My friend, the filmmaker and photographer Francesca Romeo, recorded me here in New Orleans this week talking about some of the challenges facing Mexico and Guatemala. In this short clip, I discuss drug trafficking, organized crime and some of the steps that the I think the United States could take to help lessen the violence in both countries.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Michael Deibert on KPFK Pacifica Radio
My interview yesterday with Suzi Weissman on KPFK Pacifica Radio about the violence currently affecting Mexico and Guatemala can be heard here. My segment starts around the 28 minute mark after the segment about Palestine. Also got to throw in my two cents about the arrest of Ratko Mladic.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Mladic, Chomsky and Srebrenica: Time for an apology
By now the word that wanted war criminal Ratko Mladic has been arrested in Serbia has traveled around the globe. On the run for nearly 15 years, the former Bosnian Serb general accused of overseeing that massacre 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995 will face justice. But will the apologists for the violent Serbian expansion of the 1990s in the international community - the linguist and MIT professor Noam Chomsky chief among them - finally apologize to his many victims for seeking to scuttle their calls for justice all these years?
I first became aware of Chomsky's, shall we say rather unorthodox, views of the Bosnian conflict in connection with a campaign he and his supporters launched against the talented young British journalist Emma Brockes, whose October 2005 interview with Mr. Chomsky in The Guardian caused a great deal of controversy. Among other tough questions, it asked about Chomsky’s relationship with what The Times (UK) columnist Oliver Kamm quite accurately described as “some rather unsavoury elements who wrote about the Balkan wars in the 1990s.”
The furor at the time centered around Ms. Brockes confronting Chomky with the fact that he had lent his name to a letter praising the “outstanding” (Chomsky’s own words) work of a journalist called Diana Johnstone. Johnstone’s 2002 book Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto Press), argues that the July 1995 killing of at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica was, in essence (directly quoting from her book), not a “part of a plan of genocide” and that “there is no evidence whatsoever” for such a charge. This despite the November 1995 indictment of Bosnian Serb leaders Mladic and Radovan Karadzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for “genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war” stemming from that very episode and the later conviction by the same tribunal of a Bosnian Serb general of aiding and abetting genocide in Srebrenica.
Johnstone also states that no evidence exists that much more than 199 men and boys were killed there and that Srebrenica and other unfortunately misnamed 'safe areas' had in fact “served as Muslim military bases under UN protection.” In 2003, the Swedish magazine Ordfront published an interview with Johnstone where she reiterated these views. Chomsky was also among those who supported a campaign defending the right of a fringe magazine called Living Marxism to publish claims that footage the British television station ITN took in August 1992 at the Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp in Bosnia was faked. ITN sued the magazine for libel and won, putting the magazine out of business, as Living Marxism could not produce a single witness who had seen the camps at first hand, whereas others who had - such as the journalist Ed Vulliamy - testified as to their horror.
In fact, as recently as April 25, 2006, in an interview with Radio Television of Serbia (a station formerly aligned with the murderous and now-deceased Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic), Chomsky stated, of the iconic, emaciated image of a Bosnian Muslim man named Fikret Alic, the following:
Chomsky: [I]f you look at the coverage [i.e. media coverage of earlier phases of the Balkan wars], for example there was one famous incident which has completely reshaped the Western opinion and that was the photograph of the thin man behind the barb-wire.
Interviewer: A fraudulent photograph, as it turned out.
Chomsky: You remember. The thin men behind the barb-wire so that was Auschwitz and 'we can't have Auschwitz again.'
In taking this position, Chomsky seemingly attempts to discredit the on-the-ground reporting of not only Mr. Vulliamy - whose reporting for the Guardian from the war in Bosnia won him the international reporter of the year award in 1993 and 1994 - but of other journalists such as Penny Marshall, Ian Williams and Roy Gutman. In fact, Vulliamy , who filed the first reports on the horrors of the Trnopolje camp and was there that day the ITN footage was filmed, wrote as follows in The Guardian in March 2000:
Living Marxism's attempts to re-write the history of the camps was motivated by the fact that in their heart of hearts, these people applauded those camps and sympathized with their cause and wished to see it triumph. That was the central and - in the final hour, the only - issue. Shame, then, on those fools, supporters of the pogrom, cynics and dilettantes who supported them, gave them credence and endorsed their vile enterprise.
In his interview with Brockes, Chomsky stated that "Ed Vulliamy is a very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true."
In a November 2005 column, Marko Attila Hoare, a Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Kingston (London), wrote thusly:
An open letter to Ordfront, signed by Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and others, stated: 'We regard Johnstone's Fools' Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.' In his personal letter to Ordfront in defence of Johnstone, Chomsky wrote: 'I have known her for many years, have read the book, and feel that it is quite serious and important.' Chomsky makes no criticism here of Johnstone's massacre denial, or indeed anywhere else - except in the Brockes interview, which he has repudiated. Indeed, he endorses her revisionism: in response to Mikael van Reis's claim that 'She [Johnstone] insists that Serb atrocities - ethnic cleansing, torture camps, mass executions - are western propaganda', Chomsky replies that 'Johnstone argues - and, in fact, clearly demonstrates - that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.'
Pretty astounding stuff, huh? But, faced with a relentless campaign by Mr. Chomsky and his supporters The Guardian, to its eternal shame, pulled Brockes’ interview from its website and issued what can only be described as a groveling apology that did a great disservice not only to Ms Brockes herself, but also to former Guardian correspondent Vulliamy and all those journalists who actually risked their lives covering the Bosnian conflict, to say nothing of the victims of the conflict themselves.
The caving-in focused on three points, the chief of which appeared to be the headline used on the interview, which read: “Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated? A: My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough.”
Though this was a paraphrase rather than a literal quotation, the fact of the matter was that it did seem to accurately sum up the state of affairs: Chomsky had actively supported Johnstone, who in turn had claimed that the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated and not part of a campaign of genocide. The Guardian brouhaha prompted, Kemal Pervanic, author of The Killing Days: My Journey Through the Bosnia War, and a survivor of the Omarska concentration camp, to write that “If Srebrenica has been a lie, then all the other Bosnian-Serb nationalists' crimes in the three years before Srebrenica must be false too. Mr Chomsky has the audacity to claim that Living Marxism was "probably right" to claim the pictures ITN took on that fateful August afternoon in 1992 - a visit which has made it possible for me to be writing this letter 13 years later - were false. This is an insult not only to those who saved my life, but to survivors like myself.”
Chomsky complained about that, too, forcing The Guardian to write in its apology that, ignoring the fact that it was Chomsky’s characterization of the Serb-run camps that seemed to outrage Pervanic the most, “Prof Chomsky believes that publication (of Pervanic’s letter) was designed to undermine his position, and addressed a part of the interview which was false…With hindsight it is acknowledged that the juxtaposition has exacerbated Prof Chomsky's complaint and that is regretted.”
So Emma Brockes (whom I have never met), in this instance, at least, was silenced.
But the history of what happened in the Balkan wars should not be so easily silenced and re-written. With Ratko Mladic, predator and killer, now in custody, Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and the others who have sought to deny justice to the victims of Bosnia's killing fields should apologize to those victims for working so long to make the justice they sought less, not more, likely.
I first became aware of Chomsky's, shall we say rather unorthodox, views of the Bosnian conflict in connection with a campaign he and his supporters launched against the talented young British journalist Emma Brockes, whose October 2005 interview with Mr. Chomsky in The Guardian caused a great deal of controversy. Among other tough questions, it asked about Chomsky’s relationship with what The Times (UK) columnist Oliver Kamm quite accurately described as “some rather unsavoury elements who wrote about the Balkan wars in the 1990s.”
The furor at the time centered around Ms. Brockes confronting Chomky with the fact that he had lent his name to a letter praising the “outstanding” (Chomsky’s own words) work of a journalist called Diana Johnstone. Johnstone’s 2002 book Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto Press), argues that the July 1995 killing of at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica was, in essence (directly quoting from her book), not a “part of a plan of genocide” and that “there is no evidence whatsoever” for such a charge. This despite the November 1995 indictment of Bosnian Serb leaders Mladic and Radovan Karadzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for “genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war” stemming from that very episode and the later conviction by the same tribunal of a Bosnian Serb general of aiding and abetting genocide in Srebrenica.
Johnstone also states that no evidence exists that much more than 199 men and boys were killed there and that Srebrenica and other unfortunately misnamed 'safe areas' had in fact “served as Muslim military bases under UN protection.” In 2003, the Swedish magazine Ordfront published an interview with Johnstone where she reiterated these views. Chomsky was also among those who supported a campaign defending the right of a fringe magazine called Living Marxism to publish claims that footage the British television station ITN took in August 1992 at the Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp in Bosnia was faked. ITN sued the magazine for libel and won, putting the magazine out of business, as Living Marxism could not produce a single witness who had seen the camps at first hand, whereas others who had - such as the journalist Ed Vulliamy - testified as to their horror.
In fact, as recently as April 25, 2006, in an interview with Radio Television of Serbia (a station formerly aligned with the murderous and now-deceased Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic), Chomsky stated, of the iconic, emaciated image of a Bosnian Muslim man named Fikret Alic, the following:
Chomsky: [I]f you look at the coverage [i.e. media coverage of earlier phases of the Balkan wars], for example there was one famous incident which has completely reshaped the Western opinion and that was the photograph of the thin man behind the barb-wire.
Interviewer: A fraudulent photograph, as it turned out.
Chomsky: You remember. The thin men behind the barb-wire so that was Auschwitz and 'we can't have Auschwitz again.'
In taking this position, Chomsky seemingly attempts to discredit the on-the-ground reporting of not only Mr. Vulliamy - whose reporting for the Guardian from the war in Bosnia won him the international reporter of the year award in 1993 and 1994 - but of other journalists such as Penny Marshall, Ian Williams and Roy Gutman. In fact, Vulliamy , who filed the first reports on the horrors of the Trnopolje camp and was there that day the ITN footage was filmed, wrote as follows in The Guardian in March 2000:
Living Marxism's attempts to re-write the history of the camps was motivated by the fact that in their heart of hearts, these people applauded those camps and sympathized with their cause and wished to see it triumph. That was the central and - in the final hour, the only - issue. Shame, then, on those fools, supporters of the pogrom, cynics and dilettantes who supported them, gave them credence and endorsed their vile enterprise.
In his interview with Brockes, Chomsky stated that "Ed Vulliamy is a very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true."
In a November 2005 column, Marko Attila Hoare, a Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Kingston (London), wrote thusly:
An open letter to Ordfront, signed by Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and others, stated: 'We regard Johnstone's Fools' Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.' In his personal letter to Ordfront in defence of Johnstone, Chomsky wrote: 'I have known her for many years, have read the book, and feel that it is quite serious and important.' Chomsky makes no criticism here of Johnstone's massacre denial, or indeed anywhere else - except in the Brockes interview, which he has repudiated. Indeed, he endorses her revisionism: in response to Mikael van Reis's claim that 'She [Johnstone] insists that Serb atrocities - ethnic cleansing, torture camps, mass executions - are western propaganda', Chomsky replies that 'Johnstone argues - and, in fact, clearly demonstrates - that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.'
Pretty astounding stuff, huh? But, faced with a relentless campaign by Mr. Chomsky and his supporters The Guardian, to its eternal shame, pulled Brockes’ interview from its website and issued what can only be described as a groveling apology that did a great disservice not only to Ms Brockes herself, but also to former Guardian correspondent Vulliamy and all those journalists who actually risked their lives covering the Bosnian conflict, to say nothing of the victims of the conflict themselves.
The caving-in focused on three points, the chief of which appeared to be the headline used on the interview, which read: “Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated? A: My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough.”
Though this was a paraphrase rather than a literal quotation, the fact of the matter was that it did seem to accurately sum up the state of affairs: Chomsky had actively supported Johnstone, who in turn had claimed that the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated and not part of a campaign of genocide. The Guardian brouhaha prompted, Kemal Pervanic, author of The Killing Days: My Journey Through the Bosnia War, and a survivor of the Omarska concentration camp, to write that “If Srebrenica has been a lie, then all the other Bosnian-Serb nationalists' crimes in the three years before Srebrenica must be false too. Mr Chomsky has the audacity to claim that Living Marxism was "probably right" to claim the pictures ITN took on that fateful August afternoon in 1992 - a visit which has made it possible for me to be writing this letter 13 years later - were false. This is an insult not only to those who saved my life, but to survivors like myself.”
Chomsky complained about that, too, forcing The Guardian to write in its apology that, ignoring the fact that it was Chomsky’s characterization of the Serb-run camps that seemed to outrage Pervanic the most, “Prof Chomsky believes that publication (of Pervanic’s letter) was designed to undermine his position, and addressed a part of the interview which was false…With hindsight it is acknowledged that the juxtaposition has exacerbated Prof Chomsky's complaint and that is regretted.”
So Emma Brockes (whom I have never met), in this instance, at least, was silenced.
But the history of what happened in the Balkan wars should not be so easily silenced and re-written. With Ratko Mladic, predator and killer, now in custody, Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and the others who have sought to deny justice to the victims of Bosnia's killing fields should apologize to those victims for working so long to make the justice they sought less, not more, likely.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
The Struggle for Kashmir
Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, chairman of the Hurriyat Conference in Indian-administered Kashmir, was placed under house arrest today in India's latest move in its long colonial adventure there. I interviewed him in 2007 while reporting from the region and, at the request of a Kashmiri friend, repost my article from that time here today. To anyone who may read this, Kashmir remains the most beautiful place I have seen on this earth, and the story there is not at all what we have been lead to believe. Visit it soon, if you can. MD
The Struggle for Kashmir
By Michael Deibert
This article originally appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of the World Policy Journal.
In the bloody annals of the struggle for the Kashmir Valley, few chapters are as wrenching as that of the “disappeared.” Some 8,000 persons have been arrested or seized, the majority by Indian army and police units, never to be seen again. The conflict has thus far claimed at least 40,000 lives (local human rights groups put the number much higher), left tens of thousands wounded, hundreds of thousands displaced, and pitted the Indian state against Islamist militants, historically aided by India’s nuclear rival Pakistan. Amid this bitter conflict, another dark chapter has begun to surface, after nearly two decades of international silence and official denial.
In Ganderbal, a town in the heart of India’s Kashmir Valley, a visitor superficially encounters a winter idyll: rushing mountain streams ringed with snow-covered hills. But the sensation is fleeting.
“We have so many cases of people who have been disappeared, who have been killed, whose names are never known,” says Abdul Aziz, a 26 year-old merchant, standing with a group of men under a gray sky, garbed like the rest, in the region’s distinctive gown-like shirt, called a pheran. As he speaks, a horse-drawn cart pulls fire wood and produce down the road. “They are killed as militants, but they were not militants.” Steps away from the storefront where Aziz and a dozen others are gathered, there are three rises of freshly turned earth. These graves hold the bodies of three unknown men, say Aziz and the villagers, buried there by Indian security forces.
“Police or military arrest an innocent person and they label him as a Pakistani militant, as a foreign militant, as a local militant, and then they kill him,” says Gulam Hassan, a 50-year-old shopkeeper, as he observes the scene. “This is against the constitution, against the law, and against all humanity.”
When India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, vowed “zero tolerance” for the killing of suspected rebels in government custody while attending a May 2006 conference with local political leaders in Kashmir’s capital, Srinagar, many hoped a new day had dawned for human rights in the region. India has engaged in intermittent peace talks with Pakistan since 2003, and Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf in late 2006 proposed a four-point formula which, he said, could form the basis of a solution of the Kashmir dispute. (Most salient among them, for the first time there would be no Pakistani claim to Indian-controlled Kashmir or a demand for full independence for the region.) These moves seemed to augur a more peaceful future.
This January, in what many interpreted as another hopeful sign, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the spiritual leader of Kashmir’s Sunni Muslims and chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference, which has historically advocated autonomy for the region, told a crowd in Islamabad, Pakistan, that he was calling for an end to armed struggle as a means of ending Indian rule of the region. “We are not prepared to sacrifice any more of our loved ones,” he announced
After a similar declaration five years ago, Abdul Ghani Lone, then leader of the Hurriyat Conference, was gunned down by unknown assailants. Mr. Farooq’s own father, Mirwaiz Mohammed Farooq, was slain in a similar manner in May 1990. But the politicians’ words have yet to filter to ground-level. A special investigating team sent by the Indian government has thus far arrested 11 policemen from Ganderbal—including the senior superintendent and deputy superintendent—for the alleged killings of civilians in staged gun battles with the security forces, here described as “encounters.” At least four bodies have been exhumed from graves as part of the investigation.
Police officers in Ganderbal said that they thought the stories of disappearances were exaggerated. “That’s not the entire police force, only one or two people may have done it,” said A. M. Reshi, the on-duty Ganderbal police station house officer. “I am of the opinion that the police, on the whole, are working on a good way, as per procedure, as per of the law of the land, as per the constitution.” A. R. Khan, the new police superintendent of Ganderbal, declined to be interviewed for this report.
How It Began
The roots of the Kashmir crisis stretch back to the twilight of Great Britain’s colonial rule and partition of India and Pakistan, when a Hindu Maharaja, Hari Singh, pleaded for Indian assistance to fend off an invasion of Pakistan-backed tribesmen entering Kashmir in 1947. He allowed Indian troops to rush to his aid, and signed a document agreeing to become part of the Indian state. Kashmiris, 12 million of whom make up the only Muslim-majority state in India, where a promised a referendum on the status of the region which was never held. A 1948 United Nations Security Council resolution posited that in a plebiscite, Kashmiris should only have the option to accede to either India or Pakistan, denying Kashmiris a vote for independence, the long-cherished goal of many. Despite later wars, the 1947 armistice border between Indian and Pakistani-administered Kashmir has remained largely along the contours one sees today, and is know as the Line of Control.
Though demarcating separate sections controlled by two separate armies, the Line of Control has never been recognized as an international border. India and Pakistan have fought successive wars along the frontier, the most recent in 1999. The Indian government refers to its portion of the territory as Jammu and Kashmir, referring as well to neighboring Jammu state, which falls within Indian territory, while the other side of the Line of Control is dubbed Pakistani Occupied Kashmir (POK ). The Pakistani government refers to its portion of the captured territory as Azad (Free) Jammu and Kashmir.
When 1987 legislative elections seemed likely to result in a victory for a coalition of Islamic and secessionist parties under the umbrella of the Muslim United Front (MUF), the Indian authorities responded with mass arrests of MUF candidates and party workers. This was followed by credible and pervasive allegations of vote rigging, and the awarding of the election to a rival, less radical, coalition. Many Kashmiri youths who had previously sought to change the status quo through electoral means felt they had no alternative but to turn to the gun, with Pakistan’s intelligence services—particularly the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency—more than happy to provide training and weapons. The dispute flared into open insurrection.
The Indian government faced large-scale protests and a sustained campaign of terrorism, including the murder of political leaders and mass-casualty civilian attacks, on a scale not seen before. In two incidents in 1990 alone, Indian police shot and killed at least 35 demonstrators attempting to cross Srinagar’s Gawakadal Bridge, and then opened fire and killed at least 21 at the funeral of Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq. Three years later, 37 people were killed when India’s 74th Battalion Border Security Force opened fire on a crowd estimated at 10,000 marching to protest extrajudicial killings in the town of Beijbehara. For their part, Kashmiri militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure), which India has long accused Pakistan of supporting, retaliated with the December 2000 attack on the 17th century Red Fort in India’s capital, New Delhi, in which three died; a 2001 suicide attack on India’s parliament which left 14 dead; and, the Indian government charges, last summer’s bomb attacks on commuter trains in India’s economic capital, Mumbai, in which 187 people were killed. Fatal attacks by Islamic militants against members of the local Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and National Conference Party (NCP) because of their participation in Indian electoral politics are now routine. Tens of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus, called Pandits, have been driven from their homes.
Many fear that if the opportunity for a lasting settlement to the Kashmir problem is not seized during the present era of relative détente, the region will have lost its last, best chance for peace. “This is a golden opportunity which needs to be taken now, it should not take years,” says Mehbooba Mufti, president of the PDP. Mufti’s party came to power as part of an elected coalition government in Kashmir in 2002. The post of chief minister (the Indian equivalent of governor) currently resides with Ghulam Nabi Azad, of the ruling national Congress party, which favors resolving the crisis in Kashmir within the Indian constitutional framework. “So many people have been martyred, so many people have lost their lives, so many homes have been destroyed, they would like to have something out of it,” Mufti contends. “If we don’t give the Kashmiris something today, this problem is going...to manifest again into some type of
gangrene.”
Though India, a dynamic, hopeful country, is undergoing an economic boom that is the envy of other emergent nations, Kashmir remains a shaming stain. “The Indian government has ended some practices such as indiscriminate firing upon unarmed protesters,” says Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. “But they have begun this system where soldiers just kill suspected militants, completely against the laws of war.”
In a September 2006, Human Rights Watch issued a detailed report condemning what it called “patterns of impunity” in Kashmir and neighboring Jammu state, and called for a “credible and independent” investigation into all disappearances and staged killings since the conflict began. Part of the problem, according to Ganguly, is a system of payouts and promotions whereby soldiers are rewarded for killing suspected insurgents.
Likewise, human rights monitors have pointed to Section 45 of India’s criminal procedure code, which protects any member of the armed forces from arrest for “anything done or purported to be done by him in the discharge of his official duties except after obtaining the consent of the Central government.“ Section 197(2) of the same code makes it mandatory for prosecutors to obtain permission from the federal government to initiate criminal proceedings against any public servant, including armed forces personnel.
The fate of Kashmir remains an intensely divisive issue in modernizing India. Facile political definitions become blurred as Indians talk about the fate of the restive region. “Kashmir could be solved tomorrow. If the Kashmiris wanted to join the Indian union, they would prosper like never before,” says Ramachandra Guha, an Indian historian and author of the just-published
India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. “Independence or joining Pakistan are no solutions...and chasing this fantasy of independence will lead to the sacrifice of another generation of young men.”
Many Kashmiris, however, find such arguments unpersuasive. “For me, that’s a colonial way of looking at things,” says Idrees Kanth, a 28-year-old Kashmiri graduate student in New Delhi. “That was precisely how the British rationalized their rule in India.” Ideas like nationalism are “very penetrative,” Kanth believes, even to the Left and the intellectual class. “But, watching them during an India-Pakistan cricket match, you should see how they cheer.”
The Voices Seldom Heard
This past February, in the Lal Chowk neighborhood of Srinagar, a once-lovely city on Dal Lake now ringed with barbed wire and patrolled by soldiers, hundreds of Kashmiris stage a sit-in protest for three days against the human rights situation in the region. Beneath a tent, festooned with images of the dead and Urdu script quoting the Koran, is Yasin Malik, a secessionist rebel who underwent a transformation while in prison and now leads a non-violent, Ghandian movement called the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF ). He lies on a mat during the second day of a hunger strike.
He threatens to fast “unto death” if the human rights situation in Kashmir does not improve. “The mothers and sisters want to know where their children are," said Malik. "If they have been killed, give us their bodies.” Nearby, sit relatives of the disappeared, many holding photos.
“I joined this organization because my son, Javid Ahmed Ahanger, was taken by national security personnel in August 1990,” says Parmina Ahanger, the 47-year-old head of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, a Srinagar-based organization. “I sent a complaint into the court and to the police. They established that he had been taken, but they pleaded their inability to act as the officers involved in my son’s abduction were of very high- ranking positions.”
Another woman, 50-year-old Rahti Razak, speaking through her tears, held up a photo of a young man with an impressive mane of black locks. “My son was taken from his bedroom when he was sleeping with his one-year-old son and wife in 1997. They came into his room, dragged him out by his hair and took him away,” she says. “He was abducted by the Special Operations Group (army and local police). I have been going all over this valley, to Uttar Pradesh and other places, but I have not been able to locate him.”
There are many such stories. Safiya Azad, whose haunting dark eyes are visible beneath her black burqa, tells the story of her husband, Himaynu Azad. “My husband was about 29 when he was arrested by Special Battalion 137 in 1993,” she says. “He was a political activist, and was connected with the militants. But even if he was a militant, they have punished the whole family. We’ve gone everywhere, to all authorities, we have put in reports with several police stations. They say that he escaped from their custody. We have a right to know what happened to him.”
As another family member of one of Kashmir's disappeared takes to the microphone and begins yet another impassioned appeal for justice, Yasin Malik rises wearily from beneath his blanket to say some final words to a visitor. "In Kashmir, there is no democracy," said Malik. "The government of India in Kashmir is existing in bunkers, and they're running their democracy through the barrel of a gun."
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press).
The Struggle for Kashmir
By Michael Deibert
This article originally appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of the World Policy Journal.
In the bloody annals of the struggle for the Kashmir Valley, few chapters are as wrenching as that of the “disappeared.” Some 8,000 persons have been arrested or seized, the majority by Indian army and police units, never to be seen again. The conflict has thus far claimed at least 40,000 lives (local human rights groups put the number much higher), left tens of thousands wounded, hundreds of thousands displaced, and pitted the Indian state against Islamist militants, historically aided by India’s nuclear rival Pakistan. Amid this bitter conflict, another dark chapter has begun to surface, after nearly two decades of international silence and official denial.
In Ganderbal, a town in the heart of India’s Kashmir Valley, a visitor superficially encounters a winter idyll: rushing mountain streams ringed with snow-covered hills. But the sensation is fleeting.
“We have so many cases of people who have been disappeared, who have been killed, whose names are never known,” says Abdul Aziz, a 26 year-old merchant, standing with a group of men under a gray sky, garbed like the rest, in the region’s distinctive gown-like shirt, called a pheran. As he speaks, a horse-drawn cart pulls fire wood and produce down the road. “They are killed as militants, but they were not militants.” Steps away from the storefront where Aziz and a dozen others are gathered, there are three rises of freshly turned earth. These graves hold the bodies of three unknown men, say Aziz and the villagers, buried there by Indian security forces.
“Police or military arrest an innocent person and they label him as a Pakistani militant, as a foreign militant, as a local militant, and then they kill him,” says Gulam Hassan, a 50-year-old shopkeeper, as he observes the scene. “This is against the constitution, against the law, and against all humanity.”
When India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, vowed “zero tolerance” for the killing of suspected rebels in government custody while attending a May 2006 conference with local political leaders in Kashmir’s capital, Srinagar, many hoped a new day had dawned for human rights in the region. India has engaged in intermittent peace talks with Pakistan since 2003, and Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf in late 2006 proposed a four-point formula which, he said, could form the basis of a solution of the Kashmir dispute. (Most salient among them, for the first time there would be no Pakistani claim to Indian-controlled Kashmir or a demand for full independence for the region.) These moves seemed to augur a more peaceful future.
This January, in what many interpreted as another hopeful sign, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the spiritual leader of Kashmir’s Sunni Muslims and chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference, which has historically advocated autonomy for the region, told a crowd in Islamabad, Pakistan, that he was calling for an end to armed struggle as a means of ending Indian rule of the region. “We are not prepared to sacrifice any more of our loved ones,” he announced
After a similar declaration five years ago, Abdul Ghani Lone, then leader of the Hurriyat Conference, was gunned down by unknown assailants. Mr. Farooq’s own father, Mirwaiz Mohammed Farooq, was slain in a similar manner in May 1990. But the politicians’ words have yet to filter to ground-level. A special investigating team sent by the Indian government has thus far arrested 11 policemen from Ganderbal—including the senior superintendent and deputy superintendent—for the alleged killings of civilians in staged gun battles with the security forces, here described as “encounters.” At least four bodies have been exhumed from graves as part of the investigation.
Police officers in Ganderbal said that they thought the stories of disappearances were exaggerated. “That’s not the entire police force, only one or two people may have done it,” said A. M. Reshi, the on-duty Ganderbal police station house officer. “I am of the opinion that the police, on the whole, are working on a good way, as per procedure, as per of the law of the land, as per the constitution.” A. R. Khan, the new police superintendent of Ganderbal, declined to be interviewed for this report.
How It Began
The roots of the Kashmir crisis stretch back to the twilight of Great Britain’s colonial rule and partition of India and Pakistan, when a Hindu Maharaja, Hari Singh, pleaded for Indian assistance to fend off an invasion of Pakistan-backed tribesmen entering Kashmir in 1947. He allowed Indian troops to rush to his aid, and signed a document agreeing to become part of the Indian state. Kashmiris, 12 million of whom make up the only Muslim-majority state in India, where a promised a referendum on the status of the region which was never held. A 1948 United Nations Security Council resolution posited that in a plebiscite, Kashmiris should only have the option to accede to either India or Pakistan, denying Kashmiris a vote for independence, the long-cherished goal of many. Despite later wars, the 1947 armistice border between Indian and Pakistani-administered Kashmir has remained largely along the contours one sees today, and is know as the Line of Control.
Though demarcating separate sections controlled by two separate armies, the Line of Control has never been recognized as an international border. India and Pakistan have fought successive wars along the frontier, the most recent in 1999. The Indian government refers to its portion of the territory as Jammu and Kashmir, referring as well to neighboring Jammu state, which falls within Indian territory, while the other side of the Line of Control is dubbed Pakistani Occupied Kashmir (POK ). The Pakistani government refers to its portion of the captured territory as Azad (Free) Jammu and Kashmir.
When 1987 legislative elections seemed likely to result in a victory for a coalition of Islamic and secessionist parties under the umbrella of the Muslim United Front (MUF), the Indian authorities responded with mass arrests of MUF candidates and party workers. This was followed by credible and pervasive allegations of vote rigging, and the awarding of the election to a rival, less radical, coalition. Many Kashmiri youths who had previously sought to change the status quo through electoral means felt they had no alternative but to turn to the gun, with Pakistan’s intelligence services—particularly the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency—more than happy to provide training and weapons. The dispute flared into open insurrection.
The Indian government faced large-scale protests and a sustained campaign of terrorism, including the murder of political leaders and mass-casualty civilian attacks, on a scale not seen before. In two incidents in 1990 alone, Indian police shot and killed at least 35 demonstrators attempting to cross Srinagar’s Gawakadal Bridge, and then opened fire and killed at least 21 at the funeral of Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq. Three years later, 37 people were killed when India’s 74th Battalion Border Security Force opened fire on a crowd estimated at 10,000 marching to protest extrajudicial killings in the town of Beijbehara. For their part, Kashmiri militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure), which India has long accused Pakistan of supporting, retaliated with the December 2000 attack on the 17th century Red Fort in India’s capital, New Delhi, in which three died; a 2001 suicide attack on India’s parliament which left 14 dead; and, the Indian government charges, last summer’s bomb attacks on commuter trains in India’s economic capital, Mumbai, in which 187 people were killed. Fatal attacks by Islamic militants against members of the local Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and National Conference Party (NCP) because of their participation in Indian electoral politics are now routine. Tens of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus, called Pandits, have been driven from their homes.
Many fear that if the opportunity for a lasting settlement to the Kashmir problem is not seized during the present era of relative détente, the region will have lost its last, best chance for peace. “This is a golden opportunity which needs to be taken now, it should not take years,” says Mehbooba Mufti, president of the PDP. Mufti’s party came to power as part of an elected coalition government in Kashmir in 2002. The post of chief minister (the Indian equivalent of governor) currently resides with Ghulam Nabi Azad, of the ruling national Congress party, which favors resolving the crisis in Kashmir within the Indian constitutional framework. “So many people have been martyred, so many people have lost their lives, so many homes have been destroyed, they would like to have something out of it,” Mufti contends. “If we don’t give the Kashmiris something today, this problem is going...to manifest again into some type of
gangrene.”
Though India, a dynamic, hopeful country, is undergoing an economic boom that is the envy of other emergent nations, Kashmir remains a shaming stain. “The Indian government has ended some practices such as indiscriminate firing upon unarmed protesters,” says Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. “But they have begun this system where soldiers just kill suspected militants, completely against the laws of war.”
In a September 2006, Human Rights Watch issued a detailed report condemning what it called “patterns of impunity” in Kashmir and neighboring Jammu state, and called for a “credible and independent” investigation into all disappearances and staged killings since the conflict began. Part of the problem, according to Ganguly, is a system of payouts and promotions whereby soldiers are rewarded for killing suspected insurgents.
Likewise, human rights monitors have pointed to Section 45 of India’s criminal procedure code, which protects any member of the armed forces from arrest for “anything done or purported to be done by him in the discharge of his official duties except after obtaining the consent of the Central government.“ Section 197(2) of the same code makes it mandatory for prosecutors to obtain permission from the federal government to initiate criminal proceedings against any public servant, including armed forces personnel.
The fate of Kashmir remains an intensely divisive issue in modernizing India. Facile political definitions become blurred as Indians talk about the fate of the restive region. “Kashmir could be solved tomorrow. If the Kashmiris wanted to join the Indian union, they would prosper like never before,” says Ramachandra Guha, an Indian historian and author of the just-published
India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. “Independence or joining Pakistan are no solutions...and chasing this fantasy of independence will lead to the sacrifice of another generation of young men.”
Many Kashmiris, however, find such arguments unpersuasive. “For me, that’s a colonial way of looking at things,” says Idrees Kanth, a 28-year-old Kashmiri graduate student in New Delhi. “That was precisely how the British rationalized their rule in India.” Ideas like nationalism are “very penetrative,” Kanth believes, even to the Left and the intellectual class. “But, watching them during an India-Pakistan cricket match, you should see how they cheer.”
The Voices Seldom Heard
This past February, in the Lal Chowk neighborhood of Srinagar, a once-lovely city on Dal Lake now ringed with barbed wire and patrolled by soldiers, hundreds of Kashmiris stage a sit-in protest for three days against the human rights situation in the region. Beneath a tent, festooned with images of the dead and Urdu script quoting the Koran, is Yasin Malik, a secessionist rebel who underwent a transformation while in prison and now leads a non-violent, Ghandian movement called the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF ). He lies on a mat during the second day of a hunger strike.
He threatens to fast “unto death” if the human rights situation in Kashmir does not improve. “The mothers and sisters want to know where their children are," said Malik. "If they have been killed, give us their bodies.” Nearby, sit relatives of the disappeared, many holding photos.
“I joined this organization because my son, Javid Ahmed Ahanger, was taken by national security personnel in August 1990,” says Parmina Ahanger, the 47-year-old head of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, a Srinagar-based organization. “I sent a complaint into the court and to the police. They established that he had been taken, but they pleaded their inability to act as the officers involved in my son’s abduction were of very high- ranking positions.”
Another woman, 50-year-old Rahti Razak, speaking through her tears, held up a photo of a young man with an impressive mane of black locks. “My son was taken from his bedroom when he was sleeping with his one-year-old son and wife in 1997. They came into his room, dragged him out by his hair and took him away,” she says. “He was abducted by the Special Operations Group (army and local police). I have been going all over this valley, to Uttar Pradesh and other places, but I have not been able to locate him.”
There are many such stories. Safiya Azad, whose haunting dark eyes are visible beneath her black burqa, tells the story of her husband, Himaynu Azad. “My husband was about 29 when he was arrested by Special Battalion 137 in 1993,” she says. “He was a political activist, and was connected with the militants. But even if he was a militant, they have punished the whole family. We’ve gone everywhere, to all authorities, we have put in reports with several police stations. They say that he escaped from their custody. We have a right to know what happened to him.”
As another family member of one of Kashmir's disappeared takes to the microphone and begins yet another impassioned appeal for justice, Yasin Malik rises wearily from beneath his blanket to say some final words to a visitor. "In Kashmir, there is no democracy," said Malik. "The government of India in Kashmir is existing in bunkers, and they're running their democracy through the barrel of a gun."
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press).
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Cartel Wars
Cartel Wars
May 16, 2011
By Michael Deibert
Truthdig
(Read the original article here)
MATAMOROS, Mexico—Of all the iconography that one encounters when traversing the border regions between the United States and Mexico—a land informed by the exploits of Mexican and American bandits and smugglers and which was part of a single country until 1836—two images stand out to a visitor.
Gazing out at passersby from clothing shops and discount stores on both sides of the border, the first is a visage of dapper, mustachioed solemnity: The face of Jesús Malverde. Often depicted today on T-shirts and baseball caps with marijuana leafs wreathing his face, Malverde was said to have been an outlaw from the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa. The main shrine dedicated to Malverde—allegedly executed by authorities in about 1909 and revered as a quasi-saint by many in Mexico’s criminal underworld—is in the Sinaloan city of Culiacan, birthplace of the eponymous Cartel de Sinaloa, headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, perhaps Mexico’s most famous drug trafficker.
The other image is that of a hooded, scythe-wielding skeleton, Santa Muerte (Saint Death). Like Jesús Malverde, Santa Muerte—whose main shrine in the rough-and-ready Mexican city barrio of Tepito sees visitors greeted by the skeletal lady in a white wedding dress—has become an object of veneration among Mexico’s criminals.
Here in Matamoros, a community of about 500,000 that gave birth to the criminal organization known as the Cartel del Golfo (Gulf Cartel) and which sits just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, these figures, culled from the rich imagery of religion and crime, have now been joined by new depictions of transgression and loss.
At the Matamoros morgue, plastered to its glass doors amid a stench of human decay, the faces of dozens of people who have disappeared in this Mexican state of Tamaulipas over the last year gaze out onto the world. Relatives believe that they may be among the 183 bodies exhumed from 40 separate pits by Mexican authorities over the last month or so, likely victims of the Gulf Cartel’s erstwhile allies-turned-enemies, Los Zetas.
In the annals of a conflict that has killed more than 34,600 since Mexican President Felipe Calderon militarized his country’s battle against drug traffickers in December 2006, the conflict in Tamaulipas is writing a new and bloody chapter.
Cartel Recruited Elite Army Unit’s Members
What would grow into the present-day Cartel del Golfo had its genesis in Matamoros and the enterprising diversification of a Mexican smuggler and bootlegger named Juan Nepomuceno Guerra. Born in 1915, Guerra and his nephew, Juan Garcia Abrego, had decided by the 1970s to expand the criminal band’s connections with Colombia’s Cali Cartel, and had developed an extensive web of corruption of local, state and federal government officials in Tamaulipas.
Garcia Abrego was arrested at a ranch in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon in January 1996 and subsequently sentenced to 11 life terms in the United States for drug trafficking. Guerra died in 2001 of natural causes. Control of the cartel fell into the hands of Osiel Cardenas Guillen, a former mechanic who promptly earned the sobriquet El Mata Amigos (Friend Killer) by dispatching a potential rival, a close personal acquaintance.
When Cardenas recruited as his lieutenants his two brothers—Antonio Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen (aka Tony Tormenta, or Tony the Storm) and Mario Cardenas Guillen—as well as Jorge Eduardo “El Coss” Costilla Sanchez, a former Matamoros police officer, the modern-day Gulf Cartel was born.
Feeling under pressure from his rivals after his ascension to the head of the cartel, in the late 1990s Cardenas began to recruit active members of an elite Mexican army unit, the Grupo Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), to become the organization’s military wing. Trained originally in counterinsurgency and counternarcotics tactics, the GAFE deserters were also skilled in such tactics as rapid deployment, intelligence collection, countersurveillance and ambush.
Initially led by Arturo Guzman Decena, known as Z1 (“Zeta” in Spanish) after a Mexican radio code for high-ranking officers. Guzman Decena was killed in November 2002, and his successor, Rogelio Gonzalez Pizaña (Z2), was scooped up by authorities less than two years later. The leadership of Los Zetas then coalesced around Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano (Z3), a man whose violence caused him to become known as El Verdugo (The Executioner).
For a time, the arrangement worked. Los Zetas proved themselves to be so adept at killing and terrorizing the cartel’s enemies that they were even recruited to train members of La Familia, Gulf Cartel allies based in the western state of Michoacan and at the time led by Nazario Moreno Gonzalez. Known as El Mas Loco (The Craziest One), Moreno invested La Familia with quasi-religious overtones, even giving the group’s foot soldiers a book of his aphorisms to carry along as they committed such acts as hurling five decapitated heads across the floor of the Sol y Sombra (Sun and Shadow) nightclub in September 2006. Moreno would be killed in a gun battle with Mexican security forces in December 2010.
La Familia was outrageous and bizarre, but it proved to be only the smallest foreshadowing of what was to come. Shortly after the Sol y Sombra incident, Felipe Calderon was elected Mexico’s president and declared war on the country’s drug trade. In an equally significant corollary, although hardly commented upon at the time, Osiel Cardenas Guillen, who had been running the Gulf Cartel from a Mexican prison cell since his arrest in March 2003, was extradited to the United States.
The glue that had held together one of Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking operations for a decade was becoming unstuck. The center would not hold.
Pits Filled With the Dead at San Fernando
Following the extradition of Cardenas, relations between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas grew ever more strained. Members of the latter, high on their own sense of power and fortified by copious amounts of cocaine and Buchanan whisky (the cartel libation of choice), had little use for their former bosses, diminished as they were by the Cardenas arrest and a decentralized system that saw Cardenas’ brother Tony Tormenta and the former cop El Coss acting as co-heads of the organization.
The January 2010 slaying of Victor Mendoza, a Zeta lieutenant killed by a Gulf Cartel gunman in circumstances that are not entirely clear, proved to be the match that lit the bonfire of violence that now threatens to consume Tamaulipas.
Following pitched battles in the city of Reynosa, about 50 miles west of Matamoros, the Gulf Cartel claimed control of those two cities, with the Zetas ruling in the state capital, Ciudad Victoria, and in Nuevo Laredo, the Mexican counterpart of Laredo, Texas. The space between these population centers consists of little-patrolled rough countryside, and became the scene of the most ruthless kind of war as each side tried to eliminate the other.
“The current levels of violence are indeed changing the entire culture of the border region,” says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville who has studied the conflict extensively. “The levels of violence have escalated to unprecedented levels, and the new practices by killers are extreme and had never been observed in the past.”
Correa-Cabrera is referring to the 183 confirmed dead recovered thus far from the San Fernando pits, roughly 80 miles to the south, but her observations are anything but distant and academic. The university campus where she works, just across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, has been struck on three separate occasions by bullets fired during confrontations on the Mexican side.
Almost unbelievably, before this latest outrage, San Fernando, surrounded by rural roads and ranches, had been the scene of a similar mass killing less than a year earlier, when a group believed to be the Zetas killed 72 Central American migrants outside the town in August 2010 after holding them for ransom. Since the most recent killings, 16 local police officers have been detained under suspicion of involvement.
“They recruit boys from 13 to 17 years old,” says a 19-year-old university student from Matamoros, speaking in hushed tones about the cartels. “The police are also involved in this.”
Since the February 2010 mutiny by the Zetas, two loose and broad-based cartel alliances have seemed to coalesce. One configuration consists of the Gulf Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel and the now greatly diminished La Familia; the Zetas have aligned themselves with the Cartel de Juarez (based in the eponymous city in the state of Chihuahua in western Mexico) and the Beltran-Leyva Carte, which became famous for its use of 12-year-old hit men and has suffered the loss of its top leaders through killings and imprisonment at the Calderon government’s hands. The Zetas have also reinforced themselves by recruiting members of Los Kabiles, a special-operations unit of the Guatemalan army trained in jungle warfare and counterinsurgency tactics and that had a particularly ghastly record in that country’s civil war.
In Tamaulipas, at least, the federal government has often seemed little more than a hapless referee as the two sides have battled each other for control of lucrative drug trafficking routes with ever-increasing levels of savagery. The dumping of dismembered bodies in the state has become almost routine, while gruesome videos of the foot soldiers of various factions being beheaded or otherwise killed are posted to websites such as the anonymously run Blog del Narco as a way to send messages and spread fear among opponents.
Though several midlevel Zeta operatives have been killed or captured, perhaps the Calderon government’s most notable victory in the region was the killing of Tony Tormenta during an hours-long gun battle in Matamoros last November. Although the official reports said that four cartel gunmen, three marines and a reporter perished during a series of gun battles throughout the city, Matamoros residents put the number of dead that day at closer to 100.
In February of this year, banners addressed to the Zetas were hung from bridges in Tamaulipas and three other Mexican states. They contained the claim, among others, that the state “had already witnessed the killing and massacre of innocent people by the Zetas” and a demand that the group “fight like men.” The banners were signed Carteles Unidos (United Cartels), an apparent reference to the Gulf-Sinaloa-La Familia alliance.
An entire new vocabulary of neologisms—from narcocorridos (songs) and narcomantas (banners) to narcobloqueos (blockades)—has taken root in Mexican culture as the society at large seeks ways to label the pervasive influence of drug traffickers and their signifiers.
“People are tired,” says Mauricio Meschoulam, a professor at the department of international studies at the Universidad Iberoamericana in the capital of Mexico City, where an estimated 150,000 people marched against the violence this month. “They feel that the government’s fight is unsuccessful and that the government is not in control of the situation. This perception increased sharply in 2010, especially in the second half of the year.”
Endless Violence Fueled by U.S. Firearms
Though the violence in Tamaulipas is shocking, it is not isolated.
In Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city of 1.3 million people across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, 3,000 people were killed last year during a power struggle between the Cartel de Juarez and the Cartel de Sinaloa and a general breakdown in law and order not lessened by the presence of the Mexican army. This past February, Jaime Zapata, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, was shot to death and his partner was wounded as they drove in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi. A known member of Los Zetas was subsequently arrested for his killing.
On May 19, a gun battle between suspected Zetas and Mexican marines patrolling Falcon Lake, which sits on the border between Texas and Tamaulipas, left 12 gang members and one marine dead. Last September, U.S. boater David Hartley disappeared after being chased and shot by gunmen on the Mexican side of the lake’s border. The severed head of the Mexican police commander in charge of investigating the case was subsequently left outside a Mexican army post.
The policies of the United States, involved in a perversely symbiotic relationship with Mexico in which drugs flow north and weapons flow south, have not been helpful.
A recent report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime concluded that the U.S., with a population of 310 million, consumed $37 billion in cocaine in 2008, while Europe as a whole, with a population of 830 million, consumed $34 billion. Over the past four years, as The Washington Post has reported, more than 60,000 U.S. guns have been found in Mexico, largely coming from gun dealers in states with conspicuously liberal gun laws such as Texas and Arizona. The AK-47 used to kill agent Jaime Zapata was traced to a legal purchase at a Texas gun store.
In the meantime, the brazen and highly ritualized drumbeat of violence continues, leading observers on both sides of the border to wonder just how deeply it is permanently changing Mexico.
“How can you justify these extreme new practices and massacres?” asks professor Correa-Cabrera. “How can someone justify to himself assassinating dozens of men, women and children?”
“The economic explanation is definitely an important one,” she continues. “But there must be more elements in these new and extreme forms of violence. A new culture and new beliefs are taking hold.”
Michael Deibert's writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Miami Herald, Le Monde diplomatique, Folha de Sao Paulo and the World Policy Journal, among other publications. He has been a featured commentator on international affairs for the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, National Public Radio, and WNYC New York Public Radio.
In his role as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University, which promotes processes of reconciliation by non-violent means at all levels throughout the world, he aids the Centre in its mission to increase and sustain dialogue on international peacebuliding and development issues, with a particular focus on Africa and Latin America.
A recognized authority on the Caribbean nation of Haiti, which he first visited in 1997, Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). His reporting currently focuses on drug trafficking, organized crime and insurgency in the Americas.
His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com. He can be followed on Twitter at twitter.com/michaelcdeibert.
May 16, 2011
By Michael Deibert
Truthdig
(Read the original article here)
MATAMOROS, Mexico—Of all the iconography that one encounters when traversing the border regions between the United States and Mexico—a land informed by the exploits of Mexican and American bandits and smugglers and which was part of a single country until 1836—two images stand out to a visitor.
Gazing out at passersby from clothing shops and discount stores on both sides of the border, the first is a visage of dapper, mustachioed solemnity: The face of Jesús Malverde. Often depicted today on T-shirts and baseball caps with marijuana leafs wreathing his face, Malverde was said to have been an outlaw from the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa. The main shrine dedicated to Malverde—allegedly executed by authorities in about 1909 and revered as a quasi-saint by many in Mexico’s criminal underworld—is in the Sinaloan city of Culiacan, birthplace of the eponymous Cartel de Sinaloa, headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, perhaps Mexico’s most famous drug trafficker.
The other image is that of a hooded, scythe-wielding skeleton, Santa Muerte (Saint Death). Like Jesús Malverde, Santa Muerte—whose main shrine in the rough-and-ready Mexican city barrio of Tepito sees visitors greeted by the skeletal lady in a white wedding dress—has become an object of veneration among Mexico’s criminals.
Here in Matamoros, a community of about 500,000 that gave birth to the criminal organization known as the Cartel del Golfo (Gulf Cartel) and which sits just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, these figures, culled from the rich imagery of religion and crime, have now been joined by new depictions of transgression and loss.
At the Matamoros morgue, plastered to its glass doors amid a stench of human decay, the faces of dozens of people who have disappeared in this Mexican state of Tamaulipas over the last year gaze out onto the world. Relatives believe that they may be among the 183 bodies exhumed from 40 separate pits by Mexican authorities over the last month or so, likely victims of the Gulf Cartel’s erstwhile allies-turned-enemies, Los Zetas.
In the annals of a conflict that has killed more than 34,600 since Mexican President Felipe Calderon militarized his country’s battle against drug traffickers in December 2006, the conflict in Tamaulipas is writing a new and bloody chapter.
Cartel Recruited Elite Army Unit’s Members
What would grow into the present-day Cartel del Golfo had its genesis in Matamoros and the enterprising diversification of a Mexican smuggler and bootlegger named Juan Nepomuceno Guerra. Born in 1915, Guerra and his nephew, Juan Garcia Abrego, had decided by the 1970s to expand the criminal band’s connections with Colombia’s Cali Cartel, and had developed an extensive web of corruption of local, state and federal government officials in Tamaulipas.
Garcia Abrego was arrested at a ranch in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon in January 1996 and subsequently sentenced to 11 life terms in the United States for drug trafficking. Guerra died in 2001 of natural causes. Control of the cartel fell into the hands of Osiel Cardenas Guillen, a former mechanic who promptly earned the sobriquet El Mata Amigos (Friend Killer) by dispatching a potential rival, a close personal acquaintance.
When Cardenas recruited as his lieutenants his two brothers—Antonio Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen (aka Tony Tormenta, or Tony the Storm) and Mario Cardenas Guillen—as well as Jorge Eduardo “El Coss” Costilla Sanchez, a former Matamoros police officer, the modern-day Gulf Cartel was born.
Feeling under pressure from his rivals after his ascension to the head of the cartel, in the late 1990s Cardenas began to recruit active members of an elite Mexican army unit, the Grupo Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), to become the organization’s military wing. Trained originally in counterinsurgency and counternarcotics tactics, the GAFE deserters were also skilled in such tactics as rapid deployment, intelligence collection, countersurveillance and ambush.
Initially led by Arturo Guzman Decena, known as Z1 (“Zeta” in Spanish) after a Mexican radio code for high-ranking officers. Guzman Decena was killed in November 2002, and his successor, Rogelio Gonzalez Pizaña (Z2), was scooped up by authorities less than two years later. The leadership of Los Zetas then coalesced around Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano (Z3), a man whose violence caused him to become known as El Verdugo (The Executioner).
For a time, the arrangement worked. Los Zetas proved themselves to be so adept at killing and terrorizing the cartel’s enemies that they were even recruited to train members of La Familia, Gulf Cartel allies based in the western state of Michoacan and at the time led by Nazario Moreno Gonzalez. Known as El Mas Loco (The Craziest One), Moreno invested La Familia with quasi-religious overtones, even giving the group’s foot soldiers a book of his aphorisms to carry along as they committed such acts as hurling five decapitated heads across the floor of the Sol y Sombra (Sun and Shadow) nightclub in September 2006. Moreno would be killed in a gun battle with Mexican security forces in December 2010.
La Familia was outrageous and bizarre, but it proved to be only the smallest foreshadowing of what was to come. Shortly after the Sol y Sombra incident, Felipe Calderon was elected Mexico’s president and declared war on the country’s drug trade. In an equally significant corollary, although hardly commented upon at the time, Osiel Cardenas Guillen, who had been running the Gulf Cartel from a Mexican prison cell since his arrest in March 2003, was extradited to the United States.
The glue that had held together one of Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking operations for a decade was becoming unstuck. The center would not hold.
Pits Filled With the Dead at San Fernando
Following the extradition of Cardenas, relations between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas grew ever more strained. Members of the latter, high on their own sense of power and fortified by copious amounts of cocaine and Buchanan whisky (the cartel libation of choice), had little use for their former bosses, diminished as they were by the Cardenas arrest and a decentralized system that saw Cardenas’ brother Tony Tormenta and the former cop El Coss acting as co-heads of the organization.
The January 2010 slaying of Victor Mendoza, a Zeta lieutenant killed by a Gulf Cartel gunman in circumstances that are not entirely clear, proved to be the match that lit the bonfire of violence that now threatens to consume Tamaulipas.
Following pitched battles in the city of Reynosa, about 50 miles west of Matamoros, the Gulf Cartel claimed control of those two cities, with the Zetas ruling in the state capital, Ciudad Victoria, and in Nuevo Laredo, the Mexican counterpart of Laredo, Texas. The space between these population centers consists of little-patrolled rough countryside, and became the scene of the most ruthless kind of war as each side tried to eliminate the other.
“The current levels of violence are indeed changing the entire culture of the border region,” says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville who has studied the conflict extensively. “The levels of violence have escalated to unprecedented levels, and the new practices by killers are extreme and had never been observed in the past.”
Correa-Cabrera is referring to the 183 confirmed dead recovered thus far from the San Fernando pits, roughly 80 miles to the south, but her observations are anything but distant and academic. The university campus where she works, just across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, has been struck on three separate occasions by bullets fired during confrontations on the Mexican side.
Almost unbelievably, before this latest outrage, San Fernando, surrounded by rural roads and ranches, had been the scene of a similar mass killing less than a year earlier, when a group believed to be the Zetas killed 72 Central American migrants outside the town in August 2010 after holding them for ransom. Since the most recent killings, 16 local police officers have been detained under suspicion of involvement.
“They recruit boys from 13 to 17 years old,” says a 19-year-old university student from Matamoros, speaking in hushed tones about the cartels. “The police are also involved in this.”
Since the February 2010 mutiny by the Zetas, two loose and broad-based cartel alliances have seemed to coalesce. One configuration consists of the Gulf Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel and the now greatly diminished La Familia; the Zetas have aligned themselves with the Cartel de Juarez (based in the eponymous city in the state of Chihuahua in western Mexico) and the Beltran-Leyva Carte, which became famous for its use of 12-year-old hit men and has suffered the loss of its top leaders through killings and imprisonment at the Calderon government’s hands. The Zetas have also reinforced themselves by recruiting members of Los Kabiles, a special-operations unit of the Guatemalan army trained in jungle warfare and counterinsurgency tactics and that had a particularly ghastly record in that country’s civil war.
In Tamaulipas, at least, the federal government has often seemed little more than a hapless referee as the two sides have battled each other for control of lucrative drug trafficking routes with ever-increasing levels of savagery. The dumping of dismembered bodies in the state has become almost routine, while gruesome videos of the foot soldiers of various factions being beheaded or otherwise killed are posted to websites such as the anonymously run Blog del Narco as a way to send messages and spread fear among opponents.
Though several midlevel Zeta operatives have been killed or captured, perhaps the Calderon government’s most notable victory in the region was the killing of Tony Tormenta during an hours-long gun battle in Matamoros last November. Although the official reports said that four cartel gunmen, three marines and a reporter perished during a series of gun battles throughout the city, Matamoros residents put the number of dead that day at closer to 100.
In February of this year, banners addressed to the Zetas were hung from bridges in Tamaulipas and three other Mexican states. They contained the claim, among others, that the state “had already witnessed the killing and massacre of innocent people by the Zetas” and a demand that the group “fight like men.” The banners were signed Carteles Unidos (United Cartels), an apparent reference to the Gulf-Sinaloa-La Familia alliance.
An entire new vocabulary of neologisms—from narcocorridos (songs) and narcomantas (banners) to narcobloqueos (blockades)—has taken root in Mexican culture as the society at large seeks ways to label the pervasive influence of drug traffickers and their signifiers.
“People are tired,” says Mauricio Meschoulam, a professor at the department of international studies at the Universidad Iberoamericana in the capital of Mexico City, where an estimated 150,000 people marched against the violence this month. “They feel that the government’s fight is unsuccessful and that the government is not in control of the situation. This perception increased sharply in 2010, especially in the second half of the year.”
Endless Violence Fueled by U.S. Firearms
Though the violence in Tamaulipas is shocking, it is not isolated.
In Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city of 1.3 million people across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, 3,000 people were killed last year during a power struggle between the Cartel de Juarez and the Cartel de Sinaloa and a general breakdown in law and order not lessened by the presence of the Mexican army. This past February, Jaime Zapata, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, was shot to death and his partner was wounded as they drove in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi. A known member of Los Zetas was subsequently arrested for his killing.
On May 19, a gun battle between suspected Zetas and Mexican marines patrolling Falcon Lake, which sits on the border between Texas and Tamaulipas, left 12 gang members and one marine dead. Last September, U.S. boater David Hartley disappeared after being chased and shot by gunmen on the Mexican side of the lake’s border. The severed head of the Mexican police commander in charge of investigating the case was subsequently left outside a Mexican army post.
The policies of the United States, involved in a perversely symbiotic relationship with Mexico in which drugs flow north and weapons flow south, have not been helpful.
A recent report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime concluded that the U.S., with a population of 310 million, consumed $37 billion in cocaine in 2008, while Europe as a whole, with a population of 830 million, consumed $34 billion. Over the past four years, as The Washington Post has reported, more than 60,000 U.S. guns have been found in Mexico, largely coming from gun dealers in states with conspicuously liberal gun laws such as Texas and Arizona. The AK-47 used to kill agent Jaime Zapata was traced to a legal purchase at a Texas gun store.
In the meantime, the brazen and highly ritualized drumbeat of violence continues, leading observers on both sides of the border to wonder just how deeply it is permanently changing Mexico.
“How can you justify these extreme new practices and massacres?” asks professor Correa-Cabrera. “How can someone justify to himself assassinating dozens of men, women and children?”
“The economic explanation is definitely an important one,” she continues. “But there must be more elements in these new and extreme forms of violence. A new culture and new beliefs are taking hold.”
Michael Deibert's writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Miami Herald, Le Monde diplomatique, Folha de Sao Paulo and the World Policy Journal, among other publications. He has been a featured commentator on international affairs for the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, National Public Radio, and WNYC New York Public Radio.
In his role as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University, which promotes processes of reconciliation by non-violent means at all levels throughout the world, he aids the Centre in its mission to increase and sustain dialogue on international peacebuliding and development issues, with a particular focus on Africa and Latin America.
A recognized authority on the Caribbean nation of Haiti, which he first visited in 1997, Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). His reporting currently focuses on drug trafficking, organized crime and insurgency in the Americas.
His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com. He can be followed on Twitter at twitter.com/michaelcdeibert.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Border region lives in fear amid Mexico cartel war
Border region lives in fear amid Mexico cartel war
By Michael Deibert
Thu May 12 2011, 1:12 am ET
MATAMOROS, Mexico (AFP) – Plastered to the front of the morgue in this border city, where only hours before a battle raged between Mexican security forces and gunmen believed to belong to a local drug cartel, the faces stare back, haunting in their silence and mystery.
Carlos Alberto Sanchez, 17 years old. Fernando Tejeda Loya, 39 years old. Kelvin Alvin Palomo Nava, 22 years old. Dozens of photos and names belonging to people who have disappeared in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas over the last year.
From inside the squat, gray structure, a sickly whiff of human decay is unmistakable.
Since Mexican authorities exhumed a total of 183 bodies from 40 separate pits in the state over the last month, the families of hundreds of missing people have offered DNA samples to Mexican authorities.
At this point, only three of the bodies have been identified.
This part of Mexico was once a booming hub for cross-border trade between the country and the United States -- which operates hundreds of low-wage factories on the Mexican side.
Today, it finds itself in the midst of a terrifying war of attrition between the city's indigenous Gulf Cartel, their former partners known as Los Zetas and the elements of government power that have not been bought or bullied into the drug traffickers' service.
Near the morgue, black-clad policemen, their identities hidden under ski masks, set up check points, their assault rifles at the ready, while convoys of Mexican marines speed down broad boulevards.
"There is practically an anarchy here," says a businessman from the nearby city of Reynosa. "Many people have abandoned their homes."
The Gulf Cartel, which came into force under the wing of a Matamoros crime boss who had made his money bootlegging, by the late 1990s was being led by former mechanic Osiel Cardenas Guillen.
It was Cardenas Guillen who recruited the group of 30 Mexican special forces soldiers that would become Los Zetas to act as the cartel's military shock troops.
The group has since changed and expanded through the killing or arrest of most of its founding members and the addition of elements such as rogue soldiers from the Kabiles, a feared special forces branch of the Guatemalan military with an abysmal human rights record.
With Cardenas Guillen in jail in the United States and the leadership of the Gulf Cartel having shifted to his two brothers and a former Matamoros police officer, tensions between the two organizations grew until they exploded into open conflict in early 2010, each seeking to control lucrative drug shipment routes heading north.
Though a substantial portion of the the Zetas membership appears to be drawn from around the state of Veracruz, the group as a whole lacks the deep regional roots connect to many Mexican drug trafficking organizations whose very names -- Cartel de Sinaloa, Cartel de Tijuana, La Familia Michoacana -- speak of their histories in the regions that gave birth to them.
"The introduction of the Zetas changed the whole panorama of drug trafficking in Mexico," says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville who has studied the region extensively.
"Because of these new paramilitary practices, other groups have been made to raise their standards of violence, as well."
In August 2010, the Zetas were blamed for the slaying of 72 Central American migrants whose bodies were found at a ranch in Tamaulipas.
In June of that year, the leading candidate for the governorship of the state -- brother of the its current governor -- was slain along with four others.
This past February, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was shot to death while driving in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi and a known member of Los Zetas was subsequently arrested for his killing.
Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon militarized his country's battle against Mexico's drug traffickers in December 2006, more than 34,600 have died in drug-related violence.
Along with the violence has grown a pervasive culture of corruption and fear. After the discovery of the most recent mass graves, 16 police officers were detained under suspicion of involvement.
Many newspapers on the Tamaulipas side of the border have almost stopped covering drug-related violence entirely.
Now, with one of Cardenas Guillen's brothers having perished in a wild firefight with Mexican security forces in Matamoros last year and the command of the Zetas having passed to Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano (known as El Verdugo, or The Executioner), Tamaulipas remains hotly contested and divided.
The Gulf Cartel controls the northeastern part of the state that encompasses the cities of Reynosa and Matamoros itself, while the Zetas maintain power bases in the state capital Ciudad Victoria and Nuevo Laredo.
Despite the government's promises of security and increased aid, many local residents remain unconvinced, and say that governmental control in the region is visible little, if at all.
"The president says that here are many federal forces between here and Ciudad Victoria," says a cab driver in Matamoros who frequents the road. "But it's just not true."
By Michael Deibert
Thu May 12 2011, 1:12 am ET
MATAMOROS, Mexico (AFP) – Plastered to the front of the morgue in this border city, where only hours before a battle raged between Mexican security forces and gunmen believed to belong to a local drug cartel, the faces stare back, haunting in their silence and mystery.
Carlos Alberto Sanchez, 17 years old. Fernando Tejeda Loya, 39 years old. Kelvin Alvin Palomo Nava, 22 years old. Dozens of photos and names belonging to people who have disappeared in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas over the last year.
From inside the squat, gray structure, a sickly whiff of human decay is unmistakable.
Since Mexican authorities exhumed a total of 183 bodies from 40 separate pits in the state over the last month, the families of hundreds of missing people have offered DNA samples to Mexican authorities.
At this point, only three of the bodies have been identified.
This part of Mexico was once a booming hub for cross-border trade between the country and the United States -- which operates hundreds of low-wage factories on the Mexican side.
Today, it finds itself in the midst of a terrifying war of attrition between the city's indigenous Gulf Cartel, their former partners known as Los Zetas and the elements of government power that have not been bought or bullied into the drug traffickers' service.
Near the morgue, black-clad policemen, their identities hidden under ski masks, set up check points, their assault rifles at the ready, while convoys of Mexican marines speed down broad boulevards.
"There is practically an anarchy here," says a businessman from the nearby city of Reynosa. "Many people have abandoned their homes."
The Gulf Cartel, which came into force under the wing of a Matamoros crime boss who had made his money bootlegging, by the late 1990s was being led by former mechanic Osiel Cardenas Guillen.
It was Cardenas Guillen who recruited the group of 30 Mexican special forces soldiers that would become Los Zetas to act as the cartel's military shock troops.
The group has since changed and expanded through the killing or arrest of most of its founding members and the addition of elements such as rogue soldiers from the Kabiles, a feared special forces branch of the Guatemalan military with an abysmal human rights record.
With Cardenas Guillen in jail in the United States and the leadership of the Gulf Cartel having shifted to his two brothers and a former Matamoros police officer, tensions between the two organizations grew until they exploded into open conflict in early 2010, each seeking to control lucrative drug shipment routes heading north.
Though a substantial portion of the the Zetas membership appears to be drawn from around the state of Veracruz, the group as a whole lacks the deep regional roots connect to many Mexican drug trafficking organizations whose very names -- Cartel de Sinaloa, Cartel de Tijuana, La Familia Michoacana -- speak of their histories in the regions that gave birth to them.
"The introduction of the Zetas changed the whole panorama of drug trafficking in Mexico," says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville who has studied the region extensively.
"Because of these new paramilitary practices, other groups have been made to raise their standards of violence, as well."
In August 2010, the Zetas were blamed for the slaying of 72 Central American migrants whose bodies were found at a ranch in Tamaulipas.
In June of that year, the leading candidate for the governorship of the state -- brother of the its current governor -- was slain along with four others.
This past February, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was shot to death while driving in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi and a known member of Los Zetas was subsequently arrested for his killing.
Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon militarized his country's battle against Mexico's drug traffickers in December 2006, more than 34,600 have died in drug-related violence.
Along with the violence has grown a pervasive culture of corruption and fear. After the discovery of the most recent mass graves, 16 police officers were detained under suspicion of involvement.
Many newspapers on the Tamaulipas side of the border have almost stopped covering drug-related violence entirely.
Now, with one of Cardenas Guillen's brothers having perished in a wild firefight with Mexican security forces in Matamoros last year and the command of the Zetas having passed to Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano (known as El Verdugo, or The Executioner), Tamaulipas remains hotly contested and divided.
The Gulf Cartel controls the northeastern part of the state that encompasses the cities of Reynosa and Matamoros itself, while the Zetas maintain power bases in the state capital Ciudad Victoria and Nuevo Laredo.
Despite the government's promises of security and increased aid, many local residents remain unconvinced, and say that governmental control in the region is visible little, if at all.
"The president says that here are many federal forces between here and Ciudad Victoria," says a cab driver in Matamoros who frequents the road. "But it's just not true."
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
A few thoughts on the killing of Osama Bin Laden
Human emotions are complicated things. As someone who was in Manhattan on 9/11, I didn't exactly rejoice at Osama Bin Laden's death - thinking of all those lost on that day and since - but I didn't exactly feel bad, either. More like felt as if a murderous, deluded rich kid - which was all that Bin Laden ever was - got what he deserved. I'll definitely direct my compassion to more deserving recipients. From Tamaulipas, MD.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
A Note on the Passing of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros
By now, the news of the killing of journalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros by the forces Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in the besieged city of Misrata has spread around the world. Hetherington was the co-director of the film Restrepo, which chronicled a year spent embedded with the Second Platoon, B Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in the Korengal valley in Afghanistan, and Hondros was a photographer of great distinction whose work I had long admired.
I didn't know either man personally, though, the world of international reportage being as small as it is in these days of shrinking new coverage, we had quite a number of friends in common.
But, although journalists covering this ground quickly make their peace with the idea that one day they would go out and it might be their last, and though I am relatively sure that both men would point out the irony that their passing should attract so much attention after the world has sat back for weeks and let the people of Misrata get slaughtered, it is appropriate to take a moment and reflect on their loss.
Without the work of reporters like Hetherington, who provided us with one of the most important portraits of the Afghanistan conflict, and Hondros, whose 2003 photos of the civil war in Liberia remain some of the best war photography I have ever seen, the rest of the "developed" world would be able to suck its collective thumbs, stuff its face and drive its SUVs with nary a thought for people in the kinds of desperate circumstances both men documented.
A moment of mourning, both for the men themselves and for all the important stories that will not be told because of one more deluded dictator. Perhaps, if there is any silver lining, this terrible incident will help wake the world and its leaders up to the reality of what is happening to the people of Misrata, which has been laid siege to by Gaddafi's forces for nearly two months and witnessed hundreds of people being killed.
Rest in peace, colleagues.
I didn't know either man personally, though, the world of international reportage being as small as it is in these days of shrinking new coverage, we had quite a number of friends in common.
But, although journalists covering this ground quickly make their peace with the idea that one day they would go out and it might be their last, and though I am relatively sure that both men would point out the irony that their passing should attract so much attention after the world has sat back for weeks and let the people of Misrata get slaughtered, it is appropriate to take a moment and reflect on their loss.
Without the work of reporters like Hetherington, who provided us with one of the most important portraits of the Afghanistan conflict, and Hondros, whose 2003 photos of the civil war in Liberia remain some of the best war photography I have ever seen, the rest of the "developed" world would be able to suck its collective thumbs, stuff its face and drive its SUVs with nary a thought for people in the kinds of desperate circumstances both men documented.
A moment of mourning, both for the men themselves and for all the important stories that will not be told because of one more deluded dictator. Perhaps, if there is any silver lining, this terrible incident will help wake the world and its leaders up to the reality of what is happening to the people of Misrata, which has been laid siege to by Gaddafi's forces for nearly two months and witnessed hundreds of people being killed.
Rest in peace, colleagues.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Of Haiti and Côte d'Ivoire
Reading the novelist Venance Konan's excellent Op-Ed in the New York Times the other day - about how he watched his friend and colleugue Laurent Gbagbo go from the kind of person who went to jail for fighting for democracy to a man who, as much as anyone, undermined it and fanned the flames of ethnic hatred in post-Félix Houphouët-Boigny Côte d'Ivoire - I found the similarities with Haiti, and another leader who went from being a champion of democracy to the nastiest sort of despot, inescapable.
Apropos of Konan’s article, a fellow journalist wrote to me that “[Gbagbo’s] resisting the international community would be almost heroic, if one did not suspect that he's a very bad man. And [Alassane] Ouattara seems typical of the kind of person who wins elections organized by the UN and US: a technocrat, Western-trained, etc. with international banking creds, like Ellen Sirleaf in Liberia.”
My view is this: As in Haiti with Jean-Bertrand Aristide, anyone who has visited Côte d'Ivoire with their eyes open knows quite well and has seen ample evidence that Gbagbo is a bad man, they don't just suspect it. And they just a certainly they know that, like Gbagbo's forces, Ouattara's supporters in the Forces Nouvelles have committed gross human rights abuses.
Given Côte d'Ivoire's particular history, though, I would not only refer to Ouattara as "the kind of person who wins elections organized by the UN and US," but also as the kind of person who wins elections in a country where the 1960 to 1993 government of Houphouët-Boigny encouraged massive migration into Côte d'Ivoire from neighboring countries such as Mali, Burkina-Faso and Guinea, only to spur a venomous backlash to that policy in terms of the discriminatory ivoirité rhetoric of Henri Konan Bédié and Gbagbo himself following Houphouët-Boigny's death. Given the ethnic and religious make-up of present-day Côte d'Ivoire, and Gbagbo's wretched record as president, it is not at all surprising that Ouattara would win a presidential election there, UN organized or not.
I think the interesting thing is how, like Aristide, Gbagbo was once perceived by those who know him best as exactly the kind of person his country needed to leave the dark days of despotism and oppression behind and start on a new, more just and correct course, and how he eventually became the epitome of everything he claimed to have been fighting against all along.
Of course, with the exception of the nutters of the Christian right in the United States, Gbagbo really doesn't have the PR machine of greased-palm attorneys, former and future lobbyists, armchair academics, ignorant or ideologically-blinded journalists and professional "activists" working to whitewash his ghastly history that Aristide still does. At least those years in exile in DC taught him to do something right, I guess, even if governing Haiti wasn’t it.
Despite their great challenges, though, I hope that 2011 marks a brighter year for Haiti and Côte d'Ivoire under the leadership of their new presidents, Alassane Ouattara and Michel Martelly. May they somehow resist the temptations that proved so irresistible to those who came before them.
Apropos of Konan’s article, a fellow journalist wrote to me that “[Gbagbo’s] resisting the international community would be almost heroic, if one did not suspect that he's a very bad man. And [Alassane] Ouattara seems typical of the kind of person who wins elections organized by the UN and US: a technocrat, Western-trained, etc. with international banking creds, like Ellen Sirleaf in Liberia.”
My view is this: As in Haiti with Jean-Bertrand Aristide, anyone who has visited Côte d'Ivoire with their eyes open knows quite well and has seen ample evidence that Gbagbo is a bad man, they don't just suspect it. And they just a certainly they know that, like Gbagbo's forces, Ouattara's supporters in the Forces Nouvelles have committed gross human rights abuses.
Given Côte d'Ivoire's particular history, though, I would not only refer to Ouattara as "the kind of person who wins elections organized by the UN and US," but also as the kind of person who wins elections in a country where the 1960 to 1993 government of Houphouët-Boigny encouraged massive migration into Côte d'Ivoire from neighboring countries such as Mali, Burkina-Faso and Guinea, only to spur a venomous backlash to that policy in terms of the discriminatory ivoirité rhetoric of Henri Konan Bédié and Gbagbo himself following Houphouët-Boigny's death. Given the ethnic and religious make-up of present-day Côte d'Ivoire, and Gbagbo's wretched record as president, it is not at all surprising that Ouattara would win a presidential election there, UN organized or not.
I think the interesting thing is how, like Aristide, Gbagbo was once perceived by those who know him best as exactly the kind of person his country needed to leave the dark days of despotism and oppression behind and start on a new, more just and correct course, and how he eventually became the epitome of everything he claimed to have been fighting against all along.
Of course, with the exception of the nutters of the Christian right in the United States, Gbagbo really doesn't have the PR machine of greased-palm attorneys, former and future lobbyists, armchair academics, ignorant or ideologically-blinded journalists and professional "activists" working to whitewash his ghastly history that Aristide still does. At least those years in exile in DC taught him to do something right, I guess, even if governing Haiti wasn’t it.
Despite their great challenges, though, I hope that 2011 marks a brighter year for Haiti and Côte d'Ivoire under the leadership of their new presidents, Alassane Ouattara and Michel Martelly. May they somehow resist the temptations that proved so irresistible to those who came before them.
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Friday, April 08, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Illegality and immorality of Guatemala´s election process
(This is an important commentary on an upcoming election in a country that has virtually been forgotten by the international media, but where I have watched a fragile civil society struggle against organized crime and drug traffickers since my first visit there in 2003. Some of my own articles on Guatemala can be read here, here and here. MD)
Illegality and immorality of Guatemala´s election process
By Barbara Schieber in the Guatemala Times
March 2011
(Read the original article here)
The long expected and for some dreaded announcement of the divorce proceedings of the Guatemalan Presidential couple came today. The divorce is a strategy to legalize the candidacy of First Lady Sandra Torres de Colom according to the Guatemalan constitution. For many months now, there have been constant violations of the constitutional laws of Guatemalan by the political parties. All parties have violated the law in one way or another; there are no innocent politicians in this election year. Our question is what is illegal and what is immoral or is it all the same in politics?
Today in Guatemala, the most frequently used description for the divorce strategy is that it is immoral. The churches, catholic and evangelical mega-churches (both a very powerful influences in Guatemalan politics) have already declared that the divorce is to be condemned and immoral. It is unacceptable before the Catholic Church.
Since last year there have been constant violations of the constitutional laws of Guatemalan by the political parties. All parties have violated the law in several ways, illegalities and disrespect for the law has been the main signature of the election year so far. It is feared it will only get worse. There are no “innocent” politicians in this election year.
The gravest violation of the laws have been:
1. Promoting anti- constitutional candidates, or promoting changes to the constitution to change the laws stipulating the presidential candidate’s requirements, which is a crime according to the Guatemalan constitution.
2. Election propaganda before the commencement of the legally established election period (May 2011).
3. Refusal of political parties to disclose their financial records.
There are and have been several “illegal” candidates this election year
1. Mayor of Guatemala City, Alvaro Arzu, ex-president of Guatemala. Article 186 of the Guatemalan Constitution states that the person who has been president by democratic elections or coup d'état, can not be eligible as presidential candidate. His decision to run for the presidency caused alarm in the right wing sectors of Guatemala. After a “no” answer to his inquiries at the Guatemalan Congress to legitimize his candidacy, Alvaro Arzu has now decided to promote his wife Patricia de Arzu as the presidential candidate of his party. The PR campaign is up and running, the picture shows Patricia de Arzu alone now (a week before it was the couple) with a slogan of kindness and order.
She is still the wife of Alvaro Arzu, meaning a relative of a Guatemalan ex-president, maybe they will decide to get a divorce too? Patricia de Arzu is a prominent member of Opus Dei (Catholic Church sect); they have a very powerful and rich constituency.
2. Parliamentarian, Zury Mayté Ríos Montt Sosa de Weller is the daughter of ex- military dictator Efrain Rios Montt. Se was proclaimed the official candidate for president of the FRG party in October 2010. She is legally barred as a candidate according to the Guatemalan Constitution that bars presidential family members from running. Her brother, ex-military Enrique Rios Sosa has been found guilty of serious crimes and is currently in jail. She has very powerful friends in AIPAC, Washington. D.C.
The decision to determine the legality of a candidate rests in the hands of Guatemala’s Constitutional Court, a court that once ruled that Efrain Rios Mont had no legal impediment to run for presidency. A decision that later was overturned. General Efraín Ríos Montt seized power in a coup d'état in 1982.
Illegal Propaganda Activities
Basically all the legally registered political parties are guilty of early promotion of their political parties and presidential candidates. The official date to start election propaganda by law, according to the Supreme Electoral Court of Guatemala, is in May 2011. Several parties have been fined because they infringed the law. Some candidates publish paid pages of informative messages in the printed press and spots on national TV, cable and radio stations. The printed press, Cable, TV and radio stations accept these payments. The Guatemalan Supreme Electoral Court claims that their budget is far too small to monitor and detect all the illegal political propaganda activities.
The political propaganda issue shows that none of the political parties or candidates have respect for the law. It is a mayor issue of show of character and probable future attitudes towards respecting any law of the country. Every party accuses the others of infringing the law that includes the official party UNE.
Is this illegal or immoral?
Lack of transparency in the financing of the political parties
The law of political parties in Guatemala is obsolete; it has a series of flaws that impede the possibility to seriously audit the parties’ sources of income. Since large amounts of cash transactions are possible, the books that the parties keep to comply with the law of political parties can in theory exclude the cash transactions and therefore may not be a reflection of the reality of financing. The date to present the most recent financial statement of the political parties came and went without any of them presenting the required information, including the ruling party UNE.
In our perspective, this is the most serious and ominous infringement of the law. Money is the determining factor in this election as in most elections. The persistent lack of disclosure of the origins of the financial support to the political parties is the greatest danger to Guatemalan democracy.
Is this illegal or immoral?
The Narco scenario
It is no secret that 60 % or more of Guatemalan territory is in the hands of the narco business. Guatemala has been invaded by narco - gangs and drug lords, also drug money, a consequence of the drug war strategy of the US, not noticing that Guatemala and Central America have to exist between Colombia’s and Mexico’s war on drugs. As an exact replica of the cold war period, now the superpowers realize that if Guatemala goes, all Central America goes as a narco - region. Such was the saying during the cold war such is the saying now in the “war on drugs”.
From our perspective all political parties in Guatemala have committed numerous, repeated illegal and immoral acts. There is no “better” political party, there is only “worse”. The political parties have no ideology except power. Left and right does not exist anymore, it is power for power sake. This is a struggle for the economic resources of the country. The elections are a pretext to see who will keep what is left over from Guatemala, which is not much. Democratic principles have nothing to do with it.
Illegality and immorality of Guatemala´s election process
By Barbara Schieber in the Guatemala Times
March 2011
(Read the original article here)
The long expected and for some dreaded announcement of the divorce proceedings of the Guatemalan Presidential couple came today. The divorce is a strategy to legalize the candidacy of First Lady Sandra Torres de Colom according to the Guatemalan constitution. For many months now, there have been constant violations of the constitutional laws of Guatemalan by the political parties. All parties have violated the law in one way or another; there are no innocent politicians in this election year. Our question is what is illegal and what is immoral or is it all the same in politics?
Today in Guatemala, the most frequently used description for the divorce strategy is that it is immoral. The churches, catholic and evangelical mega-churches (both a very powerful influences in Guatemalan politics) have already declared that the divorce is to be condemned and immoral. It is unacceptable before the Catholic Church.
Since last year there have been constant violations of the constitutional laws of Guatemalan by the political parties. All parties have violated the law in several ways, illegalities and disrespect for the law has been the main signature of the election year so far. It is feared it will only get worse. There are no “innocent” politicians in this election year.
The gravest violation of the laws have been:
1. Promoting anti- constitutional candidates, or promoting changes to the constitution to change the laws stipulating the presidential candidate’s requirements, which is a crime according to the Guatemalan constitution.
2. Election propaganda before the commencement of the legally established election period (May 2011).
3. Refusal of political parties to disclose their financial records.
There are and have been several “illegal” candidates this election year
1. Mayor of Guatemala City, Alvaro Arzu, ex-president of Guatemala. Article 186 of the Guatemalan Constitution states that the person who has been president by democratic elections or coup d'état, can not be eligible as presidential candidate. His decision to run for the presidency caused alarm in the right wing sectors of Guatemala. After a “no” answer to his inquiries at the Guatemalan Congress to legitimize his candidacy, Alvaro Arzu has now decided to promote his wife Patricia de Arzu as the presidential candidate of his party. The PR campaign is up and running, the picture shows Patricia de Arzu alone now (a week before it was the couple) with a slogan of kindness and order.
She is still the wife of Alvaro Arzu, meaning a relative of a Guatemalan ex-president, maybe they will decide to get a divorce too? Patricia de Arzu is a prominent member of Opus Dei (Catholic Church sect); they have a very powerful and rich constituency.
2. Parliamentarian, Zury Mayté Ríos Montt Sosa de Weller is the daughter of ex- military dictator Efrain Rios Montt. Se was proclaimed the official candidate for president of the FRG party in October 2010. She is legally barred as a candidate according to the Guatemalan Constitution that bars presidential family members from running. Her brother, ex-military Enrique Rios Sosa has been found guilty of serious crimes and is currently in jail. She has very powerful friends in AIPAC, Washington. D.C.
The decision to determine the legality of a candidate rests in the hands of Guatemala’s Constitutional Court, a court that once ruled that Efrain Rios Mont had no legal impediment to run for presidency. A decision that later was overturned. General Efraín Ríos Montt seized power in a coup d'état in 1982.
Illegal Propaganda Activities
Basically all the legally registered political parties are guilty of early promotion of their political parties and presidential candidates. The official date to start election propaganda by law, according to the Supreme Electoral Court of Guatemala, is in May 2011. Several parties have been fined because they infringed the law. Some candidates publish paid pages of informative messages in the printed press and spots on national TV, cable and radio stations. The printed press, Cable, TV and radio stations accept these payments. The Guatemalan Supreme Electoral Court claims that their budget is far too small to monitor and detect all the illegal political propaganda activities.
The political propaganda issue shows that none of the political parties or candidates have respect for the law. It is a mayor issue of show of character and probable future attitudes towards respecting any law of the country. Every party accuses the others of infringing the law that includes the official party UNE.
Is this illegal or immoral?
Lack of transparency in the financing of the political parties
The law of political parties in Guatemala is obsolete; it has a series of flaws that impede the possibility to seriously audit the parties’ sources of income. Since large amounts of cash transactions are possible, the books that the parties keep to comply with the law of political parties can in theory exclude the cash transactions and therefore may not be a reflection of the reality of financing. The date to present the most recent financial statement of the political parties came and went without any of them presenting the required information, including the ruling party UNE.
In our perspective, this is the most serious and ominous infringement of the law. Money is the determining factor in this election as in most elections. The persistent lack of disclosure of the origins of the financial support to the political parties is the greatest danger to Guatemalan democracy.
Is this illegal or immoral?
The Narco scenario
It is no secret that 60 % or more of Guatemalan territory is in the hands of the narco business. Guatemala has been invaded by narco - gangs and drug lords, also drug money, a consequence of the drug war strategy of the US, not noticing that Guatemala and Central America have to exist between Colombia’s and Mexico’s war on drugs. As an exact replica of the cold war period, now the superpowers realize that if Guatemala goes, all Central America goes as a narco - region. Such was the saying during the cold war such is the saying now in the “war on drugs”.
From our perspective all political parties in Guatemala have committed numerous, repeated illegal and immoral acts. There is no “better” political party, there is only “worse”. The political parties have no ideology except power. Left and right does not exist anymore, it is power for power sake. This is a struggle for the economic resources of the country. The elections are a pretext to see who will keep what is left over from Guatemala, which is not much. Democratic principles have nothing to do with it.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Note on Jean-Bertrand Aristide's return to Haiti
As questionable friends of Haiti such as Amy Goodman, Danny Glover and others celebrate the return to Haiti of a man as politically and personally corrupt and ruthless as any that I have ever reported on, it seems only fitting that, if they don't have the dignity or respect to do so, some foreigner should write a note of apology to the many Haitians who fell opposing the man's rancid and despotic regime, or for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So here it goes.
On behalf of all the misguided and ignorant foreigners who still act as apologists for a man who did as much to impoverish Haiti and destroy its fragile institutions as any ruler in its history (and this is by no means a complete list), I would like to apologize
Kenbe fem,
MD
So here it goes.
On behalf of all the misguided and ignorant foreigners who still act as apologists for a man who did as much to impoverish Haiti and destroy its fragile institutions as any ruler in its history (and this is by no means a complete list), I would like to apologize
- To Marie Christine Jeune, the courageous young female Police Nationale d'Haïti (PNH) officer who had publicly criticized Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s attempts to link the police force with armed gangs and was found, raped and mutilated in March 1995
- To Yvon Toussaint, opposition senator for the Organisation du Peuple en Lutte (OPL) party, gunned down in March 1999
- To the thirteen people murdered in the Fort Mercredi slum in June 2001 by the forces of gang leader Felix “Don Fefe” Bien-Aimé, whom Jean-Bertrand Aristide had appointed as director of the Port-au-Prince cemetery as a reward for his loyalty
- To Brignol Lindor, the journalist murdered by the pro-Aristide Domi Nan Bwa gang in Petit-Goâve on 3 December 2001
- To Ramy Daran, assistant to the Mouvement Chrétien Pour une Nouvelle Haiti's Luc Mesadieu, burned alive by a pro-Aristide gang in Gonaives on 17 December 2001
- To Eric Pierre, the 27-year-old medical student from Jacmel, was was shot and killed while leaving the Haiti’s Faculté de Medicine in January 2003 on a day of planned anti- government demonstrations, with witnesses saying attackers fled the scene in a car with official TELECO plates and even providing license numbers
- To 25-year-old Saurel Volny, shot and killed by police during an anti-government demonstration in Gonaives in January 2003.
- To Ronald Cadet, a student activist who was shot and killed in Haiti's capital in February 2003 after being forced to live in hiding since November 2002
- To the eleven people, including Michelet Lozier, mother of five, killed by Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s security forces as they raided the Gonaives slum of Raboteau in the early morning hours of 2 October 2003
- To the fourteen people, including seventeen-year-old Josline Michel and the month old baby girl of Micheline Limay, also killed by Jean-Betrand Aristide’s security forces when they again raided Raboteau on 27 October 2003
- To Danielle Lustin, the university professor, feminist activist and expert in microfinancing murdered on 22 October 2003 and whose memorial mass at Sacre-Coeur was interrupted by a gang of young mean descending from a white pickup bearing “Officielle” license plates, who pummeled them with rocks and bottles, crying “Viv Aristide” and threatening them in the most base, misogynistic terms
- To Maxime Desulmond, the well-known student leader from Jacmel, killed when pro-Aristide gangs fired upon an anti-government demonstration in Port-au-Prince on 7 January 2004
- To Leroy Joseph, Kenol St. Gilles, Yveto Morancy and the rest of the at least 27 people who were murdered and the women raped by a combination of PNH, Unite de Securite de la Garde du Palais National d’Haiti and Bale Wouze forces in Saint Marc between 11 February and 29 February 2004.
- To my dear friend James "Billy" Petit-Frere, and his brother Winston "Tupac" Jean-Bart, and all the other young men used as cannon fodder by Aristide and then abandoned to their fates or their lives extinguished (such as Roland François) when they were no longer of use
- By a demobilization of the Haitian army in April 1995, which was illegal without a constitutional amendment, as the army was still enshrined in Article 263 of the Haitian constitution.
- By his violation of Article 7 of Haiti's constitution, which states that "the cult of personality is categorically forbidden. Effigies and names of living personages may not appear on the currency, stamps, seals, public buildings, streets or works of art." Jean-Bertrand Aristide placed hagiographic billboards bearing his image throughout the country, and the state television station TNH showed ceaseless homages to the president.
- By personally and directly blocking the investigation into the murder of Haiti's foremost journalist, Radio Haiti Inter owner Jean Dominique and Jean-Claude Louissaint - as attested to by the staff of Radio Haiti Inter, investigating magistrate Claudy Gassant and now-PNH chief Mario Andresol - and and by pressuring Justice Henry Kesner Noel, to sign a re-arrest warrant for Prosper Avril in April 2002, among other acts, Jean-Bertrand Aristide violated Article 60 of Haiti's constitution, which delegated firmly the independence of the executive and judicial branches of government.
- By attempting in September 2003 revive a presidential decree passed by Jean-Claude Duvalier on October 12, 1977 ("broadcast information must be precise, objective and impartial, and must come from authorized sources which are to be mentioned when broadcasting. Those who are responsible for the broadcasts have to control the programs to ensure that the information "even when it is correct ”cannot harm or alarm the population by its form, presentation or timing. The broadcast stations will provide a channel for the broadcasting of official programs, if so required by the public powers .") which was a naked assault on articles 28-1, 28-2 and 245 of Haiti's constitution, which forbids censorship and protects free speech and journalistic practices.
- To say nothing of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's arming of a generation of desperately poor street children which violated Article 268 of the Haitian constitution whereby the PNH were to be the only body with the right to distribute and circulate weapons in the country.
Kenbe fem,
MD
Monday, March 14, 2011
Note to the Corbett List
I confess some surprise that a single article of mine on Haiti’s former president has sparked such debate as the country confronts its first presidential vote in five years, a vote during which neither Mr. Aristide or any member of the interim government that followed him are candidates. But perhaps in the long run it is useful as it seems to be sparking a needed re-examination on some important aspects of Haiti’s recent history. If such examination would help even in the smallest way for the people of St. Marc who still wait for justice to achieve their aim, then it will have been mightily worth it.
1. Further on St. Marc
It is easy for those who were not in Haiti at the time to mock and dismiss the wrenching first-hand accounts of the survivors of the February 2004 Aristide government assault on St. Marc, or the first-hand accounts of journalists such as myself and the Miami Herald’s Marika Lynch who visited the town shortly thereafter. But one is reminded one of the sage words of the British academic Stephen Ellis who, when describing the incredulity that some ascribed to accounts of Liberia's civil war, wrote that "while descriptions (of the civil war) are routinely dismissed as sensational journalism by high-minded academics, it would be foolish simply to scoff at the opinions of correspondents who glean their impressions at first hand. Journalists acquire detailed knowledge, and an appreciation for the flavor of events, which can escape distant observers."
Simply put, the hypothesis that the reporting of many journalists, local and foreign, in Haiti at the time, the testimony of dozens of witnesses, the research of both Human Rights Watch and the Reseau National de Defense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), all working autonomously, is all part of a seamless, coordinated conspiracy is not a hypothesis that can be accepted by any rational person.
The best quote I’ve ever heard about Haiti’s justice system came from RNDDH’s director Pierre Esperance, who said to me, in connection that the to St. Marc case, that “in our system, the criminal becomes a victim because the system doesn't work.” That is what we saw with relation to the St. Marc massacre. Rather than having a transparent trial to hold the perpetrators accountable, they were sent to sit in jail without any conclusion to the official investigation, like almost every other high-profile case in the country’s history.
A word in defense of the RNDDH, an organization that I have seen do the most important human rights advocacy in Haiti, both in its present incarnation and as the Haiti-branch of the NCHR, since I first began visiting Haiti now nearly 15 years ago.
Though their critics like to bray about RNDDH’s 2004 award of C$100,000 (US$85,382) from the Canadian International Development Agency, most of the group’s funding in fact comes from organizations such as Christian Aid, the Mennonite Central Committee and the Lutheran World Federation. As part of its vitally important work, since that grant, RNDDH has consistently advocated for justice on behalf of a number of Fanmi Lavalas members who it says were victimized under Haiti’s 2004-2006 interim government, including Jean Maxon Guerrier, Yvon Feuille, Gerald Gilles, and Rudy Heriveaux.
RNDDH has shown a commitment to a non-political defense of human rights that a group like the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), under the sway as it is of Mr. Aristide's Miami attorney Ira Kurzban (one of the IJDH’s founders and chairman of its board of directors), or the IJDH’s Haiti partner, the the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), which receives “most of its support from the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti,” have never risen to.
[With the IJDH’s 2005 annual report listing Mr. Kurzban’s law firm in the category reserved for those having contributed more than $5000 to the organization, the group’s 2006 report lists the firm under “Donations of Time and Talent,” and the American Immigration Lawyers Association South Florida Chapter (for which Mr. Kurzban served as past national president and former general council) in a section reserved for those having donated $10,000 or more. Simply put, the IJDH is a creature of Mr. Aristide’s attorney, a man who has a financial stake in rehabilitating the former president. Their work in Haiti should be seen in this context.]
I would like to give the last word on the St. Marc killings to Charlienor Thompson, the coordinator of the Association des Victimes du Genocide de la Scierie (AVIGES), whose feelings of abandonment by the international community in general and the United Nations in particular were summed-up in a heart-rending 2007 open letter to Louis Joinet, the United Nations' independent expert on the situation of human rights in Haiti at the time. In that letter, Thompson wrote of how “we, the victims, who live in Haiti and who have lodged a complaint with the judicial system of our country for more than three years, remain confused and ask ourselves who cares about our case?"
Thompson goes on to ask:
How can we expect justice? Who can testify freely while murderers are free and move with impunity? The majority of people in Saint Marc are afraid. Even those who were direct victims of the acts mentioned above are frightened. The victims are eager to flee the city and witnesses to hide. When will we enjoy the benefits of justice that we demand? In the present circumstances, in what form will it come?
2. Further on Martissant
As happened with regards to the killing of St. Marc, a handful of advocates for Haiti’s former president living in North America have made it their goal to attempt to deceive people that violence in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Martissant came only from one side, that of forces hostile to Haiti’s former president. They seek to convince people, despite the evidence gathered by Haiti’s own journalists and foreign reporters such as myself, that gangs formerly allied to Haiti’s former president did not play an enthusiastic and blood-soaked role in the killings there. Put simply, this is false.
Consider the following:
- A 23 August 2005 broadcast from the capital’s Radio Kiskeya stated "inhabitants of various districts of Martissant (a southern slum of Port-au-Prince) launched an S.O.S to the authorities on Monday so that they would forcefully intervene in a zone infested with heavily-armed gangsters. These inhabitants, the majority of them young people coming from 4th and the 5th Avenue Bolosse, describe the reactivation in the district of groups armed under the regime of Jean Bertrand Aristide which have made their residence in the Grand Ravine zone of Martissant."
- The 19 November 2005 article "Nouvelle montee de tension a Martissant" from the Haitian media outlet AlterPresse stated "The tension went up of a notch these last days within Martissant, in the southern sector of the capital, where confrontations have occurred between rival bands, residents told AlterPresse. Clashes have occurred on several occasions during the last 8 days between the armed bands from Grande Ravine and the Lame Ti Manchet, leaving at least 2 dead and several casualties by bullets."
- A 6 November 2006 statement by the president of Haiti’s senate, Joseph Lambert, himself a member of the Lespwa party of Haitian president Rene Preval, where Lambert directly referred to the violence in Martissant as being part of "Operation Baghdad II," in reference to a fall 2004 explosion of violence by Aristide partisans, and went on to say that "Operation Baghdad 2 takes the form of a means for a sector to politically pressure the executive (branch) in order to find employment." [Note: Despite statements to the contrary, Operation Baghdad was called just that by those carrying it out, as can be heard in this 2004 report from National Public Radio's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro]
- A 4 December 2006 broadcast from Radio Kiskeya which stated that "according to residents (of Martissant) a local gang called Base Pilate was responsible for four murders. The leaders of this armed group are insane with rage after the death of a police officer considered to be one of their allies...The Base Pilate is committed, under the umbrella of the armed gangs of Grand Ravine, to fight without mercy against the Lame Ti Manchet, another rival band based within Sainte-Bernadette lane."
- An 8 December 2006 broadcast, again recorded on the ground in Martissant, from Radio Metropole, stated "Heavy shooting was recorded in the zone of Martissant yesterday ; witnesses confirm that gangsters of Grand Ravine associated with the gang Base Pilate tried to launch an attack against the districts of Descartes and Martissant 1. Residents of Descartes and Martissant 1 affirm that 2 people were killed and several others wounded yesterday evening. "
- A 19 January 2007 broadcast from Radio Kiskeya, which stated that "A wild war has been underway for several months among gangs called Base Pilate and Lame Ti Manchet, which imposes the law of the jungle on Bolosse, Grand Ravine and Ste-Bernadette."
3. Further on Nanoune Myrthil’s infant
Like any other observer, I do not feel that I yet know the full story of the fate of Nanoune Myrthil’s infant, nor have I ever stated otherwise. However, given the statements of Nanoune Myrthil herself, the focus on the case by Radio Haiti Inter (arguably Haiti’s most independent and respected radio station when it was still broadcasting) and Radio Metropole during 2000/2001, and the separate (yet highly similar) declarations of Johnny Occilius, Jean-Michard Mercier and Sonia Desrosiers, it certainly, to me, seems a case worth investigating and by any standard rises to the level of something that is newsworthy. Can one imagine such a case in the United States or Europe, with individuals similarly close to the seat of power making such declarations and the charges not receiving media attention or a thorough investigation? I certainly cannot.
4. Reporting ethically from Haiti
Most journalists I know, whatever other criticisms I may have of them, would never knowingly print information that they knew to be false. This cannot be said for those seeking to deny justice to the victims of St. Marc and Martissant today.
In 2006, Jeb Sprague and Diana Barhona attacked the press solidarity group Reporters sans frontières (RSF), for supposedly receiving money from the International Republican Institute (IRI). When Sprague and Barhona were unable to produce proof of this claim, RSF News Editor Jean-François Julliard responded succinctly "We do not receive any funding from the International Republican Institute. This is a pure figment of the authors' imagination. Your readers can check our certified accounts on our website, rsf.org. "
Also, in 2006, Jeb Sprague attacked the Haiti Support Group, a London-based solidarity organization that has been working at a grassroots level in Haiti since 1992. In an article co-authored with Joe Emersberger and which appeared in the magazine Counterpunch, Sprague claimed that Haiti Support Group head Charles Arthur encouraged people to harass a researcher who had published highly controversial human rights study in the British medical journal, The Lancet (link). Arthur later wrote that "The statements about me in the Counterpunch piece are pure fiction. " Arthur’s full response to Sprague’s allegations can be read here.
In his 2009 article, “Calls Mount to Free Lavalas Activist," Wadner Pierre (along with Sprague one of the co-editors of the Haiti Analysis website) described Ronald “Black Ronald” Dauphin - a man identified by survivors of the February 2004 pogrom as one of the chief members of the group that carried out the massacre - as “a Haitian political prisoner,” attacked the RNDDH and quoted the IJDH which also, curiously, described Ronald Dauphin in a June 2009 press release as “a Haitian grassroots activist, customs worker and political prisoner,” language mimicked closely in the Sprague/Pierre article.
Wadner Pierre, who recently wrote a rather un-gentlemanly piece mocking Haitian presidential candidate Mirlande Manigat on the basis of here age wrote his laudatory article about those accused in the St. Marc killings having never mentioned that he had been described as working for the IJDH’s Haiti affiliated, the BAI , or that he had previously contributed text and photographs to the IJDH website lauding the April 2007 release of Amanus Mayette, another suspect of the St. Marc massacre, a photo essay that since appears to have been removed from the IJDH site.
Given such a record, I am not surprised that Sprague, Pierre, etc would continue their rather fevered attacks against reporters against myself (which I largely responded to in a blog posting here) and against the victims in Martissant and St. Marc.
Our first and only duty as reporters is not to those abroad who have profited from Haiti’s ongoing misery, it is to the suffering in Haiti themselves. Whatever discomfort that causes in powerful circles beyond Haiti is not only deserved, but welcome and necessary if the cycle of impunity that is killing the country is ever to be ended.
With my best regards and hopes for a peaceful election,
MD
1. Further on St. Marc
It is easy for those who were not in Haiti at the time to mock and dismiss the wrenching first-hand accounts of the survivors of the February 2004 Aristide government assault on St. Marc, or the first-hand accounts of journalists such as myself and the Miami Herald’s Marika Lynch who visited the town shortly thereafter. But one is reminded one of the sage words of the British academic Stephen Ellis who, when describing the incredulity that some ascribed to accounts of Liberia's civil war, wrote that "while descriptions (of the civil war) are routinely dismissed as sensational journalism by high-minded academics, it would be foolish simply to scoff at the opinions of correspondents who glean their impressions at first hand. Journalists acquire detailed knowledge, and an appreciation for the flavor of events, which can escape distant observers."
Simply put, the hypothesis that the reporting of many journalists, local and foreign, in Haiti at the time, the testimony of dozens of witnesses, the research of both Human Rights Watch and the Reseau National de Defense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), all working autonomously, is all part of a seamless, coordinated conspiracy is not a hypothesis that can be accepted by any rational person.
The best quote I’ve ever heard about Haiti’s justice system came from RNDDH’s director Pierre Esperance, who said to me, in connection that the to St. Marc case, that “in our system, the criminal becomes a victim because the system doesn't work.” That is what we saw with relation to the St. Marc massacre. Rather than having a transparent trial to hold the perpetrators accountable, they were sent to sit in jail without any conclusion to the official investigation, like almost every other high-profile case in the country’s history.
A word in defense of the RNDDH, an organization that I have seen do the most important human rights advocacy in Haiti, both in its present incarnation and as the Haiti-branch of the NCHR, since I first began visiting Haiti now nearly 15 years ago.
Though their critics like to bray about RNDDH’s 2004 award of C$100,000 (US$85,382) from the Canadian International Development Agency, most of the group’s funding in fact comes from organizations such as Christian Aid, the Mennonite Central Committee and the Lutheran World Federation. As part of its vitally important work, since that grant, RNDDH has consistently advocated for justice on behalf of a number of Fanmi Lavalas members who it says were victimized under Haiti’s 2004-2006 interim government, including Jean Maxon Guerrier, Yvon Feuille, Gerald Gilles, and Rudy Heriveaux.
RNDDH has shown a commitment to a non-political defense of human rights that a group like the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), under the sway as it is of Mr. Aristide's Miami attorney Ira Kurzban (one of the IJDH’s founders and chairman of its board of directors), or the IJDH’s Haiti partner, the the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), which receives “most of its support from the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti,” have never risen to.
[With the IJDH’s 2005 annual report listing Mr. Kurzban’s law firm in the category reserved for those having contributed more than $5000 to the organization, the group’s 2006 report lists the firm under “Donations of Time and Talent,” and the American Immigration Lawyers Association South Florida Chapter (for which Mr. Kurzban served as past national president and former general council) in a section reserved for those having donated $10,000 or more. Simply put, the IJDH is a creature of Mr. Aristide’s attorney, a man who has a financial stake in rehabilitating the former president. Their work in Haiti should be seen in this context.]
I would like to give the last word on the St. Marc killings to Charlienor Thompson, the coordinator of the Association des Victimes du Genocide de la Scierie (AVIGES), whose feelings of abandonment by the international community in general and the United Nations in particular were summed-up in a heart-rending 2007 open letter to Louis Joinet, the United Nations' independent expert on the situation of human rights in Haiti at the time. In that letter, Thompson wrote of how “we, the victims, who live in Haiti and who have lodged a complaint with the judicial system of our country for more than three years, remain confused and ask ourselves who cares about our case?"
Thompson goes on to ask:
How can we expect justice? Who can testify freely while murderers are free and move with impunity? The majority of people in Saint Marc are afraid. Even those who were direct victims of the acts mentioned above are frightened. The victims are eager to flee the city and witnesses to hide. When will we enjoy the benefits of justice that we demand? In the present circumstances, in what form will it come?
2. Further on Martissant
As happened with regards to the killing of St. Marc, a handful of advocates for Haiti’s former president living in North America have made it their goal to attempt to deceive people that violence in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Martissant came only from one side, that of forces hostile to Haiti’s former president. They seek to convince people, despite the evidence gathered by Haiti’s own journalists and foreign reporters such as myself, that gangs formerly allied to Haiti’s former president did not play an enthusiastic and blood-soaked role in the killings there. Put simply, this is false.
Consider the following:
- A 23 August 2005 broadcast from the capital’s Radio Kiskeya stated "inhabitants of various districts of Martissant (a southern slum of Port-au-Prince) launched an S.O.S to the authorities on Monday so that they would forcefully intervene in a zone infested with heavily-armed gangsters. These inhabitants, the majority of them young people coming from 4th and the 5th Avenue Bolosse, describe the reactivation in the district of groups armed under the regime of Jean Bertrand Aristide which have made their residence in the Grand Ravine zone of Martissant."
- The 19 November 2005 article "Nouvelle montee de tension a Martissant" from the Haitian media outlet AlterPresse stated "The tension went up of a notch these last days within Martissant, in the southern sector of the capital, where confrontations have occurred between rival bands, residents told AlterPresse. Clashes have occurred on several occasions during the last 8 days between the armed bands from Grande Ravine and the Lame Ti Manchet, leaving at least 2 dead and several casualties by bullets."
- A 6 November 2006 statement by the president of Haiti’s senate, Joseph Lambert, himself a member of the Lespwa party of Haitian president Rene Preval, where Lambert directly referred to the violence in Martissant as being part of "Operation Baghdad II," in reference to a fall 2004 explosion of violence by Aristide partisans, and went on to say that "Operation Baghdad 2 takes the form of a means for a sector to politically pressure the executive (branch) in order to find employment." [Note: Despite statements to the contrary, Operation Baghdad was called just that by those carrying it out, as can be heard in this 2004 report from National Public Radio's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro]
- A 4 December 2006 broadcast from Radio Kiskeya which stated that "according to residents (of Martissant) a local gang called Base Pilate was responsible for four murders. The leaders of this armed group are insane with rage after the death of a police officer considered to be one of their allies...The Base Pilate is committed, under the umbrella of the armed gangs of Grand Ravine, to fight without mercy against the Lame Ti Manchet, another rival band based within Sainte-Bernadette lane."
- An 8 December 2006 broadcast, again recorded on the ground in Martissant, from Radio Metropole, stated "Heavy shooting was recorded in the zone of Martissant yesterday ; witnesses confirm that gangsters of Grand Ravine associated with the gang Base Pilate tried to launch an attack against the districts of Descartes and Martissant 1. Residents of Descartes and Martissant 1 affirm that 2 people were killed and several others wounded yesterday evening. "
- A 19 January 2007 broadcast from Radio Kiskeya, which stated that "A wild war has been underway for several months among gangs called Base Pilate and Lame Ti Manchet, which imposes the law of the jungle on Bolosse, Grand Ravine and Ste-Bernadette."
3. Further on Nanoune Myrthil’s infant
Like any other observer, I do not feel that I yet know the full story of the fate of Nanoune Myrthil’s infant, nor have I ever stated otherwise. However, given the statements of Nanoune Myrthil herself, the focus on the case by Radio Haiti Inter (arguably Haiti’s most independent and respected radio station when it was still broadcasting) and Radio Metropole during 2000/2001, and the separate (yet highly similar) declarations of Johnny Occilius, Jean-Michard Mercier and Sonia Desrosiers, it certainly, to me, seems a case worth investigating and by any standard rises to the level of something that is newsworthy. Can one imagine such a case in the United States or Europe, with individuals similarly close to the seat of power making such declarations and the charges not receiving media attention or a thorough investigation? I certainly cannot.
4. Reporting ethically from Haiti
Most journalists I know, whatever other criticisms I may have of them, would never knowingly print information that they knew to be false. This cannot be said for those seeking to deny justice to the victims of St. Marc and Martissant today.
In 2006, Jeb Sprague and Diana Barhona attacked the press solidarity group Reporters sans frontières (RSF), for supposedly receiving money from the International Republican Institute (IRI). When Sprague and Barhona were unable to produce proof of this claim, RSF News Editor Jean-François Julliard responded succinctly "We do not receive any funding from the International Republican Institute. This is a pure figment of the authors' imagination. Your readers can check our certified accounts on our website, rsf.org. "
Also, in 2006, Jeb Sprague attacked the Haiti Support Group, a London-based solidarity organization that has been working at a grassroots level in Haiti since 1992. In an article co-authored with Joe Emersberger and which appeared in the magazine Counterpunch, Sprague claimed that Haiti Support Group head Charles Arthur encouraged people to harass a researcher who had published highly controversial human rights study in the British medical journal, The Lancet (link). Arthur later wrote that "The statements about me in the Counterpunch piece are pure fiction. " Arthur’s full response to Sprague’s allegations can be read here.
In his 2009 article, “Calls Mount to Free Lavalas Activist," Wadner Pierre (along with Sprague one of the co-editors of the Haiti Analysis website) described Ronald “Black Ronald” Dauphin - a man identified by survivors of the February 2004 pogrom as one of the chief members of the group that carried out the massacre - as “a Haitian political prisoner,” attacked the RNDDH and quoted the IJDH which also, curiously, described Ronald Dauphin in a June 2009 press release as “a Haitian grassroots activist, customs worker and political prisoner,” language mimicked closely in the Sprague/Pierre article.
Wadner Pierre, who recently wrote a rather un-gentlemanly piece mocking Haitian presidential candidate Mirlande Manigat on the basis of here age wrote his laudatory article about those accused in the St. Marc killings having never mentioned that he had been described as working for the IJDH’s Haiti affiliated, the BAI , or that he had previously contributed text and photographs to the IJDH website lauding the April 2007 release of Amanus Mayette, another suspect of the St. Marc massacre, a photo essay that since appears to have been removed from the IJDH site.
Given such a record, I am not surprised that Sprague, Pierre, etc would continue their rather fevered attacks against reporters against myself (which I largely responded to in a blog posting here) and against the victims in Martissant and St. Marc.
Our first and only duty as reporters is not to those abroad who have profited from Haiti’s ongoing misery, it is to the suffering in Haiti themselves. Whatever discomfort that causes in powerful circles beyond Haiti is not only deserved, but welcome and necessary if the cycle of impunity that is killing the country is ever to be ended.
With my best regards and hopes for a peaceful election,
MD
Saturday, March 12, 2011
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You can now follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/michaelcdeibert. Happy Reading!
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Huffington’s Plunder
(This piece by journalist and author Chris Hedges is perhaps the best article that I have yet read on the scandalous and rapacious practices that are killing real journalism these days. As Hedges writes, "this latest form of 'liberal' exploitation exposes yet again the liberal class for who they really are—opportunists whose operating methods are as callous as those used in running the textile mills in southern China." Well said, Mr. Hedges. MD)
Huffington’s Plunder
Please read the original article here.
Posted on Feb 21, 2011
Huffington’s Plunder
Please read the original article here.
Posted on Feb 21, 2011
By Chris Hedges
I was in New York City on Thursday night at the Brecht Forum to discuss with the photographer Eugene Richards his powerful new book “War Is Personal” when I was approached for an interview by a blogger for The Huffington Post. I had just finished speaking with another blogger who had recently graduated from UC Berkeley.
These encounters, which are frequent at public events, break my heart. I see myself in the older bloggers, many of whom worked for newspapers until they took buyouts or were laid off, as well as in the aspiring reporters. These men and women love the trade. They want to make a difference. They have the integrity not to sell themselves to public relations firms or corporate-funded propaganda outlets. And they keep at it, the way true artists, musicians or actors do, although there are dimmer and dimmer hopes of compensation. They are victims of a dying culture, one that no longer values the talents that would keep it healthy and humane. The corporate state remunerates corporate management and public relations. It lavishes money on the celebrities who provide the fodder for our national mini-dramas. But those who deal with the bedrock virtues of truth, justice and beauty, who seek not to entertain but to transform, are discarded. They must struggle on their own.
The sale of The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million, and the tidy profit of reportedly at least several million dollars made by principal owner and founder Arianna Huffington, who was already rich, is emblematic of this new paradigm of American journalism. The Huffington Post, as Stephen Colbert pointed out when he stole the entire content of The Huffington Post and rechristened it The Colbuffington Re-post, produces little itself. The highly successful site, like most Internet sites, is largely pirated from other sources, especially traditional news organizations, or is the product of unpaid writers who are rechristened “citizen journalists.” It is driven by the celebrity gossip that dominates cheap tabloids, with one or two stories that come from The New York Times or one of the wire services to give it a veneer of journalistic integrity. Hollywood celebrities, or at least their publicists, write windy and vapid commentaries. And this, I fear, is what news is going to look like in the future. The daily reporting and monitoring of city halls, courts, neighborhoods and government, along with investigations into corporate fraud and abuse, will be replaced by sensational garbage and Web packages that are made to look like news but contain little real news.
The terminal decline of newspapers has destroyed thousands of jobs that once were dedicated to reporting, verifying fact and giving a voice to those who without these news organizations would not be heard. Newspapers, although they were too embedded among the power elite and blunted their effectiveness in the name of a faux objectivity, at least stopped things from getting worse. This last and imperfect bulwark has been removed. It has been replaced by Internet creations that mimic journalism. Good reporters, like good copy editors or good photographers, who must be paid and trained for years while they learn the trade, are becoming as rare as blacksmiths. Stories on popular sites are judged not by the traditional standards of journalism but by how many hits they receive, how much Internet traffic they generate, and how much advertising they can attract. News is irrelevant. Facts mean little. Reporting is largely nonexistent. No one seems to have heard of the common good. Our television screens are filled with these new chattering celebrity journalists. They pop up one day as government spokespeople and appear the next as hosts on morning news shows. They deal in the currency of emotion, not truth. They speak in empty clichés, not ideas. They hyperventilate, with a spin from the left or the right, over every bit of gossip. And their corporate sponsors make these court jesters millionaires. We are entertained by these clowns as corporate predators ruthlessly strip us of our capacity to sustain a living, kill our ecosystem because of greed, gut civil liberties and turn us into serfs.
Any business owner who uses largely unpaid labor, with a handful of underpaid, nonunion employees, to build a company that is sold for a few hundred million dollars, no matter how he or she is introduced to you on the television screen, is not a liberal or a progressive. Those who take advantage of workers, whatever their outward ideological veneer, to make profits of that magnitude are charter members of the exploitative class. Dust off your Karl Marx. They are the enemies of working men and women. And they are also, in this case, sucking the lifeblood out of a trade I care deeply about. It was bad enough that Huffington used her site for flagrant self-promotion, although the cult of the self has reached such dizzying proportions in American society that such behavior is almost expected. But there is an even sadder irony that this was carried out in the name of journalism.
“Something is happening here,” Bob Dylan sang in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “but you don’t know what it is. Do you Mr. Jones?”
This latest form of “liberal” exploitation exposes yet again the liberal class for who they really are—opportunists whose operating methods are as callous as those used in running the textile mills in southern China. Is it any wonder that working men and women, who have been abandoned and betrayed by these self-identified liberals, hate the liberal class and its transparent hypocrisy? Is it any wonder that the some 40 million Americans who live in poverty are invisible to the wider culture? Is it any wonder that the tea party and all the lunatics on the fringe of our political spectrum put their cross hairs on the liberal class and its purported values? Let’s not forget the title of Huffington’s latest book: “Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream.”
Liberals like these deserve the rage they engender.
The argument made to defend this exploitation is that the writers had a choice. It is an argument I also heard made by the managers of sweatshops in the Dominican Republic and Mexico, the coal companies in West Virginia or Kentucky and huge poultry farms in Maine. It is the argument made by the comfortable, by those who do not know what it is to be hard up, desperate or driven by a passion to express one’s self and the world through journalism or art. It is the argument the wealthy elite, who have cemented in place an oligarchic system under which there are no real choices, use to justify their oppression.
Who would not want to be able to carry out his or her trade and make enough to pay the bills? What worker would decline the possibility of job protection, health care and a pension? Why do these people think tens of millions of Americans endure substandard employment?
If Huffington has a conscience, she will sit down when the AOL check arrives and make sure every cent of it is paid out to those who worked free or at minimal wages for her over the last six years, starting with Mayhill Fowler, the blogger who broke the “clinging to guns and religion” story about Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and spent two years writing and reporting without a salary.
“She strung me along for two years while I repeatedly asked for funding for three projects, and then I quit,” Fowler told me from Oakland, Calif., as I spoke with her by phone. When Fowler, whom the site nominated twice for a Pulitzer, finally resigned last year in disgust, Mario Ruiz, the spokesperson for The Huffington Post, acidly told Yahoo News: “Mayhill Fowler says that she is ‘resigning’ from The Huffington Post. How do you resign from a job you never had?”
That comment says it all. It exposes the callousness of our oligarchic class and their belief that they have a right to use anyone who can contribute to the monuments they spend their lives erecting to themselves.
Chris Hedges is a fellow at The Nation Institute and a weekly Truthdig columnist. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”
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