Month: January 2010

by PETRA BARTOSIEWICZ (from Counterpunch)

A note from Counterpunch editors: This week the trial of one of the most wanted women in the war on terrorism begins in a federal courtroom in Manhattan. The defendant, Aafia Siddiqui, is a 37-year-old, MIT-educated neuroscientist and suspected Al Qaeda operative. Siddiqui lived in the U.S. for ten years before mysteriously vanishaing from her hometown in Karachi in 2003, along with her three children, two of whom are American born. By some accounts she is Al Qaeda royalty, having allegedly married Ammar al Baluchi, who is the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and one of the five accused 9/11 plotters expected to face trial in the same courthouse as Siddiqui herself. But human rights groups say Siddiqui is no extremist and have long suspected foul play in her disappearance. They believe she was detained and illegally interrogated by Pakistani intelligence at the behest of the U.S. The issue of U.S. complicity in “enforced disappearances” has received little media attention, but the practice begun under Bush has continued apace in the Obama administration. Overseas intelligence gathering is increasingly outsourced to amenable foreign regimes who act as interrogators on our behalf, detaining and torturing the “truth” out of sources who often don’t have much to offer. The practice is a blatant violation of human rights and in the worst instances nothing less than torture by proxy.

Opening statements in Siddiqui’s trial begin Jan. 19. We have reprinted here an investigation into her case, “The Intelligence Factory: How America Makes its Enemies Disappear,” by freelance journalist Petra Bartosiewicz. The article first appeared in the November 2009 issue of Harper’s magazine. A PDF version is also available at www.harpers.org.

When I first read the U.S. government’s complaint against Aafia Siddiqui, who is awaiting trial in a Brooklyn detention center on charges of attempting to murder a group of U.S. Army officers and FBI agents in Afghanistan, the case it described was so impossibly convoluted—and yet so absurdly incriminating—that I simply assumed she was innocent. According to the complaint, on the evening of July 17, 2008, several local policemen discovered Siddiqui and a young boy loitering about a public square in Ghazni. She was carrying instructions for creating “weapons involving biological material,” descriptions of U.S. “military assets,” and numerous unnamed “chemical substances in gel and liquid form that were sealed in bottles and glass jars.” Siddiqui, an MIT-trained neuroscientist who lived in the United States for eleven years, had vanished from her hometown in Pakistan in 2003, along with all three of her children, two of whom were U.S. citizens. The complaint does not address where she was those five years or why she suddenly decided to emerge into a public square outside Pakistan and far from the United States, nor does it address why she would do so in the company of her American son. Various reports had her married to a high-level Al Qaeda operative, running diamonds out of Liberia for Osama bin Laden, and abetting the entry of terrorists into the United States. But those reports were countered by rumors that Siddiqui actually had spent the previous five years in the maw of the U.S. intelligence system—that she was a ghost prisoner, kidnapped by Pakistani spies, held in secret detention at a U.S. military prison, interrogated until she could provide no further intelligence, then spat back into the world in the manner most likely to render her story implausible. These dueling narratives of terrorist intrigue and imperial overreach were only further confounded when Siddiqui finally appeared before a judge in a Manhattan courtroom on August 5. Now, two weeks after her capture, she was bandaged and doubled over in a wheelchair, barely able to speak, because—somehow—she had been shot in the stomach by one of the very soldiers she stands accused of attempting to murder.

It is clear that the CIA and the FBI believed Aafia Siddiqui to be a potential source of intelligence and, as such, a prized commodity in the global war on terror. Every other aspect of the Siddiqui case, though, is shrouded in rumor and denial, with the result that we do not know, and may never know, whether her detention has made the United States any safer. Even the particulars of the arrest itself, which took place before a crowd of witnesses near Ghazni’s main mosque, are in dispute. According to the complaint, Siddiqui was detained not because she was wanted by the FBI but simply because she was loitering in a “suspicious” manner; she did not speak the local language and she was not escorted by an adult male. What drove her to risk such conspicuous behavior has not been revealed. When I later hired a local reporter in Afghanistan to re-interview several witnesses, the arresting officer, Abdul Ghani, said Siddiqui had been carrying “a box with some sort of chemicals,” but a shopkeeper named Farhad said the police had found only “a lot of papers.” Hekmat Ullah, who happened to be passing by at the time of her arrest, said Siddiqui “was attacking everyone who got close to her”—a detail that is not mentioned in the complaint. A man named Mirwais, who had come to the mosque that day to pray, said he saw police handcuff Siddiqui, but Massoud Nabizada, the owner of a local pharmacy, said the police had no handcuffs, “so they used her scarf to tie her hands.” What everyone appears to agree on is this: an unknown person called the police to warn that a possible suicide bomber was loitering outside a mosque; the police arrested Siddiqui and her son; and, Afghan sovereignty notwithstanding, they then dispatched the suspicious materials, whatever they were, to the nearest U.S. military base.

The events of the following day are also subject to dispute. According to the complaint, a U.S. Army captain and a warrant officer, two FBI agents, and two military interpreters came to question Siddiqui at Ghazni’s police headquarters. The team was shown to a meeting room that was partitioned by a yellow curtain. “None of the United States personnel were aware,” the complaint states, “that Siddiqui was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain.” No explanation is offered as to why no one thought to look behind it. The group sat down to talk and, in another odd lapse of vigilance, “the Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot.” Siddiqui, like a villain in a stage play, reached from behind the curtain and pulled the three-foot rifle to her side. She unlatched the safety. She pulled the curtain “slightly back” and pointed the gun directly at the head of the captain. One of the interpreters saw her. He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui shouted, “Get the fuck out of here!” and fired twice. She hit no one. As the interpreter wrestled her to the ground, the warrant officer drew his sidearm and fired “approximately two rounds” into Siddiqui’s abdomen. She collapsed, still struggling, then fell unconscious.

The authorities in Afghanistan describe a different series of events. The governor of Ghazni Province, Usman Usmani, told my local reporter that the U.S. team had “demanded to take over custody” of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate. He proposed a compromise: the U.S. team could interview Siddiqui, but she would remain at the station. In a Reuters interview, however, a “senior Ghazni police officer” suggested that the compromise did not hold. The U.S. team arrived at the police station, he said, and demanded custody of Siddiqui, the Afghan officers refused, and the U.S. team proceeded to disarm them. Then, for reasons unexplained, Siddiqui herself somehow entered the scene. The U.S. team, “thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her.”

Siddiqui’s own version of the shooting is less complicated. As she explained it to a delegation of Pakistani senators who came to Texas to visit her in prison a few months after her arrest, she never touched anyone’s gun, nor did she shout at anyone or make any threats. She simply stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain and startled the soldiers. One of them shouted, “She is loose,” and then someone shot her. When she regained consciousness she heard someone else say, “We could lose our jobs.”

Siddiqui’s trial is scheduled for this November. The charges against her stem solely from the shooting incident itself, not from any alleged act of terrorism. The prosecutors provide no explanation for how a scientist, mother, and wife came to be charged as a dangerous felon. Nor do they account for her missing years, or her two other children, who still are missing. What is known is that the United States wanted her in 2003, and it wanted her again in 2008, and now no one can explain why.

Counterpunch for more

by Shirley Pate

Yesterday, I watched news of rescue efforts in Port-au-Prince. Elite rescue teams, such as the one from Fairfax County, VA, were focusing primarily on the Montana Hotel and the headquarters of the UN “peacekeeping” force, MINUSTAH. Anyone who knows Haiti knows that the Montana Hotel is the most lavish lodging your can find in Port-au-Prince and is frequented by wealthy business people, foreign dignitaries, and served as the initial headquarters of the MINUSTAH force. Meanwhile, in the neighborhoods most heavily hit by the earthquake, Haitians, equipped with nothing more than their bare hands, dug frantically to save their families and neighbors.

The Canada Haitian Action Network is circulating an aid worker’s account that tells of this class/race disparity in responding to the injured. The aid worker says rescue teams are refusing to go into popular neighborhoods because they fear “violence.” Breathlessly, the media rotate stories of poor, injured Haitians with warnings of violent Haitian masses on the verge of a nationwide riot.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s foil to counter Michael Moore about his indictment of the US health care system in his film Sicko (Moore kicked his ass), reported two nights ago that a tent clinic in downtown Port-au-Prince was abandoned by all medical staff because of a “rumor” of impending violence. Gupta showed the CNN audience cot after cot of injured Haitians with no medical staff in sight. CNN would probably get an Emmy award if Gupta would quit playing journalist and used his time there being the doctor he was trained to be. This is not a place or time where ANY medical professional on the ground in Haiti should do anything other than treating the injured.

Those who have observed that US aid is slow getting to Haiti, such as the Navy’s USS Comfort which is leaving Baltimore, Md., only TODAY, should understand that the US is concentrating on getting military boots on the ground first. By the end of the weekend, the US will have 10,000 military troops in Haiti. Once this is done, it will be “safe” for aid workers to tend to the injured in the popular neighborhoods. As time goes on, pay attention to the back story, and you will see that the placement of these soldiers has more to do with stemming a political tsunami than helping the people.

MRZine for more

by BRUCE A. DIXON

Tavis Smiley announced on January 6 that he was ending SOBU, the annual State of the Black Union. For ten years, SOBU drew black academics, civic, political, labor, religious and business leaders together each February for a day-long discussion of the current status and future hopes of African America. Each year thousands attended in person and millions more watched the event live on C-SPAN. SOBU had grown so large and popular that it spawned secondary events for the live attendees, along with book and lecture tours.

Tavis’s cancellation announcement, a brief video on his tavistalks.com web site is long on folksy introductions, self-congratulation, thank-yous, and goodbyes. The reasons he offers for ending the annual event are brief and unconvincing. Ten years ago, he offers, “…there was only one syndicated black radio show… there was only one black TV network… we didn’t have an African American president… (and) we no longer have to wait for one day a year in February to discuss issues that matter to us…” on TV.

Tavis is talking nonsense here. The so-called black TV and radio operations feel no obligation to field news operations because they don’t view African Americans as a polity with opinions worth informing, sharing or airing.
To these station owners, black or otherwise, African Americans are just another marketing target to be sliced, diced, age and income stratified and delivered up to corporate sponsors. A master marketer himself, Tavis knows this better than anybody.

As a marketing contraption SOBU was a runaway success. Corporate sponsors like Wal-Mart, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Exxon-Mobil and McDonalds got their logos and corporate messaging, and even some of their spokespeople in front of millions of black eyeballs. C-SPAN, which the cable TV monopolists offer as a pitiful substitute for the thousands of public, educational, governmental and local news channels they ought to be funding with the trillions they make of public subsidies, public resources and the use of the public rights of way, got to pose as a kind of “public service.” Of course SOBU manufactured and magnified the celebrity status and earning power of Tavis Smiley. SOBU spawned a number of spinoff ventures, sold millions of books and videos, and made household names in black America of people like Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson.

But the State of the Black Union did things for millions of ordinary African Americans too, people with an urgent hunger to hear some of their unique experiences taken into account, their longings for peace abroad and economic justice at home validated, and more. Millions of ordinary African Americans privately question why jobs can’t be created in their communities even in good economic times, and why the only model of urban economic development is moving poor people out and richer ones in. They know at close hand the devastating effects of our society’s policy of racially selective policing, prosecution and mass incarceration, and marvel at why no discussion including their viewpoint on such matters can be found in the mass media, including the so-called black media.

Flawed as it was, and layered with right wing prosperity-gospel preachers, black corporate hacks and “black conservatives” who owe their careers to white corporate largesse, SOBU put forward religious, labor, academic and civic leaders who, for several minutes at a time could speak on these matters. If they were skillful enough, some could flip the entire panel discussion into explorations of these topics.

For one Saturday a year then, SOBU was eagerly awaited and watched by millions because it tried to reflect the very real black internal conversation, which simply could not be heard anyplace else on TV. To a significant degree, it ws a hit because it reflected and validated the ordinary wisdom and experience of black America. For ten years SOBUwas a win-win situation for everybody. But that’s over now. There’s a new sheriff in town. Like Tavis said, ten years ago we didn’t have a black president. That’s what’s different, and that’s why SOBU is being called off.

Black Agenda Report for more

Attacked by critics from the left and right, the president can regain his popularity by imitating an illustrious predecessor

by Michael Crowley

When Barack Obama arrives in Boston this afternoon, he will be confronting a possible tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. This Tuesday, Massachusetts will hold a special election to fill the Senate seat that belonged to Senator Edward M Kennedy before he succumbed to cancer last August. Massachusetts is an overwhelmingly Democratic state, but the party’s heir apparent, attorney general Martha Coakley, appears at best tied with her little-known Republican challenger, state Senator Scott Brown.

A Coakley loss would be a nightmare for Democrats, not only for its symbolism, but because it would imperil the passage at long last of Obama’s signature healthcare reform bill. (Democrats have precisely enough votes now to pass the bill in the Senate and cannot afford to lose a single “yea”.) Hence the potential tragedy: the death of healthcare champion Ted Kennedy could conceivably lead to the historic measure’s bizarre demise. “If Scott Brown wins, it’ll kill the healthcare bill,” the Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank declared on Friday.

Some of the blame lies with Coakley: she was slow to campaign in earnest, for instance, and recently scoffed at the notion of shaking voters’ hands outside Boston’s Fenway Park “in the cold”. But her woes also have to do with the deeper forces bedevilling Barack Obama as he completes his first year in office. Like Obama, Coakley finds herself caught between conservative anger and liberal disillusionment. Conservatives are energised by the notion that Obama is trying to impose “socialised medicine” and Brown is touting his candidacy as a chance to stop healthcare in its tracks. Liberals, meanwhile, are upset that the health bill isn’t bolder and that Obama is escalating the war in Afghanistan (which Coakley opposes).

As a result, it appears possible that a strong Republican turnout and a weak Democratic one will combine to hand Coakley – and, by extension, Obama himself – a reeling blow. Which is why Obama is making today’s last-ditch campaign stop in Boston.

Even if a healthcare debacle is averted, Obama won’t be in the clear. The national political currents that have shaped the Massachusetts showdown are sure to carry on well into 2010. Take the right wing: after healthcare, Obama’s upcoming agenda items seem sure to further inflame such populist-conservative passions. Next up could be a bill to address global warming, something the right denies is even a problem. There’s also been talk of a new push to reform the country’s immigration laws, a move that could grant amnesty to some illegal immigrants – political nitroglycerine on the nativist right.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin enjoys the bestselling non-fiction book in America and will soon be peddling her views on the airwaves via Fox News, where she recently signed a contract to become a commentator. And a recent poll found that a plurality of voters would vote for a candidate running under the banner of the loosely organised and occasionally fanatical “Tea Party” movement before supporting either a Republican or a Democrat.

But Obama can’t simply take shelter under his party’s left wing. There is no room for him at that inn. The healthcare bill’s passage will come with outraged cries that Obama sold out his core supporters. Liberals like the former Democratic party chairman Howard Dean have argued that a health bill with no public option provision which forces private insurers to compete with the government is worse than no bill at all. Other prominent liberals, including the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, are upset that Obama hasn’t forced Congress to inject more stimulus dollars into the economy; others complain he has yet to make good on his pledge to allow gays to serve openly in the military, and to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison camp once and for all.

As for Obama’s surge of 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan, the powerful Democratic Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey speaks for many a liberal when he calls it “a fool’s errand”. It’s a stunning turn of events for a president who many progressives believed was their saviour and would usher in a new era of bold liberal activism.

At the moment, this grip appears treacherous indeed for Obama. The latest polling from Gallup shows him with a meagre 49% approval rating, with 45% of Americans disapproving of his performance, down from a 66-27 split in early May. But the middle can be a good place to be and Obama may yet escape the dreaded left-right pincer.

Consider the example of Bill Clinton. Two years into his presidency, Clinton appeared ruined. Republicans stampeded in the 1994 midterm elections to capture the House and Senate, leaving Clinton to argue for his own relevance. But Clinton understood that the Republicans had benefited from a public perception that he had lurched to the left on healthcare and gays in the military. Clinton began his comeback by forcefully taking on unsympathetic Republican rivals such as Newt Gingrich. But he also “triangulated”, to use the word made famous by his adviser, Dick Morris, against his party’s left wing. Clinton balanced the federal budget, signed a welfare reform bill and even famously declared in his 1995 State of the Union speech that “the era of big government is over”.

Guardian for more

by KATHARINE DANIELS

For me and my colleagues, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s new book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is exhilarating. Already in its 17th printing, Half the Sky pulls no punches in detailing the major abuses women suffer worldwide. Through personal stories, told by the women living them, sex trafficking, forced prostitution, honor killings, mass rape, and maternal mortality become shockingly real. Critics believe Half the Sky will ignite the global women’s movement as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring did the environmental movement in the 1960s. So do I. This remarkable book moves the conversation from women’s issues to human rights; shows change is possible one woman at a time; and, most importantly, inspires hope.

Recently I had the opportunity to talk with this Pulitzer Prize-winning couple. Speaking with them I felt great possibility for change in areas that before seemed unrelentingly dark and difficult – ending the incessant violence against women, emancipating the 100 million women enslaved in sex trafficking operations worldwide, and silencing the bell that rings with the death of a woman in childbirth once every minute of every day.

What becomes clear in reading Half the Sky is the opportunity the emancipation of women provides. Despite the oftentimes devastating read, the authors ask us to bear in mind what they refer to as a central truth: Women aren’t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity. Neither Kristof nor WuDunn are shy about their vision for the book, “We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women’s power as economic catalysts.”

Although Kristof and WuDunn are confident the atrocities committed against women and girls worldwide will one day be behind us, the pathway there must include both women and men. “If this is a cause that is backed only by women,” Kristof warns, “it has lost already. It is immediately marginalized.” According to Kristof, success will require a broad coalition to resolve an issue that he notes is no more a woman’s issue than the holocaust was a Jewish issue, or civil rights were a black issue. “When 100 million women are discriminated against to death, that’s not just a woman’s issue…both for intrinsic moral reasons and also for practical reasons…it’s essential that men get on board.”

“It really is a partnership,” WuDunn adds. “It’s not women standing up for their rights. It’s really men and women standing up for just human rights.” She further elaborates that what’s needed is a realistic approach “that really focuses on outcomes, not on outrage.”

While traditional feminists, who have cared about these issues for decades, make up the older audiences on their speaking tours, it was encouraging to learn that the younger audiences include many more men. Young men who, according to Kristof, “don’t see this as a women’s issue or a soft issue” but instead “intuitively think that if women and girls are kidnapped and locked up in brothels or die in vast numbers in childbirth – that’s just wrong.”

Kristof and WuDunn’s challenge is to engage partners worldwide in a movement to stop abuses that for most of us are far removed from our daily lives. They use the abolition of slavery in Great Britain in 1807 as what they call “a singular, shining example of a people who accepted a substantial, sustained sacrifice of blood and treasure to improve the lives of fellow human beings living far away.” For its moral commitment to ending slavery, the British sacrificed the equivalent of more than $14 trillion USD today.

Women’s International Perspective for more

by MARIAH BLAKE

Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas. When he greeted me at the door one evening last October, he was clutching a thin paperback with the skeleton of a seahorse on its cover, a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. We sat down at his dining table, which was piled high with three-ring binders, and his wife, Nancy, brought us ice water in cut-crystal glasses with matching coasters. Then McLeroy cracked the book open. The margins were littered with stars, exclamation points, and hundreds of yellow Post-its that were brimming with notes scrawled in a microscopic hand. With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

Views like these are relatively common in East Texas, a region that prides itself on being the buckle of the Bible Belt. But McLeroy is no ordinary citizen. The jovial creationist sits on the Texas State Board of Education, where he is one of the leaders of an activist bloc that holds enormous sway over the body’s decisions. As the state goes through the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting the standards for its textbooks, the faction is using its clout to infuse them with ultraconservative ideals. Among other things, they aim to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy, bring global-warming denial into science class, and downplay the contributions of the civil rights movement.

Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of the state’s standards. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.

Up until the 1950s, textbooks painted American history as a steady string of triumphs, but the upheavals of the 1960s shook up old hierarchies, and beginning in the latter part of the decade, textbook publishers scrambled to rewrite their books to make more space for women and minorities. They also began delving more deeply into thorny issues, like slavery and American interventionism. As they did, a new image of America began to take shape that was not only more varied, but also far gloomier than the old one. Author Frances FitzGerald has called this chain of events “the most dramatic rewriting of history ever to take place.”

This shift spurred a fierce backlash from social conservatives, and some began hunting for ways to fight back. In the 1960s, Norma and Mel Gabler, a homemaker and an oil-company clerk, discovered that Texas had a little-known citizen-review process that allowed the public to weigh in on textbook content. From their kitchen table in the tiny town of Hawkins, the couple launched a crusade to purge textbooks of what they saw as a liberal, secular, pro-evolution bias. When textbook adoptions rolled around, the Gablers would descend on school board meetings with long lists of proposed changes—at one point their aggregate “scroll of shame” was fifty-four feet long. They also began stirring up other social conservatives, and eventually came to wield breathtaking influence. By the 1980s, the board was demanding that publishers make hundreds of the Gablers’ changes each cycle. These ranged from rewriting entire passages to simple fixes, such as pulling the New Deal from a timeline of significant historical events (the Gablers thought it smacked of socialism) and describing the Reagan administration’s 1983 military intervention in Grenada as a “rescue” rather than an “invasion.”

To avoid tangling with the Gablers and other citizen activists, many publishers started self-censoring or allowing the couple to weigh in on textbooks in advance. In 1984, the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way analyzed new biology textbooks presented for adoption in Texas and found that, even before the school board weighed in, three made no mention of evolution. At least two of them were later adopted in other states. This was not unusual: while publishers occasionally produced Texas editions, in most cases changes made to accommodate the state appeared in textbooks around the country—a fact that remains true to this day.

Washington Monthly for more

George Manuel on Parliament Hill. Photo: George Manuel Institute

Don’t let Harper play hockey with human rights

by Arthur Manuel

COLDSTREAM, BC—We have reached a very critical time in our struggle for our land and human rights as Indigenous Peoples. The Canadian government knows this and has been doing everything in their power to trick us into extinguishing our Aboriginal Title through negotiations under their policies—including their Comprehensive Land Claims and Self-Government Policies. Canada’s courts have been the alternative to negotiations, and there we have had measured success. But the establishment Indigenous organizations, like the Assembly of First Nations, have been stuck with what the government is dictating to them.

As Indigenous Peoples we need to think about what to do now. In early August 2009, Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl sent a strong message to the British Columbia Treaty Commission (BCTC) Common Table, a group of First Nations from different BCTC negotiating tables who came together to raise concerns regarding consistent obstacles they all faced in negotiating land claims agreements in BC. He said that the federal government will not change the existing Comprehensive Land Claims and Self-Government Policies.

The federal government has ignored all objections from groups who do not negotiate and groups who are inactive in their negotiations. Now they have stated clearly to those actively negotiating that they will not review their land and self-government policies.

It is important for Indigenous Peoples who have not signed treaties surrendering their Title to realize that we are all under the federal Comprehensive Land Claims and Self-Government Policies. We must realize that any land claims and self-government agreement will be determined by these policies. Right now, this will mean that the best deal Indigenous Peoples can get is the Nisga’a, Tsawwassen or Maa-nulth Final Agreements. This requires the extinguishment of Aboriginal Title, according to what the government has put on the table under the Comprehensive Land Claims and Self-Government Policies. Indigenous Peoples will have to give up their tax-exemption, take their land in fee simple, and agree to be under provincial control.

There needs to be a fundamental change in Canada’s Land Claims and Self-Government Policies. These policies need to address the direct link between Aboriginal Title and our human rights as Indigenous Peoples. Canada must abandon their existing policy of extinguishment and assimilation and adopt a plan of recognition and co-existence. This dramatic change must be forced on the federal government by direct action from Indigenous
Peoples and our supporters. We get a lot of support for taking direct action. We just need faith and courage to stand up for our rights.

The 1980 Constitution Express, an international grassroots campaign that involved sending a train with hundreds of Indigenous protesters from the west coast to Ottawa, secured section 35(1) in the Canadian Constitution 1982. We need similar collective action to get Aboriginal Title recognized.

A lot has changed since the 1980s.

The Delgamuukw case judicially recognized Aboriginal Title in 1997. The World Trade Organization and the North America Free Trade Agreement recognized that Canada’s policy not to recognize Aboriginal Title was a subsidy to Canada’s resource industries. The British Columbia government now has to report Aboriginal Title as a contingent liability in their annual balance sheet. And the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples despite the fact that Canada voted against the Declaration.

Our real problem is that the federal and provincial governments do not want to recognize Aboriginal Title because it ousts their jurisdiction over our Aboriginal Title territory. They want to continue to mutually and exclusively make all decisions regarding our land. Everything comes from the natural wealth of our land. We need to unite, not around our weakest positions in negotiations, but around the strongest defenders of our land. In British Columbia, participating under the BCTC over the last 16 years has had dismal results: it has produced only the Tsawwassen and Maa-nulth Final Agreements, plus the rebuked Common Table Report and the rejected BC Recognition and Reconciliation Act.

Dominion for more

The controversy in Malaysia shows the arrogance and ignorance that often underlie fanaticism. But it is also heartening to discover the strength of Malaysia’s public sphere.

by C. M. Naim

The foundational creed for all Muslims is: “There is no god save Allah, and Muhammad is Allah’s prophet”—with the Arabic word Rasul indicating Muhammad’s status. Rasul literally translates as “someone who was sent,” but in common usage in Arabic—and in Islamicate languages such as Urdu and Persian—it means a prophet or apostle. According to the Qur’an, Jesus too is a Rasul of Allah’s Rasul, as are in fact all the prophets of the Old Testament. However, in Islam, Jesus is not God’s Son; though immaculately conceived, he is described only as the son of Maryam or Mary. A useful summation of what the Qur’an tells Muslims about Jesus is found in 4:156–8, where the Jews are chided—“[156] … because they denied and spoke dreadful calumnies of Mary; [157] And for saying: ‘We killed the Christ, Jesus, son of Mary, who was an apostle of God;’ but they neither killed nor crucified him, though it so appeared to them. Those who disagree in the matter are only lost in doubt. They have no knowledge about it other than conjecture, for surely they did not kill him, [158] But God took him to Himself, and God is all-mighty and all-wise.” (Ahmed Ali, Al-Qur’an, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1984, pp. 93-4.) Christianity, obviously, is six centuries and few decades older than Islam, and every reader of the Qur’an knows that its earliest verses directly and repeatedly, though not exclusively, addressed the Christians of Mecca, reminding them Allah and His Rasul, Jesus, while pointing out their “errors” in belief about the latter.

In other words, Allah was the Arabic word that the people of Mecca—Christians, Jews, and so-called Pagans—were quite familiar with and understood it to represent a singular Supreme Being in Arabic, their shared language. The word, no doubt, had an earlier history, but that is not of concern here. Of importance is the simple fact that a fairly large body of Arabic speaking Christians had been using the word “Allah” for at least a few centuries before the advent of Islam. And that for any Muslim to make a monopolistic claim on the word in the name of Islam would be an act of abysmal ignorance and absolute arrogance. To my limited knowledge, no Muslim, had ever made such a claim in the past.

But these are bad times, reminding us of the words that Yeats made memorable some ninety years ago: “… everywhere // The ceremony of innocence is drowned;// The best lack all conviction, while the worst // Are full of passionate intensity.” And so we have the situation in Malaysia, where some Muslims recently attacked and vandalized nine churches because they did not wish some Malaysian Christians to use “Allah” to refer to their own God.

I have above used the word “some” twice advisedly. According to an Associated Press report of January 9, “Only the Malay-language prayers for indigenous tribes people in the remote states of Sabah and Sarawak use ‘Allah,’ as they have for decades.” And the Catholic weekly, Herald, uses the word only in its Bahasa Malaysia edition. It had been doing so since 1995, but it was not until 2006 that it was warned by the government to stop. And it is only some Malaysian Muslims who, individually or collectively, have been involved in the recent arson and vandalism. (The most recent being an attack on the offices of the lawyer for the Catholic Church.) The many reports in the New York Times barely hinted at that “some-ness.” I had to go online and find some English language Malaysian blogs and newspapers to discover that while the problem was more extensive there was also greater dissent and resistance to the ban among Malaysian Muslims than was reported in the American press, and that any number of prominent academics and journalists had severely criticized the attacks, while bringing to light the issue’s fuller history within the context of Malaysia’s somewhat unique federal political system.

Apparently, there was a local ban and a fatwa to that effect in 1986 in the state of Selangor, which was made into a state law in 1988, and eventually became established in March 2009 as a fully gazetted law in all the constituent states of Malaysia—though not without challenge and opposition from various religious and secular organizations. The ban, in fact, concerned four words, the other three being “Kaabah,” “Solat,” and “Baitullah.” The enacted law prohibited Non-Muslims from using those four words with reference to any occasion or activity that was not Islamic.

It may be recalled that not too long ago there was in Malaysia another brouhaha. A fatwa was issued and nationally confirmed making Yoga a “non-Islamic” practice that Malaysian Muslims were told not to engage in. Earlier there were other controversies—over beauty pageants and also whether it was right for Malaysian Muslims to greet their non-Muslim compatriots on the latter’s religious occasions. I should note that the mufti of Selangor disapproved of the pageants and Yoga but allowed offering greetings to non-Muslims. Indonesia, incidentally, did not prohibit Yoga to its much larger Muslim majority population.

Outlook for more

by NADEEM F. PARACHA

Pakistanis love emailing and text messaging quotes from hadiths and assorted religious paraphernalia. I usually ignore such messages because in my mind I imagine a holy punter who is convinced that each email or SMS of his is getting him that much closer to booking a cosy place in heaven. The truth is that this (albeit irritating) activity is actually better than a holy bum blowing himself up in public to find that same place in Paradise.

However, last Monday, as I again received my share of emails and SMSes quoting hadith and citing all that sophomoric stuff about ‘scientific proofs in the Qu’ran,’ I decided to answer one particular SMS; one I was receiving for the umpteenth time.

This is how it went: Munafiq ki Nishaanian (signs of the hypocrite) – Jhoot bolna (telling lies); Wa’da khilafi karna (breaking promises); Khiyanat karma (stealing); Gaali dayna (swearing).

So I replied: Sir/Madman, thank you for your SMS. But I think you forgot one more sign of being a munafiq, i.e. khaali khuli kay SMS karna (sending aimless SMSes).

Right away the sender SMSed his/her reply: SMS technology wasn’t invented when the hadith were compiled. So you can’t say SMSing is a sign of being a munafiq.

Dawn for more

by Togzhan Kassenova

During the rainy, windy early morning of August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear explosion–code-named “First Lightning”–at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in eastern Kazakhstan. Witnesses remember feeling the ground tremble and seeing the sky turn red–and how that red sky was quickly dominated by a peculiar mushroom-shaped cloud. The Soviet military and scientific personnel conducting the test knew that the rain and wind would make the local population more susceptible to radioactive fallout. But at the time, authorities disregarded the consequences for the sake of military and political goals. Throughout the next 40 years, such a trade-off would become all too familiar to those living at and around the test site. In all, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk (340 underground and 116 aboveground), starting with that first one in August 1949 and ending with the final test on October 19, 1989. In 1991, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev officially closed the site and ordered that medical help and compensation be provided to those suffering from illness due to testing.

During the first decades of testing, the Soviet military built a secret research and administrative center 60 kilometers away from the testing grounds–a new town that the outside world would come to know only as Semipalatinsk-21. Given its secret mission, Semipalatinsk-21 was never identified on any official maps. As such, it was surrounded by barbed wire, and the flow of people in and out of the town was strictly controlled. Later, the town would be renamed Kurchatov, after the man who helped the Soviet Union obtain the bomb. The largest civilian town, Semipalatinsk, was located 160 kilometers away; while a few rural settlements were scattered nearby the site.

Although it has been 20 years since the last nuclear weapon was exploded in Kazakhstan, its people still have vivid memories of the Soviet testing era–memories that they kindly shared with me during a three-week trip I took there in July. Take, for instance, Gulsum Kakimzhanova, the head of the nongovernmental organization Iris, which is based in Semipalatinsk and helps those affected by the testing find the proper medical and social care. (During one project, Iris arranged breast cancer screenings for more than 18,000 women who live in areas close to the former test site.) Kakimzhanova herself was born in 1952 at a railway settlement not far from Semipalatinsk. The effects of the tests were everywhere. “One morning when I was a small girl, my father awoke to find all of his hair had fallen off onto his pillow overnight,” she told me. “Only many years later, when I began working on health issues as a trained biologist, did I realize that my father’s hair loss was likely caused by radiation exposure while he labored outside as a railway worker near the test site.”

Natalya Zhdanova, who lived in Kurchatov from 1968 to 2000, remembers that announcements about the tests were broadcast on the local radio stations, along with movie show times and weather forecasts. As a member of a military family whose relatives were involved in the testing, she never worried about how the tests might impact her or her family’s health. In fact, it was apparent when I spoke with her that she viewed the military presence in Semipalatinsk patriotically: “People were not afraid of radiation–maybe because nobody was suffering from leukemia or other diseases. Our fathers and husbands worked in this field, and they never had any health problems, apart from the great responsibility that came with the task. And everyone always followed safety procedures.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for more