Month: January 2010

Aminatou Haidar was on hunger strike at Lanzarote airport for 32 days
© Berserk Productions

Amnesty International has welcomed the news that Aminatou Haidar, a Sahrawi human rights activist who has spent the past month on hunger strike in Lanzarote airport, has returned home and been reunited with her children.

Aminatou Haidar said that she was allowed to fly back to Western Sahara on a private plane after being informed by a Spanish official that an agreement was reached between the Moroccan and Spanish authorities. Her passport was returned to her on arrival by the Moroccan authorities.

She told Amnesty International on Friday that her return was “a victory for human rights and justice”.

Aminatou Haidar has been on hunger strike since 15 November after she was expelled from Western Sahara by the Moroccan authorities. She was admitted to hospital on Thursday morning as her health deteriorated.

“We are delighted that Aminatou Haidar has finally been allowed home and obtained back her passport,” said Philip Luther, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.

“There must, however, be no conditions imposed on her as a result. She, and other Sahrawi human rights defenders, should be able to enjoy their right to freedom of expression without fear of retribution.”

A plane carrying Aminatou Haidar, her sister and her doctor landed in Laayoune at about midnight on Thursday. There was reportedly a heavy security presence in the city, particularly around Aminatou Haidar’s family home.

Amnesty International for more

by John Pilger

Obama’s lies over the Afghanistan war remind us of the lessons of Nineteen Eighty-Four

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the US has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said that “the world” supported the invasion in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks. In truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama Bin Laden”. In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over Bin Laden for trial, Pakistan’s military regime reported, and they were ignored.
“Hearts and minds”

Even Obama’s mystification of the 9/11 attacks as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the twin towers were attacked, the former Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik was told by the Bush administration that a US military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as “stable” enough to ensure US control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.

Obama’s most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a “safe haven” for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the west. His own national security adviser, James Jones, said in October that there were “fewer than 100” al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but “a tribal localised insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power”. The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of “world peace”.

New Statesman for more

Iran’s nuclear dispute with the West and planned U.S. troop cuts in Iraq will weigh heavily on the Middle East in 2010, instability in Yemen and deadlock in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

Iran Nuclear Ambitions

Iran, beset by political turmoil since a disputed June election, seems likely to miss the West’s end-year deadline for it to accept an enriched uranium fuel deal aimed at calming international fears about the purpose of its nuclear program.

That would set the stage for the United States and its European allies to press for harsher United Nations sanctions against Tehran, although Russia and China, which both wield veto power on the U.N. Security Council, may continue to demur.

Iran says it will defy tougher sanctions, but U.S. President Barack Obama, keen to avoid a new war while his military is still fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, may see them as the best way to head off any Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites.

An Israeli strike, while more likely to delay than destroy Iran’s nuclear potential, could entangle the United States in a regional conflagration that would threaten global oil supplies.

Iraq Election, US Troop Cuts

Groping toward a future without U.S. troops, Iraq heads into a parliamentary election on March 7 likely to herald months of political wrangling over the formation of a new government, amid unresolved disputes over territory, resources and power.

Khaleej Times for more

UB Photos
She’s got a friend A Chinese girl with a jawan at Bumla

India’s ruction, on superpowerdom and China, needs to be hushed

by Edward Luce

The other day I happened to stumble across this line from an editorial in an Indian newspaper: “India’s eventual ascension to global superpower status is all but assured,
but it cannot be upset or offended if there are hurdles along the way.” Having been asked by Outlook to address “the new global role for India”, it would be difficult to sidestep all this talk of India’s impending superpowerness. It seems worth beginning at least by specifying what India’s global role is unlikely to entail.

Hubris can be a damaging thing. Countries that overestimate their power, including George W. Bush’s America, tend to fall flat on their faces. To be sure, India is highly unlikely to embark on any “wars of choice” in the near future. But New Delhi should be wary of any missteps in its relationship with China.

There are a number of influential hawks in India who not only predict a future confrontation with China but seem, at times, actually to will it. China is undoubtedly a potential rival to India. But at this stage, China’s military superiority is not in doubt. More generally, though, India is nowhere near attaining the attributes of raw power that would qualify it as being on the brink of such a global role. By 2040, India may be jostling with China for equal or second place with the United States in terms of the absolute size of the Indian economy. But its per capita wealth will still be roughly a quarter that of the West.

Outlook for more
(Submitted by reader)

By Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

2000
plastic angels rise
from a west side lawn – guns pop –
mourn the daily dead –

2001
hands close the circle
we breathe fear as towers fall
paranoia kills

2002
wear my hair in braids
sweat the night away at clubs
come, lean into me —
share our stories now.
we are urgent, relevant —
we need each other.

2003
scars carved on shoulders
protect him through dense jungles
genocide’s ruins
we ignite the light
resurrect hope across seas
unafraid to love

2004
ask the universe
and she will answer you hard
like a hammer swing
ask the universe
and she will answer you soft
like a flower’s mouth

2005
my father’s body
cramped in a hospital bed
healed by the divine
my first bouts with grief —
my mouth clamps shut, yet my pen
finds infinity.

2006
i am ass-backwards
scramble of planes, trains, and cars
my clock ticks awry

2007
the mirror screams back —
that girl wants me dead, the one
who is so unsure.
poetry does save.
its sound and sense cure many,
transforms wounded hearts.

2008
barack obama
even softens the cynics…
for about three months

2009
slip out from girlhood
new clothes await you, woman
take control – your life
slip out from girlhood.
new loves await you – woman.
enjoy your vast worlds.

2010
with the dead buried,
the living continue on
– in me and beyond.

Kelly Tsai’s website is

By Joseph Shansky

Walter Trochez

“As a revolutionary I will be today, tomorrow and forever on the front lines of my people, all the while knowing that I may lose my life.” – Walter Trochez, 25, murdered in Tegucigalpa on 12/13/09

The bodies of slain activists are piling up in Honduras. While it’s being kept quiet in most Honduran and international media, the rage is building among a dedicated network of friends spreading the word quickly with the tragic announcement of each compañero/a.

Now that the world heard from mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times of a “clean and fair” election on Nov. 29 (orchestrated by the US-supported junta currently in power), the violence has increased even faster than feared.

The specific targets of these killings have been those perceived as the biggest threats to the coup establishment. The bravest, and thus the most vulnerable: Members of the Popular Resistance against the coup. Their friends and family. People who provide the Resistance with food and shelter. Teachers, students, and ordinary citizens who simply recognize the fallacy of an un-elected regime taking over their country. All associated with the Resistance have faced constant and growing repercussions for their courage in protesting the coup. With the international community given the green light by the US that democratic order has returned via elections, it’s open season for violent forces in Honduras working to tear apart the political unity of the Resistance Front against the coup.

The killings are happening almost faster than they can be recorded.

On Sunday, Dec. 7, a group of six people were gunned down while walking down the street in the Villanueva neighborhood of Tegucigalpa. According to sources, a white van with no license plates stopped in front of the group. Four masked men jumped out of the van and forced the group to get on the ground, where they were shot. The five victims who were killed were:

• Marcos Vinicio Matute Acosta, 39

• Kennet Josué Ramírez Rosa, 23

• Gabriel Antonio Parrales Zelaya, 34

• Roger Andrés Reyes Aguilar, 22

• Isaac Enrique Soto Coello, 24

One woman, Wendy Molina, 32, was shot several times and played dead when one of the assassins pulled her hair, checking to see if anyone in the group was still alive. She was taken to the hospital and survived.

The Honduran independent newspaper El Libertador reports that the group members were all organizers against the coup. According to a resident in the area, “The boys had organized committees so that the neighbors could get involved in the Resistance Front.”

This massacre was part of a string of Resistance-related murders during the past few weeks alone. On December 3, Walter Trochez, 25 a well-known activist in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community was snatched off the street and thrown into a van, again by four masked men, in downtown Tegucigalpa. In the report that he later filed to local and national authorities, Walter said he was interrogated for hours for information on Resistance members and activities, and was beaten in the face with a pistol for refusing to speak. He was told that he would be killed regardless, and he eventually escaped by throwing open the van door, falling into the street, and running away.

Upside Down World for more

by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

In the early 1970s the shah, via his intelligence organisation SAVAK, the CIA and the Israeli MOSSAD, sponsored a sustained “covert war” of Iraqi-Kurdish factions under the leadership of Mustafa Barzani against the Ba’thist leadership in Iraq which led to bombings of oil installations in Kirkuk and other infrastructural facilities with civilian use and subsequently to a full-fledged insurgency. Amongst us, we may deem the methods employed by the Kurdish movement “terroristic”. But this was certainly not the official view in Washington (or Britain, Iran and Israel). A White House Memorandum authored by Henry Kissinger and dated 5 October 1972 (White House Memorandum 1972, p. 1) refers to ‘Mustafa Barzani’s Kurdish resistance movement’. In the same memo (p. 1) it is indicated, that CIA Director Richard Helms reports the delivery of ‘money and arms . . . to Barzani via the Iranians without a hitch. More money and arms are in the pipeline’, it is stated. ‘Barzani received the first two monthly cash payments of each for July and August . . . By the end of October, the Iranians will have received for onward shipment to the Kurds 222,000 pounds of arms and ammunitions from Agency stocks and 142,000 pound from [Retracted].’ Note also that since its inception in 1979, the Iraqi government was put on the US State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. The country was taken off that list in 1982 in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war and at a time when the Reagan Administration was aware of Saddam Hussein’s directives to use chemical weapons against advancing Iranian army units and Iraqi civilians who resisted his regime (Adib-Moghaddam, 2006, 2008). Iraq was put on that list again after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Ultimately then, the allocation of the terror label shifted with the particular political context in which it was employed.

MRZine for more

Agra, Dec 27: Doyen of Urdu poetry Mirza Ghalib, whose 212th birth anniversary is being observed Sunday, still does not have a proper memorial, or a lane named after him in the city of his birth — Agra.

This despite the fact that demands for a Mirza Ghalib chair at the Agra University and an auditorium with a research library have been hanging fire for decades.

“Former Uttar Pradesh governor Rajeshwar Rao had asked the Agra University to institute a Chair in Ghalib’s name, and the Agra Municipal Corporation had passed a resolution renaming Bhagwan Talkies crossing as Mirza Ghalib circle. Decisions are pending on both,” Surendra Sharma, president of Braj Mandal Heritage Conservation Society
told IANS.

“The Taj city is identified with three pillars of Urdu Adab — Mir Taqi Mir, Ghalib and Nazeer Akbarabadi, but unfortunately nothing has been done to perpetuate their memory. Stones alone do not make heritage. Literature, traditions, culture are all part of the heritage that we must preserve,” said Sandeep Arora, former president of the Agra Hotels and Restaurants Association.

“When foreign tourists visit Agra, particularly from Pakistan and other West Asian countries, they ask us about Ghalib’s house. We have been requesting the tourism and other departments to build a memorial to the great poet but so far our efforts have been futile,” added Rakesh Chauhan, hotelier and the president of the Hotels Association.

Mirza Asad Ullah Khan ‘Ghalib’ is considered the Shakespeare of Urdu and was born in 1796 in Agra, once the capital of Mughal rulers. He died in Delhi in 1869, leaving behind a rich legacy of poetry that continues to inspire poets.

New Kerala for more
(Submitted by Asghar Vasanwala)

In some places, we ate them. More generally, modern humans’ more varied lifestyle may have been the key to the survival

By Jane Bosveld

Aiming his crossbow, Steven Churchill leaves no more than a two-inch gap between the freshly killed pig and the tip of his spear. His weapon of choice is a bamboo rod attached to a sharpened stone, modeled after the killing tools wielded by early modern humans some 50,000 years ago, when they cohabited in Eurasia with their large-boned relatives, the Neanderthals. Churchill, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, is doing an experiment to see if a spear thrown by an early modern human might have killed Shanidar 3, a roughly 40-year-old Neanderthal male whose remains were uncovered in the 1950s in Shanidar Cave in northeastern Iraq. Anthropologists have long debated about a penetrating wound seen in Shanidar 3’s rib cage: Was he injured by another Neanderthal in a fight—or was it an early modern human who went after him?

“Anyone who works on the ribs of Shanidar 3 wonders about this,” Churchill says.

The possibility that early humans attacked, killed, and drove small bands of Neanderthals to extinction has intrigued anthropologists and fascinated the public ever since Neanderthal bones were first studied in the mid-19th century. At first naturalists were not sure what to make of the funny-looking humanlike bones. But with publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the idea that the bones were from a species closely related to us began to make sense. Eventually scientists recognized that Neanderthals were an extinct species that shared a common ancestor (probably Homo heidelbergensis) with Homo sapiens. For thousands of years, Neanderthals were the only hominids living in Europe and parts of Asia. Then, around 50,000 years ago, early modern humans migrated into Europe from Africa. By 28,000 to 30,000 years ago, the Neanderthals had disappeared.

For more than a century after their discovery, our robust relatives were depicted as dumb brutes, but the Neanderthals have had something of a face-lift in recent years. They are now considered to have been intelligent (as smart as early modern humans, some anthropologists think), perhaps red-haired and pale-skinned, and capable of speech. They might even have created their own language. The more we learn about Neanderthals, the more familiar they seem. But one deep mystery remains: Whatever happened to them, and why did they disappear?

Discover for more

By Sami Khiyami

The indigenous people of Syria, the Amorites and the Canaanites, have civilisations which go back more than 5,000 years. Some archaeologists think the Amorites, apparently tall and fair, were of Aryan extraction; but most think they were of Syrian origin, speaking one of the earliest known semitic dialects. Tablets found in Ebla and Mari, two important sites from the third millennium BCE, revealed a sophisticated, urbane and powerful indigenous empire, which dominated Syria and portions of lower Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Persia. Jonathan Tubb of the British Museum says: “We now see the Amorites moving into Mesopotamia and influencing events there (rather than the other way around)”.

The major Amorite cities, Ebla, Aram (Aleppo), Mari (their original capital) and Babylon, were distinguished by the introduction of the rule of law and replacement of the ancestral political system of city-states by kingdoms. Men, land and cattle ceased to belong physically to the gods or to the temples and the king. A new society of big farmers, free citizens and enterprising merchants emerged. Society was for the first time in history governed by the rule of law — the Hammurabi code introduced by the Amorite king of Babylon in 1750 BC.

The Canaanites (Phoenicians to the ancient Greeks), the other indigenous people of Syria, inhabited the southern and the coastal parts of Greater Syria. Canaan was a distinct political entity formed by a loose confederation of city-states during the third millennium BC. Their main cities were Damascus, the coastal cities of Akko (Acre), Sidon, Tyre, Arwad and Ugarit, all the Palestinian cities and other smaller cities extending to Kadesh in upper central Syria.

The Canaanites’ main achievement was to create the first letter-based alphabet (as opposed to syllable-based cuneiform). Later on, in the first millennium BCE, this alphabet was simplified by “re-born” Amorites: the Aramaeans. Aramaic (the language of Christ) became the spoken language of the Middle East, from Egypt to Persia, for almost one thousand years.

Le Monde Diplomatique for more