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Beyond the Veil of Israel’s Publicity Campaign

February 14, 2009

By Christina Jung

6wounded_in_gaza_dadson_afp.jpg
‘Israel advises civilians to flee, but where can they go?’ (AFP/file)

uruknet.info, Feb 13, 2009

Israel’s offensive against Gaza has been just as much about a war of words as it has been about a war of military assault. With an aggressive public relations campaign, Israel has gone to considerable lengths no matter what the cost to create a falsified image of victimization by convincing the world of its right to protect its citizens from the daily terror of Hamas rockets.As representatives of world public opinion, we must not complacently accept Israel’s claims at face value in order to turn a blind eye to the untold suffering of the Gazans and the complicity of major powers in this unbridled carnage. We have an obligation to engage in the truth and to urge our leaders to act in accordance with reality.

A truce was forged on Jan. 18, but without further action from world leaders, a reversion to another bloody conflict appears increasingly likely. Decisive action, however, requires a fundamental acknowledgement that Israeli rhetoric often has little bearing on reality.

One of the most common justifications for military action in Gaza concerns Israel’s right to defend its people. Implicit in this assertion is the notion that Israel is under grave threat from Hamas and that Israeli citizens must be protected from this threat.

Simple numbers tell us otherwise: According to B’Tselem, an Israeli information center for human rights in the occupied territories, 388 Palestinians were killed by IDF in Gaza in the seven months before the July 2008 ceasefire, as opposed to 18 Israelis killed by Palestinians (over the course of several years). This disparity is magnified when the death toll includes fatalities from 2000 onwards, including the most recent conflict. While Israel may tout the dangers of Hamas, it is responsible for a disproportionate number of deaths arising from conflicts in Gaza, revealing its duplicity.

By this logic, we can only expect Hamas to assert its right to use violence to demand better conditions for its people who have been stripped of their land, their basic rights and their means of self-sustenance by Israel.

The point here is that, within the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict, Israel claiming its right to defense is meaningless and self-defeating, only paving the way for perpetual conflict. Appealing to a “right to defend” as justification for slaughter would bestow Hamas just as much right to exact retribution for more than 1,300 Palestinian deaths resulting from the 23-day war.

Another common claim made by the Israeli propaganda machine holds that Hamas is a terrorist organization that must be deterred. Loosely defined, terrorism refers to the targeting of civilians for political gain. Again, Israel applies a double standard in accusing Hamas of something of which it is itself guilty.

The reckless killing of civilians during Israel’s recent offensive and beyond is just one aspect of Israel’s hypocrisy. The blockade on Gaza a collective punishment on the Gazans for being so audacious as to exercise their democratic rights in voting for Hamas is evidence enough of Israel’s conviction that violence and repression is terror, only when it is directed against its own people.

Owing to the Bush administration’s war on terror, we live in a world where evoking terrorism offers a free pass that justifies what should be unjustifiable acts of brutality.

The most egregious aspect of Israel’s deception, however, is the assertion that the IDF does not target innocents or civilians.

With the Gaza-based Palestinian Center For Human Rights estimating civilian deaths at around 70 percent of total fatalities, and with growing calls for an investigation of Israel’s human rights abuses, it is difficult to give credence to Israel’s claim that the IDF exercises utmost caution when firing targets, especially in light of Israel’s highly advanced targeting capacity.

Whether deliberate or due to overt carelessness, the IDF’s killing of Gazan civilians increasingly seems like a sadistic attempt at cajoling the population into squeezing the Hamas leadership.

Israel advises civilians to flee, but where can they go? Trapped in an open-air prison, the Gazans, already refugees of national dispossession, have nowhere to escape to, either inside or outside of Gaza. The Israeli shelling of U.N. buildings filled with displaced civilians is but one reminder of the constant danger faced by Gazan civilians during war, no matter where they go.

As representatives of world public opinion, we must see beyond the veil of Israel’s publicity campaign and recognize its military action as a vain attempt to further tear down the spirit of Gazans from rightly demanding what is theirs.

– Christina Jung is an Editor, who is based in Seoul, Korea. This article was contributed to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact the author at: jung.christina@gmail.com

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Gaza: Death’s Laboratory

February 14, 2009

Conn Hallinan | Foreign Policy In Focus, February 11, 2009

Erik Fosse, a Norwegian cardiologist, worked in Gaza hospitals during the recent war.”It was as if they had stepped on a mine,” he says of certain Palestinian patients he treated. “But there was no shrapnel in the wound. Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before.”

Dr. Fosse was describing the effects of a U.S. “focused lethality” weapon that minimizes explosive damage to structures while inflicting catastrophic wounds on its victims. But where did the Israelis get this weapon? And was their widespread use in the attack on Gaza a field test for a new generation of explosives?

DIMEd to Death

The specific weapon is called a Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME). In 2000, the U.S. Air Force teamed up with the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The weapon wraps high explosives with a tungsten alloy and other metals like cobalt, nickel, or iron in a carbon fiber/epoxy container. When the bomb explodes the container evaporates, and the tungsten turns into micro-shrapnel that is extremely lethal within a 13–foot radius. Tungsten is inert, so it doesn’t react chemically with the explosive. While a non-inert metal like aluminum would increase the blast, tungsten actually contains the explosion to a limited area.

Within the weapon’s range, however, it’s inordinately lethal. According to Norwegian doctor Mad Gilbert, the blast results in multiple amputations and “very severe fractures. The muscles are sort of split from the bones, hanging loose, and you also have quite severe burns.” Most of those who survive the initial blast quickly succumb to septicemia and organ collapse. “Initially, everything seems in order…but it turns out on operation that dozens of miniature particles can be found in all their organs,” says Dr. Jam Brommundt, a German doctor working in Kham Younis, a city in southern Gaza. “It seems to be some sort of explosive or shell that disperses tiny particles…that penetrate all organs, these miniature injuries, you are not able to attack them surgically.” According to Brommundt, the particles cause multiple organ failures.

If by some miracle victims resist those conditions, they are almost certain to develop rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS), a particularly deadly cancer that deeply embeds itself into tissue and is almost impossible to treat. A 2005 U.S. Department of health study found that tungsten stimulated RMS cancers even in very low doses. All of the 92 rats tested developed the cancer.

While DIMEs were originally designed to avoid “collateral” damage generated by standard high-explosive bombs, the weapon’s lethality and profound long-term toxicity hardly seem like an improvement.

It appears DIME weapons may have been used in the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, but not enough to alarm medical workers. But in Gaza, the ordinance was widely used. Al-Shifta alone has seen 100 to 150 victims of these attacks.

Gaza as Test

Dr. Gilbert told the Oslo Gardermoen, “there is a strong suspicion…that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons.”

DIME is a U.S. invention. Did the Israelis get the weapons from the United States, or did they design similar ones themselves? Given the close relations between the two militaries, it isn’t unlikely that the U.S. Air Force supplied the weapons or, at least, the specifications on how to construct them. And since the United States has yet to use the device in a war, it would certainly benefit from seeing how these new “focused lethality” weapons worked under battlefield conditions.

Marc Garlasco, Human Rights Watch’s senior military advisor, says “it remains to be seen how Israel has acquired the technology, whether they purchased weapons from the United States under some agreement, or if they in fact licensed or developed their own type of munitions.”

DIME weapons aren’t banned under the Geneva Conventions because they have never been officially tested. However, any weapon capable of inflicting such horrendous damage is normally barred from use, particularly in one of the most densely populated regions in the world.

For one thing, no one knows how long the tungsten remains in the environment or how it could affect people who return to homes attacked by a DIME. University of Arizona cancer researcher Dr. Mark Witten, who investigates links between tungsten and leukemia, says that in his opinion “there needs to be much more research on the health effects of tungsten before the military increases its usage.”

Beyond DIMEs

DIMEs weren’t the only controversial weapons used in Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) also made generous use of white phosphorus, a chemical that burns with intense heat and inflicts terrible burns on victims. In its vapor form it also damages breathing passages. International law prohibits the weapon’s use near population areas and requires that “all reasonable precautions” be taken to avoid civilians.

Israel initially denied using the chemical. “The IDF acts only in accordance with what is permitted by international law and does not use white phosphorus,” said Israel’s Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi on January 13.

But eyewitness accounts in Gaza and Israel soon forced the IDF to admit that they were, indeed, using the substance. On January 20, the IDF confessed to using phosphorus artillery shells as smokescreens, as well as 200 U.S.-made M825A1 phosphorus mortar shells on “Hamas fighters and rocket launching crews in northern Gaza.”

Three of those shells hit the UN Works and Relief Agency compound on January 15, igniting a fire that destroyed hundreds of tons of humanitarian supplies. A phosphorus shell also hit Al-Quds hospital in Gaza City. The Israelis say there were Hamas fighters near the two targets, a charge that witnesses adamantly deny.

Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International said: “Such extensive use of this weapon in Gaza’s densely-populated residential neighborhoods…and its toll on civilians is a war crime.”

Israel is also accused of using depleted uranium ammunition (DUA), which a UN sub-commission in 2002 found in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the International Convention Against Torture, the Conventional Weapons Convention, and the Hague Conventions against the use of poison weapons.

DUA isn’t highly radioactive, but after exploding, some of it turns into a gas that can easily be inhaled. The dense shrapnel that survives also tends to bury itself deeply, leaching low-level radioactivity into water-tables.

War Crimes?

Other human-rights groups, including B’Tselem, Gisha, and Physicians for Human Rights, charge that the IDF intentionally targeted medical personal, killing over a dozen, including paramedics and ambulance drivers.

The International Federation for Human Rights called on the UN Security Council to refer Israel to the International Criminal Court for possible war crimes.

Although the Israelis dismiss the war-crimes charges, the fact that the Israeli cabinet held a special meeting on January 25 to discuss the issue suggests they’re concerned about being charged with “disproportionate” use of force. The Geneva Conventions require belligerents to at “all times” distinguish between combatants and civilians and to avoid “disproportionate force” in seeking military gains.

Hamas’s use of unguided missiles fired at Israel would also be a war crime under the Conventions.

“The one-sidedness of casualty figures is one measure of disproportion,” says Richard Falk, the UN’s human rights envoy for the occupied territories. A total of 14 Israelis have been killed in the fighting, three of them civilians killed by rockets, 11 of them soldiers, four of the latter by “friendly fire.” Some 50 IDF soldiers were also wounded.

In contrast, 1,330 Palestinians have died and 5,450 were injured, the overwhelming bulk of them civilians.

“This kind of fighting constitutes a blatant violation of the laws of warfare, which we ask to be investigated by the Commission of War Crimes,” a coalition of Israeli human rights groups and Amnesty International said in a joint statement. “The responsibility of the state of Israel is beyond doubt.”

Enter the Hague?

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann would coordinate the defense of any soldier or commander charged with a war crime. In any case, the United States would veto any effort by the UN Security Council to refer Israelis to the International Court at The Hague.

But, as the Financial Times points out, “all countries have an obligation to search out those accused of ‘grave’ breaches of the rules of war and to put them on trial or extradite them to a country that will.”

That was the basis under which the British police arrested Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998.

“We’re in a seismic shift in international law,” Amnesty International legal advisor Christopher Hall told the Financial Times, who says Israel’s foreign ministry is already examining the risk to Israelis who travel abroad.

“It’s like walking across the street against a red light,” he says. “The risk may be low, but you’re going to think twice before committing a crime or traveling if you have committed one.”

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.

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The Israeli destruction of Gaza and international silence

February 14, 2009

Published on Friday, February 13, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

by Ann Wright

I travelled to Gaza last week with Medea Benjamin and Tighe Berry of Codepink: Women for Peace. We were allowed by the Egyptian government to enter Gaza for only 48 hours.I knew that 1026 of the 1330 who were killed in the Israeli attacks on Gaza were civilians. Of the 1026 civilians, 282 were children, 111 women, 168 civilian policemen and 501 civilian men died in Israeli bombings. 274 have been classified as combatant deaths.

I knew that the estimates for the cost of reconstruction to the destruction done by Israeli bombing is over $2 billion. After seeing the destruction in Gaza City, I thought I would be prepared for North Gaza. I had heard the damage done by F-16s and tanks was substantial, but I was stunned by the large number of apartment buildings and industries that had been blown up and destroyed by the Israeli military in the northern Gaza border region with Israel.

The Israeli military destroyed virtually everything in a corridor along the border in Jabalia and forced the evacuation of Gazans back into the center part of Gaza, a tiny area 45 kilometers long and 8 kilometers wide. Homes and factories were leveled and tens of thousands of citizens were left homeless. We saw five tent camps that had been set up by relief organizations. Living conditions are spartan.

Nahed, a project manager for Palestine Medical Relief Society, guided us through the wreckage of North Gaza. We visited one of the four primary health care facilities PMRS operates, with an overworked staff trying to cope with the medical and emotional challenges of those who have returned to their bombed out homes with family members dead or injured.

37 Members of One Family Killed as Israeli Military Orders 150 into a Building then Bombs it

In the Al Zaiton area in northern Gaza, we met with the remaining members of the al Samouni family. The large extended family lived in many houses and some family members operated a poultry farm in the area. After the Israeli army invaded, Army personnel ordered 150 members of the family into one large home and then bombed the home as well as all the numerous homes and buildings of the family. 37 members of the family were killed and many were injured. The Israeli government said the military had made a mistake.
The al Samouni family set up several large tents for the numerous visitors who come by the area to pay respects. One tent had eight women inside. All had family members killed and wounded in the attacks. We spoke with Ibtessana al Samouni who had two children killed and her husband and daughter seriously injured and are being treated in Saudi Arabia. One of her sons was also injured and is in a military hospital in Cairo. She and her remaining 5 children are living with other relatives in Gaza City. Ibtessana had a glazed stare and kept repeating that no one in her family had done anything to the Israelis. We saw in her eyes the disbelief that some of her children were dead and that she would not see her husband and other children for months. The emotional health of the al Samouni extended family considering the large number of deaths and injuries in the family seemed precarious.

The family area, a section of land about ½ mile by ½ mile was completely bombed. It looked like a huge tornado or hurricane had wiped out the area. The poultry farm was totally destroyed and bulldozers were pushing the rotting chicken carcasses into a pit while we were there.

Life Without Your Home

Dressed in her black abaya, Izbet Abed Rabu told us she and her family of five children and her husband now live in a tent provided by the United Nations after her home was destroyed in Jabalia, northern Gaza. She showed us her two story concrete block home that was flattened into rubble. Her eyes teared over as she said she was lucky. No one in her family had been killed in the Israeli naval shelling and rocket attacks, but her neighbors had been hit hard. Two neighboring families each had three family members killed.

Izbet pointed to the white tent provided by the United Nations and said that after two weeks they still have only blankets, but no cots or any “furniture” inside the tents. With the night desert temperatures falling into the low 40 degrees, she said her four children are cold. The children are not yet in school.

Industries Systematically Destroyed

There are few industries left in northern Gaza and the Israeli military destroyed 10-15 of those remaining industries including two cement companies, a dairy, gas station, an aluminum recycling company and a health products company. The production capacity of Gaza has been severely impacted by the Israeli warplanes.

Agricultural Lands Purposefully Destroyed

We walked in the agricultural lands mangled by Israeli tanks that had been positioned in the fields near the medical clinic. The fruit trees in one field had been completed knocked down and bulldozed over. Olive orchards throughout Gaza were systematically destroyed by Israeli tanks.

Schools Destroyed

Close by was Khalil al Noubany High School that had been used by Israeli soldiers. To secure the building they blew holes in it setting part of it on fire. The remaining part was occupied and used to fire on any one remaining in the area. The Israeli soldiers trashed the school. They left h military trash everywhere. School books and supplies had been thrown on the floor and walked on in virtually all the classrooms. It was quite obvious that they soldier had intentionally damaged the insides of the classrooms and purposefully destroyed books and educational materials. The headmaster of the school, who arrived as we were looking at the school, said that the school had served 550 girl students in the morning and 530 male students in the afternoon. She told us that the school is so severely damaged that it cannot reopen this year and students are having to travel to the few remaining schools that are open in Gaza.

Later in the day while he was serving double duty as a Gaza government official at the Rafah, Gaza border crossing, Mr. Ahmed Ayes Alnajjar of the Ministry of Education told us that 7 schools in Gaza were totally destroyed and 135 schools were substantially damaged.

The Prison Called Gaza

We left northern Gaza and headed for the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. We had to be across the border into Egypt by 5pm as the Egyptian government was closing the border. If we did not exit Gaza by 5pm we too would be imprisoned in Gaza until the border crossing reopened-which might be months. So after only 48 hours in Gaza, we were forced to depart.

On the way to the Gaza border, we stopped to see a few of the 1500 tunnels that Palestinians have dug since the borders of Gaza were closed and the siege began. Palestinians have been locked into the prison called Gaza for the past sixteen months.

Bombing Tunnels With a Blind Eye

The tunnel area is in plain sight next to the Egyptian border. It is a surreal scene. Buildings behind the tunnel area have been bombed and are destroyed. Trucks and cars are parked under the remaining roofs of a large bombed out fresh air market– ready to move goods from the tunnel area.

Mounds of fresh sand are everywhere indicating that tunnels are still being dug. Generators hum providing air into the tunnels and powering the cables that pull loads of every imaginable type of goods from vegetables, canned goods, bags of rice and sugar, merchandise for hardware stores, etc. through the tunnels to the surface on the Gaza side.

Every tunnel is surrounded by barriers made of light fencing covered with large plastic bags. Young men are busy hauling up goods that have been brought through the tunnel from Egypt.

The tunnel “managers” we spoke with were surprisingly open in allowing us to come into the areas and talk with them. They said that about 900 tunnels have been destroyed or partially damaged by Israeli bombs. Most are being rebuilt, despite the almost daily bombing by Israeli war planes. The tunnels we saw had openings about 4 feet across. The entry holes were from 50 to 65 feet deep and the tunnels were 500 to 1,000 feet long. One tunnel opening was built with concrete blocks and another opening was built with wood.

The tunnel manager said that to rebuild a tunnel that has been blown up takes about half the time to reopen and digging a new tunnel. The tunnel areas are little cities with electricity, water, food and coffee at each tunnel entrance.

Tunnel digging is about the only employment for young men in Gaza. They earn 100 shekels ($25) per day for digging in the tunnels. One manager said many tunnel diggers had died when the reinforced sand tunnels collapsed during construction. But young men continue to risk the dangers as tunnel construction is one of the few jobs available to them.

While we did not see the other end of the tunnel operation on the Rafah, Egypt side of the border, it is inconceivable that Egyptian authorities do not know where the tunnel openings are. All they have to do is to follow the parade of trucks loaded with merchandise that come into Rafah, Egypt.

After coming through the border we stopped in Rafah, Egypt to see what the smuggling town was like. The police presence was tremendous. We had barely gotten our bags out of the taxi when a policeman was at our side asking why we were in Rafah. We replied that we were hungry and wanted to get something to eat. We stopped at a small falafel stand and for the next hour were watched by police. As one of us would go to explore the main street, police would follow in the distance. They definitely did not want us straying off the main road and back into the houses and businesses where the tunnel entrances are.

It is remarkable that all the tunnels haven’t been bombed. With the sophisticated satellite views, cameras from drones, tethered radar and surveillance balloon and the $32 million tunnel detection equipment provided by the U.S. government, the Israeli, Egyptian and United States’ governments know exactly where the tunnels are.

But, closing the border provides Egyptian and Israeli businessmen a tremendous opportunity to sell goods to people in Gaza at very high prices. No doubt, Egyptian and Israeli government officials are paid to turn a blind eye to the tunneling and “smuggling.” Determining who profits economically from the occupations and sieges is fascinating. A new Israeli website http://www.whoprofits.org tracks who profits financially from the occupation and no doubt profits from the blockade and will profit from the rebuilding of destroyed Gaza.

Israeli bombing of tunnels is, of course, only on the Gaza side. No one is bombing the entrances to the tunnels on the Egyptian side of the border.

The tunnel economy means that for the ordinary citizens of Gaza, where there is a 70% unemployment rate and where over 900,000 of the 1.5 million in Gaza are on United Nations rations, closing the border and forcing commerce through the tunnels they pay exorbitant fees for every item brought through the tunnels.

SILENCE from the International Community

The sights we saw in Gaza were tragic-a goliath Israel pounding a small Gaza David with international silence and complicity in the 22 day military attack on Gaza and on the 16 month siege of Gaza. 1330 Palestinians have died, 5400 have been wounded and hundreds of thousands with memories of the bombings and invasion and occupation. Over $2 billion will be spent on rebuilding destroyed homes, businesses and factories. And there is SILENCE!!

Smashing of Gaza is a War Crime

I deplore the use of rockets against Israeli towns by Hamas and other groups in Gaza which have killed approximately 20 Israelis.

But, as a military officer who taught the Geneva Conventions and the Law of Land Warfare in US military schools, I fully believe the disproportionate response by the Israeli government and military in the smashing of Gaza is a violation of international law and a war crime.

Ann Wright is a 29 year US Army/Army Reserves veteran who retired as a Colonel and a former US diplomat who resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq.  She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia.  In December, 2001 she was on the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.  She is the co-author of the book “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.”  (www.voicesofconscience.com)

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‘US drone’ in fatal Pakistan raid

February 14, 2009
Al Jazeera, Feb 14, 2009

Pakistan has expressed its anger over a
series of US drone attacks [Reuters]

At least 25 people have been killed in a missile attack by an unmanned US drone in a tribal district of Pakistan, Pakistani officials have told Al Jazeera.

The raid destroyed a house in the northwestern town of Ladha, a base for Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani Taliban leader accused of plotting the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister of Pakistan, an official said.

“Around 50 to 60 mujahideen [fighters] have been living [at the site of the attack] for about a week. All of them were Uzbeks,” a Taliban official said.

Pakistan intelligence agents are investigating the attack on the house in the South Waziristan region on Saturday.

Taliban fighters sealed off the site of the attack, preventing people from getting access, residents said.

Pakistan angered

The US has launched more than 30 missile attacks on Pakistani soil in recent months, ostensibly against al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked fighters.

More than 220 people were killed in the raids, according to a tally of reports from Pakistani intelligence agents, district government officials and residents.

Pakistan has been angered by the attacks, saying that innocent civilians have been killed and that Pakistani sovereignty has been infringed.

Barack Obama, the US president, said this week that he has no doubt that Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked fighters are based in Pakistan’s tribal region and the US wants the support of Islamabad in tackling the armed groups.

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Tamil conflict ‘killing 40 civilians a day’

February 14, 2009

Morning Star Online

(Friday 13 February 2009)

A SRI Lankan health official said on Friday that fighting between government troops and Tamil Tiger rebels was killing around 40 civilians a day.

Aid groups have estimated that more than 200,000 civilians are trapped in a tiny strip of land still controlled by the rebels along the north-eastern coast.

Mullaittivu district health officer Dr Thurairajah Varatharajah said that artillery barrages were routinely hitting civilian areas in the region.

He added that the makeshift hospital that he was running in a school in the coastal town of Putumattalan was overwhelmed by casualties.

Dr Varatharajah said that the facility was badly understaffed since most of the doctors and nurses had either fled the war zone or had stopped coming to work and that the hospital was running out of some essential antibiotics and anaesthetics.

He added that civilians in the area had been suffering heavy casualties for three to four weeks as the military pushed the Tamil Tigers into the area, estimating that more than 100 wounded civilians were coming to the hospital every day, most of them with injuries from artillery shells.

Patients and medical staff were forced to evacuate the hospital in the town of Puthukkudiyiruppu last week after it came under heavy shelling for days. The staff, with the help of the Red Cross, set up a makeshift hospital in Putumattalan.

Dr Varatharajah claimed that the area around the hospital had been shelled on Monday, killing 22 people.

The artillery fire appeared to have stopped on Friday after the government declared a 7.5-mile coastal strip that included the hospital a “safe zone” and pledged not to attack it, he said.

The Tamil Tigers have been fighting since 1983 for an independent state for minority Tamils. More than 70,000 people have been killed.

The Sri Lankan government rejected Britain’s decision to appoint a special envoy to address the deteriorating humanitarian situation and help resolve the country’s ethnic conflict.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown named former defence secretary Des Browne as his special envoy for Sri Lanka on Thursday, but President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his cabinet called the unilateral decision by Sri Lanka’s former colonial ruler “unhelpful,” noting that London had failed to consult with Colombo before announcing Mr Browne’s appointment.

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UN pays tribute to Fidel Castro and Julius Nyerere

February 13, 2009

Granma, February 11, 2009

NICARAGUAN Miguel D’Escoto, president of the UN General Assembly, today paid tribute to the late Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, and to leader of the Cuban Revolution Fidel Castro.

On the World Day of Social Justice, D’Escoto stated that one great hero with respect to social justice was Julius Nyerere who, he said, helped the whole of Africa to free itself from colonialism and establish a social and economic system in which human beings are at the center of any economic venture.

The Nicaraguan priest said that with respect to Fidel Castro, he is more than a hero, and is the closest thing we have to a saint in our anguished world, according to a report by the Prensa Latina agency.

During an event organized by the UN Social and Economic Council’s Commission for Social Development, D’Escoto emphasized that he is indebted to Fidel Castro, as is all of humanity, as a man who has devoted his life to tirelessly practicing and promoting solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world.

D’Escoto, who was Nicaragua’s foreign minister during the first Sandinista administration, also referred to the emergence of new leaders such as Bolivian President Evo Morales.

In overcoming all manner of difficulties, Morales is guiding the indigenous peoples of Bolivia and the rest of the world towards the central role that rightly corresponds to them in our societies, he underlined.

D’Escoto maintained that it is impossible to achieve development, integration and social justice without peace, justice and respect for all human rights.

Translated by Granma International

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Darwin’s revolutionary ideas

February 13, 2009

February 12 is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Phil Gasper explains the significance of his ideas, and why they still spark controversy today.

Socialist Worker, February 12, 2009 | Issue 690

Charles DarwinCharles Darwin

CHARLES DARWIN’S ideas revolutionized biology in the 19th century, but they also had a profound and lasting impact far outside narrow scientific circles, challenging religious dogmas and affecting almost every field of human knowledge.

Yet Darwin himself was a reluctant revolutionary–a man who shunned the limelight, hated controversy and became physically ill worrying that his ideas would shock Victorian England.

Darwin was a child of the rising liberal bourgeoisie. His paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a prominent doctor and freethinker who wrote a speculative work on biological evolution in the 1790s. His mother was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the famous pottery.

Darwin grew up in Shropshire in England, and later attended Edinburgh University to study medicine, but soon discovered he did not have the stomach for it. He transferred to Cambridge with ideas of becoming a country parson, but instead, the botanist John Stevens Henslow ignited his interest in science.

In 1831, Henslow arranged for Darwin to join a surveying voyage on HMS Beagle as personal companion to the ship’s captain, Robert FitzRoy. The voyage lasted nearly five years and was the turning point in Darwin’s life.

What else to read

A collection of Darwin’s writings can be found in The Darwin Reader, edited by Mark Ridley. Ridley is also the author of How to Read Darwin, a short and clear introduction. Darwin’s complete works are now available online.

The best biography of Darwin is Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. Desmond and Moore have also just published Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution.

For those interested in the debate around creationism and “intelligent design,” Philip Kitcher’s Living With Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith is a good introduction. The debate is put into a broader historical context in Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism From Antiquity to the Present by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York.

Finally, Ever Since Darwin, a collection of essays by the late Stephen Jay Gould, explores the continuing relevance of Darwin’s ideas and criticizes their misappropriation by biological determinists of various stripes.

The Beagle took him to South America, the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and southern Africa, before returning to England in 1836. Darwin made detailed geological, botanical and zoological observations and accumulated a large collection of specimens. Back in England, he gained respect for his work as a geologist, including proposing a novel theory for the origin of coral reefs.

Much more radically, however, by the time of his return, Darwin had come to privately reject orthodox accounts of the origin of biological species, which viewed them as having been created in pretty much their present forms.

His observations of the similarities between living and fossil mammals, and between the distinct species of plants and animals on the Galapagos Islands and their counterparts on the South American mainland, persuaded him that biological evolution had taken place, even though he was not yet sure how.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

WITHIN A few years, Darwin had elaborated his entire theory of evolution. The crucial idea is that evolution is the result of natural selection–organisms that are better adapted to their environments are more likely to survive and reproduce, thus passing on their advantageous traits to the next generation.

Although Darwin formulated his theory as early as 1837, it was to be more than 20 years before he finally made it public.

The main reason for this delay was his nervousness about the materialist implications of his views and the challenge they posed to the dogmas of orthodox religion, regarded by the upper classes as a bulwark of the status quo during a period of social unrest in early Victorian Britain.

In Darwin’s account, evolutionary change was largely the result of the random, ultimately purposeless process of natural selection. This suggests a thoroughly materialist picture of the world that banishes vital forces and preordained purposes from nature, and which implies that mental phenomena emerge when matter is arranged in complex ways.

Such ideas undermine not only traditional religious views of divine creation, but also more sophisticated versions of theism, which claim that God works through evolution.

“Love of the deity effect of organization [of the brain], oh you materialist!” he wrote privately in the late 1830s. “Why is thought being a secretion of brain more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves.”

Darwin confided to his friends that going public with his ideas about evolution would be like “confessing to a murder.” In 1839, Darwin married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, who, unlike him, was devoutly religious, adding a personal dimension to this conflict.

Darwin and his wife moved to Down House in Kent, and from this period onwards, he was in poor health, probably caused at least in part by his intellectual anxieties. But Darwin’s family inheritance allowed him to devote his time to science and to accumulate a mass of evidence supporting his views.

Darwin finally went public with his ideas in 1858, after learning that a young Welsh naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had reached similar conclusions. The following year Darwin published his masterpiece, The Origin of Species, which makes a methodical case for evolution.

Darwin argues that natural selection is a real process, analogous to the way in which plant and animal breeders can dramatically alter the characteristics of a group of organisms over a series of generations by permitting only those with desired traits to reproduce.

In the natural world, a population of organisms can become better and better adapted to its environment over a period of time, and the characteristics of its members at the end of the process may be very different from those of their ancestors.

Darwin went on to argue that natural selection is capable of giving rise not simply to new varieties, but to new species, and that it can in principle account for all the characteristics of existing organisms, even “organs of extreme perfection” like the human eye.

In the Origin, Darwin presents an enormous quantity of evidence that natural selection is not only a possible explanation of the origin of species, but that it is the only reasonable one. The data ranges from the pattern of development revealed in the fossil record, to facts about the geographical distribution of organisms, to anatomical and developmental similarities between otherwise very different living things.

Darwin demonstrates that his view can provide satisfying explanations of such matters, while from the point of view of those who believe in divine creation, they remain conundrums.

For instance, the forelimbs of humans, cats, bats, porpoises and horses perform very different functions and have very different forms, but remarkably share the same underlying bone structure. This only makes sense if all these creatures had a common ancestor in the distant past.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

EVEN THOUGH Darwin avoided the issue of human evolution in the Origin (a subject he was later to discuss at length in The Descent of Man), its publication inevitably sparked intense controversy. The eminent geologist Adam Sedgwick condemned Darwin’s views for their “unflinching materialism,” and figures such as Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, attacked evolution from a religious perspective.

But it was precisely Darwin’s materialism that explains the enthusiasm of his contemporaries Karl Marx and Frederick Engels for his new theory. Less than a month after the Origin was published, Engels remarked in a letter to Marx: “Darwin, whom I am just now reading, is splendid.”

Marx himself read the Origin the following year and commented to Engels, “Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our own view.” Several years later, Marx sent Darwin an inscribed copy of Das Kapital (although the story that he wanted to dedicate the second edition of this work to Darwin is a myth).

Although Darwin didn’t engage in the public debate around The Origin, several younger scientists, including Joseph Hooker and Thomas Huxley, came to his defense. Within less than a decade, the bulk of the scientific establishment had been won over to evolution, although it took longer for natural selection to be accepted as the central mechanism.

Darwin’s ideas were initially viewed as a challenge to the existing social order, but attempts were soon being made to use them in its support. The political theorist Herbert Spencer formulated the doctrine of Social Darwinism, defending laissez-faire economics on the grounds that it represented the principle of the “survival of the fittest” applied to human society.

Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, founded the eugenics movement, which viewed social inequalities as having a biological basis and advocated intervention to “improve” the human stock.

But while there have been many attempts to link Darwin’s ideas to the claim that social inequalities are biologically determined, and while Darwin undoubtedly shared many of the prejudices of his era, there is evidence of the opposite–that his biological theories were shaped by a commitment to human equality.

Darwin was horrified by slavery, and from an early age was a committed abolitionist who believed that all men are brothers. According to a new book by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, his convictions played an important role in leading him to the idea of the common descent of all organisms.

New attempts to use Darwinian ideas to explain social inequality have emerged in recent decades, including sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which argue that evolution has shaped human beings to live in hierarchical, competitive societies.

But the history of human evolution reveals that the distinctive characteristic of our species is its flexibility, and that for most of human history, our ancestors lived in societies based on common ownership, cooperation and equality.

While Darwin’s ideas have been misused by defenders of the status quo, they continue to come under attack from religiously motivated critics who advocate creationism or its somewhat more sophisticated variant the theory of “intelligent design.”

The truth is, however, that Darwin had already refuted such ideas 150 years ago. Today, they are utterly without merit, and represent an attack not just on evolutionary biology but on scientific rationality itself. Although Darwin did not get everything right, the evidence for evolution has only increased since his death in 1882.

Darwin’s ideas represent one of the great achievements of humanity’s efforts to understand the natural world. Properly understood, they should be part of the arsenal of everyone fighting for progressive social change today.

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Gaza: Inside the world’s biggest prison

February 13, 2009

Global Research, February 13, 2009

The Irish Times – 2009-01-24

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Evidence is mounting that the Israeli defence forces used the Gaza assault as a testing ground for new, horrific weapons that have confounded doctors’ attempts to save the wounded.

THERE WERE MANY ways to die during the Israeli offensive on Gaza.

From their hospital beds at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, Atallah Saad, 13, and Yussef Salem, 17, told me how “zananas” – remotely piloted drones that fire missiles – wounded them and killed Atallah’s mother and pregnant sister-in-law, and two of Yussef’s school friends. The drones were given the nickname because they make a loud z-z-z-z-z sound. But the most shocking thing about them is that an Israeli operator watches his target – in these cases, all civilians – through a surveillance camera before launching the missile. Death by remote control.

White phosphorous was another, much publicised means of death. Each M82581 artillery shell, manufactured by General Dynamics in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, bears the initials PB. And each of the 155mm shells contains 116 felt wafers soaked in phosphorus, which ignites on contact with oxygen. The phosphorous makes the white jellyfish-shaped clouds seen on television during the December 27th-January 17th Israeli offensive. It provides cover for advancing troops, but it also burns houses and people. If one of the felt pads lands on your skin, it burns until all the fuel is consumed, creating deep, wide, chemical burns, often to the bone.

Dr Nafiz Abu Shabaan pulls a plastic bag from under his desk. It is filled with white phosphorous, buried in sand. The brown pieces look like dog dirt, and re-ignite if broken open. Mahmoud al Jamal, 18, sits in the doctor’s office, his right ear congealed, his fingers and part of his chest eaten away by white phosphorous. The unsightly wounds make him look like a leper.

Al Jamal was walking at dawn when he saw the white jellyfish in the sky. “Everything was set on fire around me. I felt my body burning. I fell down and I asked the man lying next to me to help me, but he was dead. Then I lost consciousness.” Al Jamal’s brother later told him how smoke poured from his body in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

The Israeli’s use of white phosphorous is amply documented. Israel says it is legal, but human-rights groups say its use in civilian areas might constitute a war crime. Dr Abu Shabaan is more concerned by evidence of new, mysterious weapons and appeals for an impartial international investigation into Israel’s use of new weapons.

“We’ve seen many, many cases of amputation – like a cauterised wound, with no bleeding,” he recounts.

“Some have minor chest injuries, but the X-rays show nothing and they die suddenly, without explanation.”

Palestinian and foreign doctors who’ have treated the war-wounded at Shifa suspect the injuries may be caused by Dense Inert Metal Explosive, also known as Focus Lethality Munition, a weapon invented through Israeli-American cooperation.

“We are guinea pigs to the Americans and Israelis,” says Dr Abu Shabaan. “The Americans give the Israelis new weapons, and they try them out on us.”

“They are definitely testing weapons on us,” says Dr Sobhi Skaik, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and the head of the surgery department at Shifa. “The amount of damage done by these weapons is not commensurate to the wounds. We found computer chips, magnetic pieces and transistors in wounds. Sometimes there are only minute pin-point punctures to the abdomen and chest, but you see huge damage to internal organs. One patient had his liver burned black, as if it had been grilled. We think there must be something embedded in the human body that is releasing poison and killing.”

YET FOR ALL the high-tech and Frankenstein weaponry, perhaps Israel’s most vicious arm against the Palestinians has been “al-hissar”, the siege, imposed on the Gaza Strip 19 months ago when Hamas, after winning a democratic election that the world refused to recognise, seized power from the Fatah Palestinian Authority.

The world turned a blind eye as Gazans languished in the world’s biggest prison, unable to travel, import, export or interact with anyone or anything beyond their borders. And the world largely ignored the rockets Hamas fired in anger and frustration from within the siege.

As a result of this dual negligence the conflict exploded, killing 13 Israelis and 1,300 Palestinians.

The siege was one reason casualties were so high in the three-week war, says Fred Abrahams of Human Rights Watch. With the Israeli and Egyptian borders closed, “It wasn’t possible for Gazans to escape. The only way to get out was on a stretcher.”

For 19 months, Gaza has endured shortages of fuel, food, medicine and building materials. The Palestinians suffer the additional humiliation of using their tormentors’ currency, but two months ago the Israeli government cut the supply of shekels, creating a severe cash shortage. Fayad Salam, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, was forced to plea with the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert.

There were long queues at ATMs in Gaza City this week, but no matter how much they have in salary or savings, cash is rationed and Palestinians can withdraw only 1,000 Israeli shekels per month. “If the Israelis could deprive us of air, they would do it,” says a Palestinian doctor.

The siege of Gaza lies at the heart of the conflict. “If the Israelis want the war to end, they must open all the borders and end the siege,” says Hamas government spokesman Tahir al-Nounou. “Because the siege is war; the siege is killing our people.”

The only lifeline for Gaza are some 1,300 tunnels beneath the Gaza-Egyptian border. It costs $10,000 (€7,800) to dig a tunnel. The best tunnels are bored with sophisticated machines that compress earthen walls so no give-away sand appears outside. Some have railway tracks and electricity, and the tunnels are a lucrative business for Gazans and Egyptians. Because Hamas is believed to import weapons through the tunnels, Israel carpet-bombed them during the offensive. Yet only an estimated 400 were destroyed, and by mid-week the tunnels were again open. Huge plastic cubes in metal frames, holding petrol, appeared on the pavements of Gaza City.

But the return to a semblance of normality cannot efface the three-week nightmare. Whole families were wiped out. Abu Mohamed Balousha, who lost five daughters, and the Samounis of Zeitoun, where a four-year-old boy was the only survivor in a family of 30, have become causes célèbres.

Everyone has a worst memory. For ambulance driver Hathem Saleh, it was desperate telephone calls from the wounded. “When you have been talking to him on the phone and you cannot reach him because the Israeli tank will hit you – it happened to me many times . . . I could hear cries and the Israelis were shooting at us.”

Dr Mahmoud al Khozendar, a chest physician, tells of a colleague whose Russian wife was cut in half when an Israeli missile hit their home. It also killed their six-month-old child. “He took the two parts of his wife and put her on the bed with the baby. He escaped with a wounded son and daughter, and asked the Red Crescent to go back for the bodies.”

At Shifa, al Khozendar had a room full of limbs he could not match with bodies, and one body with two heads. “Most of the bodies were buried without names,” he says.

THERE WERE MANY ways to die during the Israeli offensive on Gaza. Perhaps the greatest number killed were crushed to death when the Israelis fired heavy tank artillery at their houses. Halima Radwan, 60, seemed particularly symbolic to me. Radwan was a young woman when she and her family fled from Israel in the 1967 war. She spent her life as a wandering Palestinian, moving to Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt. In 1996, in the glory days when Gaza had an airport and Palestinians carried passports, she and her husband Ahmad, a PLO official, decided to move back to “Palestine”. They built a five-bedroom villa in the Abed Rabbo district of Gaza. A month before the offensive, they paid off their debts and celebrated.

Maher Radwan, 36, is Halima and Ahmad’s only son and a mechanical engineer with the Palestinian Authority. He, his wife and children lived with his parents. “Before the ground offensive started, I decided to take my wife and children further from the border,” Maher recounts in front of the ruined villa. “I begged my parents to come with us, but they said ‘No, we are old. The Israelis won’t harm us’.”

On January 6th, an Israeli tank fired a shell at the Radwans’ house. Ahmad was wounded in the head and walked out with a white flag. He begged the Israelis to allow the Red Crescent to rescue his wife Halima, who was buried alive in her kitchen. The Israelis said no. Halima lived for four days under the debris of her house, which the Israelis then dynamited.

“They knew she was there and they saw her, because they searched the house before they destroyed it,” says Maher.

As soon as the ceasefire took effect last Sunday, he went with friends and relatives to dig his mother out. “I had the tiniest hope she might still be alive.” But Halima’s legs, shoulder and head had been crushed by concrete.

Broken porcelain, a framed verse from the Koran and a piece of plaster with Hebrew writing by the Israeli soldiers are scattered in the ruins of the Radwan family home. The pigeons they raised have returned to roost on the broken roof. Maher Radwan’s neighbours say there can be no peace with the Israelis who did this. But Maher is more sad than angry. Peace might still be possible, he says, “if only there were wise Israeli people”.

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Neo-Liberal Terrorism in India: The Largest Wave of Suicides in History

February 13, 2009

By P. Sainath | Counterpunch, Feb 12, 2009

The number of farmers who have committed suicide in India between 1997 and 2007 now stands at a staggering 182,936. Close to two-thirds of these suicides have occurred in five states (India has 28 states and seven union territories). The Big 5 – Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh– account for just about a third of the country’s population but two-thirds of farmers’ suicides. The rate at which farmers are killing themselves in these states is far higher than suicide rates among non-farmers. Farm suicides have also been rising in some other states of the country.

It is significant that the count of farmers taking their lives is rising even as the numbers of farmers diminishes, that is, on a shrinking farmer base. As many as 8 million people quit farming between the two censuses of 1991 and 2001. The rate of people leaving farming has only risen since then, but we’ll only have the updated figure of farmers in the census of 2011.

These suicide data are official and tend to be huge underestimates, but they’re bad enough. Suicide data in India are collated by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), a wing of the Ministry of Home Affairs, government of India. The NCRB itself seems to do little harm to the data. But the states where these are gathered leave out thousands from the definition of “farmer” and, thus, massage the numbers downward. For instance, women farmers are not normally accepted as farmers (by custom, land is almost never in their names). They do the bulk of work in agriculture – but are just “farmers’ wives.” This classification enables governments to exclude countless women farmer suicides. They will be recorded as suicide deaths – but not as “farmers’ suicides.” Likewise, many other groups, too, have been excluded from that list.

The spate of farm suicides – the largest sustained wave of such deaths recorded in history – accompanies India’s embrace of the brave new world of neoliberalism. Many reports on that process and how it has affected agriculture have been featured right here, on the Counterpunch site. The rate of farmers’ suicides has worsened particularly after 2001, by which time India was well down the WTO garden path in agriculture. The number of farmers’ suicides in the five years – 1997-2001 – was 78,737 (or 15,747 a year on average). The same figure for the five years 2002-06 was 87,567 (or 17,513 a year on average). That is, in the next  five years after 2001, one farmer took his or her life every 30 minutes on average. The 2007 figures (detailed below) place that year, too, in the higher trend.

What do the farm suicides have in common? Those who have taken their lives were deep in debt – peasant households in debt doubled in the first decade of the neoliberal “economic reforms,” from 26 per cent of farm households to 48.6 per cent. We know that from National Sample Survey data. But in the worst  states, the percentage of such households is far higher. For instance, 82 per cent of all farm households in Andhra Pradesh were in debt by 2001-02. Those who killed themselves were overwhelmingly cash crop farmers – growers of cotton, coffee, sugarcane, groundnut, pepper, vanilla. (Suicides are fewer among food crop farmers – that is, growers of rice, wheat, maize, pulses.) The brave new world philosophy mandated countless millions of Third World farmers forced  to move from food crop cultivation to cash crop (the mantra of “export-led growth”). For millions of subsistence farmers in India, this meant much higher cultivation costs, far greater loans, much higher debt, and being locked into the volatility of global commodity prices. That’s a sector dominated by a handful of multinational corporations. The extent to which the switch to cash crops impacts on the farmer can be seen in this: it used to cost Rs.8,000 ?($165 today) roughly to grow an acre of paddy in Kerala. When many switched to vanilla, the cost per acre was (in 2003-04) almost Rs.150,000 ($3,000) an acre. (The dollar equals about 50 rupees.)

With giant seed companies displacing cheap hybrids and far cheaper and hardier traditional varieties with their own products, a cotton farmer in Monsanto’s net would be paying far more for seed than he or she ever dreamed they would. Local varieties and hybrids were squeezed out with enthusiastic state support. In 1991, you could buy a kilogram of local seed for as little as Rs.7 or Rs.9 in today’s worst affected region of Vidarbha. By 2003, you would pay Rs.350 — ($7) — for a bag with 450 grams of hybrid seed. By 2004, Monsanto’s partners in India were marketing a bag of 450 grams of Bt cotton seed for between Rs.1,650 and Rs.1,800 ($33 to $36). This price was brought down dramatically overnight due to strong governmental intervention in Andhra Pradesh, where the government changed after the 2004 elections. The price fell to around Rs.900 ($18) – still many times higher than 1991 or even 2003.

Meanwhile, inequality was the great man-eater among?the “Emerging Tiger” nations  of the developing world. The predatory commercialization of the countryside devastated all other aspects of life for peasant farmer and landless workers. Health costs, for instance, skyrocketed. Many thousands of youngsters dropped out of both school and college to work on their parents’ farms (including many on scholarships). The average monthly per capita expenditure of the Indian farm household was just Rs.503 (ten dollars) by early this decade. Of that, 60 per cent roughly was spent on food and another 18 per cent on fuel, clothing and footwear.

Farmers, spending so much on food? To begin with, millions of small and marginal Indian farmers are net purchasers of food grain. They cannot produce enough to feed their families and have to work on the fields of others and elsewhere to meet the gap. Having to buy some of the grain they need on the market, they are profoundly affected by hikes in food prices, as has happened since 1991, and particularly sharply earlier this year. Hunger among those who produce food is a very real thing. Add to this the fact that the “per capita net availability” of food grain has fallen dramatically among Indians since the “reforms” began:  from 510 grams per Indian in 1991, to 422 grams by 2005. (That’s not a drop of 88 grams. It’s a fall of 88 multiplied by 365 and then by one billion Indians.) As prof. Utsa Patnaik, India’s top economist on agriculture, has been constantly pointing out, the average poor family has about 100 kg less today than it did just ten years ago – while the elite eat like it’s going out of style.  For many, the shift from food crop to cash crop makes it worse. At the end of the day, you can still eat your paddy. It’s tough, digesting cotton. Meanwhile, even the food crop sector is coming steadily under corporate price-rigging control. Speculation in the futures markets pushed up grain prices across the globe earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the neoliberal model that pushed growth through one kind of consumption also meant re-directing huge amounts of money away from rural credit to fuel the lifestyles of the aspiring elites of the cities (and countryside, too). Thousands of rural bank branches shut down during the 15 years from 1993-2007.

Even as incomes of the farmers crashed, so did the price they got for their cash crops, thanks to obscene subsidies to corporate and rich farmers in the West, from the U.S. and EU. Their battle over cotton subsidies alone (worth billions of dollars) destroyed cotton farmers not merely in India but in African nations such as Burkina Faso, Benin, Mali, and Chad. Meanwhile, all along, India kept reducing investment in agriculture (standard neoliberal procedure). Life was being made more and more impossible for small farmers.

As costs rose, credit dried up. Debt went out of control. Subsidies destroyed their prices. Starving agriculture of investment (worth billions of dollars each year) smashed the countryside. India even cut most of the few, pathetic life supports she had for her farmers. The mess was complete. From the late-’90s, the suicides began to occur at what then seemed a brisk rate.

In fact, India’s agrarian crisis can be summed up in five words (call it Ag Crisis 101): the drive toward corporate farming. The route (in five words): predatory commercialization of the countryside. The result: The biggest displacement in our history.

Corporations do not as yet have direct control of Indian farming land and do not carry out day-to-day operations directly. But they have sewn up every other sector, inputs, outlets, marketing, prices, and are heading for control of water as well (which states in India are busy privatizing in one guise or another).

The largest number of farm suicides is in the state of Maharashtra, home to the Mumbai Stock Exchange and with its capital Mumbai being home to 21 of India’s 51 dollar billionaires and over a fourth of the country’s 100,000 dollar millionaires. Mumbai shot to global attention when terrorists massacred 180 people in the city in a grisly strike in November. In the state of which Mumbai is capital, there have been 40,666 farmers’ suicides since 1995, with very little media attention.

Farmers’ suicides in Maharashtra crossed the 4,000-mark again in 2007, for the third time in four years, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. As many as 4,238 farmers took their lives in the state that year, the latest for which data are available,?accounting?for a fourth of all the 16,632 farmers’ suicides in the country. That national total represents a slight fall from the 17,060 farm suicides of 2006. But the broad trends of the past decade seem unshaken. Farm suicides in the country since 1997 now total 182,936.

To repeat, the five worst affected states?– Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh?– account for two-thirds of all farmers’ suicides in India. Together, they saw 11,026 in 2007. Of these, Maharashtra alone accounted for?over 38 per cent. Of the Big 5, Andhra Pradesh saw a decline of 810 suicides against its 2006 total. Karnataka saw a rise of 415 over the same period. Madhya Pradesh (1,375) posted a decline of 112. But Chattisgarh’s 1,593 farm suicides mean an increase of 110 over 2006. Specific factors in these states nourish the problem. These are zones of highly diversified, commercialized agriculture where cash crops dominate. Water stress has been a common feature, and gets worse with the use of technologies such as Bt seed that demand huge amounts of water. High external inputs and input costs are also common, as also the use of chemicals and pesticides. Mindless deregulation dug a lot of graves, lit a lot of pyres.

Maharashtra registered a fall of 215 farm suicides in 2007. However, no other state even touches the 3,000 mark. And AP (with 1,797) and Karnataka (2,135) – the next two worst hit states – together do not cross Maharashtra’s 4,000-plus mark. A one-year dip of 221 occurred in 2005 too, in Maharashtra, only to be followed by an all-time high of 4,453 suicides in 2006. The state’s trend shows no turnaround and remains dismal.

Maharashtra’s 2007 figure of 4,238 follows one and a half years of farm “relief packages” worth around Rs.5,000 crore ($1 billion) and a prime ministerial visit in mid-2006 to the distressed Vidharbha region. The state has also seen a plethora of official reports, studies and commissions of inquiry over 2005-07, aimed at tackling the problem. However, the 12,617 farm suicides in the same years is its worst ever total for any three-year period since the state began recording such data in 1995. Indeed, farm suicides in Maharashtra since that year have crossed the 40,000 mark. The structural causes of that crisis seem untouched.

Nationally, farmers’ suicides between 2002-07 were worse than for the years 1997-2001. NCRB data for the whole country now exists from 1997-2007. In the five years till 2001, there were 15,747 farmers’ suicides a year on average. For the six years from 2002, that average is 17,366 farmers’ suicides each year. The increase is distressingly higher in the main crisis states.

P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu and is the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. A regular contributor to CounterPunch,  he can be reached at psainath@vsnl.com.

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MIDEAST: Extremism Dominates Israeli Polls

February 13, 2009

By Mel Frykberg | Inter Press Service

RAMALLAH, Feb 12 (IPS) – “The peace process is based on three false basic assumptions,” said Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Israel’s extreme right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, which will dictate the formation and political course of the next Israeli government.

“These include the assertion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the main cause of instability in the Middle East, that the conflict is territorial and not ideological, and that the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders will end the conflict.”

Lieberman’s politics and ideology fly in the face of international law, various UN Security Council resolutions, the basis of all Israeli peace agreements with the Palestinians, moderate Israelis, and the U.S. government.

Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu emerged from Tuesday’s Israeli elections the big winner even though it came in third behind the centre-left Kadima party led by Tzipi Livni, which netted 28 seats, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s hawkish Likud party which won 27.

The tiny gap between Israel’s two main parties could narrow completely as there are over a 100,000 absentee votes yet to be counted. Many of these include the votes of Israeli soldiers in the field who traditionally vote for the right, and would presumably support Netanyahu.

Likud and Kadima were always expected to be the main contenders for the next Israeli government as the Labour party led by defence minister Ehud Barak continued to weaken and limped in, in fourth position.

Yisrael Beiteinu’s meteoric rise to power and increasing popularity reflect the growing mood of militancy in Israel as the voters veer increasingly to the right, especially in the wake of Israel’s recent bloody assault on Gaza.

Although Lieberman garnered 15 seats, fewer than the 20 predicted by political analysts on the eve of the elections, his strong showing will enable him to strongly influence who leads the next government.

During the next few weeks Kadima and Likud will be scrambling to try and win support for a coalition government to secure the necessary 61-seat majority in Israel’s 120-member Knesset, or parliament.

Israeli President Shimon Peres will then decide which party is more likely to form a coalition and elect that party’s leader as the next prime minister who will then have to form a coalition.

Both Livni and Netanyahu are currently courting Lieberman furiously and although he has said he is open to both parties, he also stated that he preferred a strong national far-right government, in other words Netanyahu’s Likud.

In the unlikely event that Yisrael Beiteinu agrees to form a coalition government with Kadima, Livni would still need to shore up either Labour’s support, or the ultra-orthodox Shaz party, as well as some of the smaller parties.

The ideological and political differences between Kadima and Labour are not insurmountable but more an issue of personality clashes between the respective leaders.

It is uncertain what Labour will do, and it appears that Netanyahu will emerge as the next prime minister. This doesn’t portend well for the future of the peace process. Netanyahu has stated that he will crush Hamas should he lead Israel again.

This is despite the plethora of evidence and growing international, regional and even domestic opinion that there is no military solution to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, and that Hamas can no longer be ignored and sidelined from any political equation.

Netanyahu is also on record as saying that he would continue to support the expansion and establishment of new illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

This is a major bone of contention with the Palestinian Authority (PA), Israel’s peace partner which controls the West Bank.

Lieberman, who lives in a settlement in the West Bank himself, is even more extremist than Netanyahu, and will provide even further political succour for a far-right government.

Besides being an extremist, Lieberman, who is currently being investigated by the Israeli police for fraud, has also been accused of racism. While foreign and Israeli reporters were permitted to cover his election campaign, Arab reporters were banned by Yisrael Beiteinu.

Moldovan-born Lieberman, a former nightclub bouncer and immigrant to Israel, also wants the transfer of the Arab populations in several Israeli-Arab towns in northern Israel to a future Palestinian state unless they “prove their loyalty.”

He has promised to bring in a new bill requiring all Israeli-Arabs to swear loyalty to the Jewish state or lose their citizenship.

He regards the anti-Gaza war sentiment of Israel’s Arab citizens, who saw thousands of their Palestinian brethren killed and maimed, as an act of disloyalty.

Ahmad Tibi, an Arab-Israeli Knesset member accused Lieberman of being a racist immigrant who was fighting against Israel’s indigenous population, the Israeli-Arabs or those Palestinians with Israeli passports.

Former leftist Israeli politician Yossi Sarid asked, “What’s the difference between his party and all the fascist parties in Europe? It’s the same message, the same technique, taking advantage of the same fears.”

The Palestinian Authority, under the leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, said it was willing to negotiate with any new Israeli government if it was committed to peace.

PA officials did state off the record, however, that they hoped Livni would ultimately triumph after the final count of outstanding votes.

The problem, however, is that the Yisrael Beiteinu leader is not thrilled with the idea of a two-state resolution to the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Israel needs to explain that the demand for a Palestinian state and the refugees’ right of return is a cover for radical Islam’s attempt to destroy the State of Israel,” said Lieberman.

Any hope of a compromise with the leadership of Hamas in the wake of the Gaza military operation appears even more remote as Lieberman has ruled out any ceasefire with the Islamic resistance organisation, and advocated its destruction instead.

Meanwhile, on the Palestinian street the indifference to any new Israeli government was evident. Palestinians have seen the settlements grow and the continued expropriation of their land and other resources under all Israeli governments from the supposedly leftist Labour to the rightist Likud. (END/2009)

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