist revolution ultimately happened.
Together and separately, John and Abigail maintained a stormy
relationship with Thomas Jefferson. The contrast between them is
telling. Jefferson's brilliance is acknowledged. But he was also
somewhat of a fop, a compulsive shopper and spender, a conniver, a
man who hated personal conflict and so secretly encouraged others to
make partisan attacks on his political opponents. Under Jefferson's
prodding, Adams was viciously slandered as mentally unstable, a
madman, a monarchist and worse.
A man of intellectual abstractions, Jefferson described the bloodshed
in revolution as "natural manure" that refreshed "the tree of
liberty." He, however, stayed away from the barricades, preferring
his estate in Monticello where, surrounded by slaves, he celebrated
the rights of man and proclaimed all men as equals. What a contrast
to Adams who, nurtured by the actual experience of small-town New
England, distrusted mob rule and insisted, in life as in rhetoric, in
the dignity and equality of all men and women.
The issue of slavery and what it does to human character is a subtext
of McCullough's book. Adams' hands, McCullough says, were those of a
farmer who cut his own wood and pitched his own hay. Abigail and John
paid their help and enjoyed working with them. They lived simply,
within their means. They abhorred slavery; believing it demeaning to
both slaves and master. When Abigail left to join John in Europe, she
placed their property in the care of a free black couple who lived in
their house and kept the farm going. When the Braintree public school
refused to admit a black child who Abigail had taught to read and
write, she, with John's support, made a stink and the school was
integrated.
John and Abigail were keen observers of human nature. What most
counted most for them was "character" -- what people did with their
lives, the ethics and morality of their actions. There's no
quarreling with the idea of Jefferson's genius; but it's Adams' life,
the personal and political, that comes off as luminous. John Adams
emerges resurrected as one our country's great visionaries, a brave
and incorruptible public servant, as well as a mensch -- which, in
our melting-pot cross-cultural world, I use to describe a
quintessential New Englander.
The world needs leaders of character like John and Abigail Adams. The
world needs incorruptible men and women, learned and experienced, who
think for themselves and say what they think, whose ambition for
public service is not motivated by greed and power.
Marty Jezer's books include Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel and The
Dark Ages, Life in the U.S. 1945-1960. He writes from Brattleboro,
Vermont and welcomes comments at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so
long as I'm the dictator."
-GW Bush during a photo-op with Congressional leaders on
12/18/2000.
As broadcast on CNN and available in transcript on their website
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0012/18/nd.01.html
Steve Wingate, Webmaster
ANOMALOUS IMAGES AND UFO FILES
http://www.anomalous-images.com
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