Neo-nazis, anti-racists battle in York, PA

Neo-nazis, anti-racist protesters, and police clash in York, PA.

By Shawn Gaynor

Jan. 12— The sleepy small town of York, Pennsylvania turned into a battleground Saturaday as local residents and anti-racist activists confronted a neo-nazi gathering at the local public library. Speaking at the library was the notorious white supremacist Matt Hale, leader of the World Church of the Creator (WCotC). Several hours of running fights in the street lead to 25 arrests and several injuries, the worst of which resulted from a hit and run by a neo-nazi driving a truck that left a local girl and an anti-racist activist injured.

The library sponsored the talk by the WCotC, a group who’s stated goal is to start a racial holy war against any non Aryan peoples. The group is most know for the 1999 shooting spree undertaken by Benjamin Smith, a member of the church. The shooting left two dead and nine wounded. All of the victims were dark skinned. Smith killed himself before being arrested.

The meeting represented an unprecedented congregation of neo-nazi groups including the Aryan Nations, the National Alliance, the National Socialist Movement (a skin head group), and the Hammer Skins. All of these groups have a history of racial violence and white supremacist beliefs. The Aryan Nations has recently moved its headquarters from Idaho to Pennsylvania after a law suit resulted in the group losing six million dollars and its Coeur d’Alene, Idaho headquarters compound.

The confrontations began early when a truck flying a Confederate flag and other nazi stickers was attacked by a group of protesters. The truck had its windows smashed and the occupant was maced.

An army of state and local police and two squads of National Guard military police spent the day protecting the library gathering, using swat teams, horses and a helicopter. As the library meeting (a public speaking event) began, outraged local residents flooded the library to capacity, leaving many neo-nazis, including at least one scheduled speaker, unable to enter the library as police enforced fire code restrictions.

Outside roughly 150 neo-nazis and 400 counter demonstrators had a stand off across a police filled street resulting in several anti-racists being arrested for throwing snow balls. A crowd of local anti-racists were joined by over 100 activists from Anti-Racist Action, the Barracada Collective, and Black Bloc anarchists.

As neo-nazis tried to leave, a group of forty was out-maneuvered by anti-racists and confronted in an alley. As the fighting spilled into a parking lot where many neo-nazis had parked, several members of the racist group the Hammerskins were assaulted before police separated the groups and the remaining Hammerskins fled.

Several anti-racists were arrested as police grabbed and arrested them at random. The remaining crowd vandalized several trucks bearing racist stickers, breaking windows and slashing tires.

As anti-racist were leaving the area, a truck driven by a white supremacist ran over a local girl and an anti-racist protester. The driver reportedly turned around to drive into the crowd, hitting the girl when he slammed the truck into reverse. A Black Bloc activist was then hit and thrown onto the hood. He was carried a half block down an alley before the truck rammed into a brick wall. The driver abandoned the truck on foot.

Street medics and protesters who were treating the injured girl were charged by riot police and beaten. At this time the girl’s aunt, who was distraught from the incident, was arrested by riot police for disorderly conduct.

According Anti-Racist Action, the police charge was made to create an opportunity for neo-nazis in the area to flee. Police initially waved the driver through the police line. He was arrested only after the crowd grew too angry to control. He has been charged with misdemeanor assault. Police denied the girl had been hit by the truck.

Later, a neo-nazi who was confronted walking to his truck in a parking garage drew and, according to several eyewitnesses, fired a pistol. Police later arrested the man for brandishing a firearm, but deny that the weapon was discharged. The National Alliance had urged its membership to get temporary concealed weapons permits for the protest.

Most of those arrested were charged with disorderly conduct and released. Only two white supremacists were arrested during the event. One protester remains jailed with $10,000 bail. He is charged with assaulting a police horse.

Both sides claimed the confrontation a victory. Hale called the gathering an outstanding success and has announced plans to return next month.

York has a history of racial tensions. According to the Washington Post, nine residents, including former mayor Charlie Robertson, were recently arrested for the killing of a black preacher’s daughter following race riots in 1969. York reportedly has the highest incidence of hate crimes in the state of Pennsylvania.

Documents reveal Kissinger okayed dirty war in Argentina

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC Jan. 8 (IPS)-- At the height of the Argentine military’s ‘’dirty war’’ against suspected leftists, then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told his Argentine counterpart Washington backed the junta’s efforts to deal with ‘’the terrorist problem,’’ according to a series of recently declassified documents.

The documents, which have been reviewed by US investigative reporters Martin Edwin Andersen and John Dinges, show that attempts by the US ambassador in Buenos Aires at the time to press the junta to reduce its repression were made futile by Kissinger’s apparent refusal to support him.

‘’We now have contemporaneous documents that show that the message given to Argentina, as well as other South American dictatorships, by Washington was, at best, ambiguous and, at worst, encouraging of human rights violations,’’ according to Dinges, who reported on the repression in Argentina and Chile for the Washington Post at the time.

The documents have come to light amid a simmering controversy over Kissinger’s stewardship of U.S. foreign policy in the 1970s, when he served first as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, then as Nixon’s secretary of state, and finally in the same position under President Gerald Ford after Nixon’s resignation due to the Watergate scandal in August 1974.

Kissinger, who left office after Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977, remains a highly influential foreign- policy analyst and consultant for a number of large multinational companies with foreign investments.

In a book published last year, journalist Christopher Hitchens argued that Kissinger should be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in formulating US policies toward Vietnam, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus and Indonesia between 1969 and 1977.

Declassified documents released over the last two years have bolstered the case against Kissinger. Just last month, for example, documents obtained by the independent National Security Archive at George Washington University confirmed that Ford and Kissinger, during a visit to Jakarta in December 1976, gave a green light to Indonesian President Suharto to invade East Timor.

‘’It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,’’ Kissinger told Suharto, according to a State Department memorandum of the conversation. Indonesian forces invaded the former Portuguese colony the next day, launching an occupation that killed as much as one third of Timor’s population in five years.

Kissinger has been asked to testify in a number of pending lawsuits brought by the victims of torture, disappearances, and assassination or their survivors regarding his knowledge of the repression carried out by Southern Cone military regimes, including Argentina’s, during the mid-1970s when they were linked through Operation Condor, an intelligence network that targeted and often assassinated their foes both in the region and abroad.

Kissinger abruptly left Paris on one occasion last year, apparently to avoid a summons issued by a magistrate there who was investigating the disappearances of five French nationals in Chile after the US-backed 1973 military coup d’etat against President Salvador Allende Gossens.

The latest documents cover events between June and October, 1976, and the controversy between the ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert Hill, and Washington regarding the message being conveyed to the Argentine junta, and specifically to its foreign minister, Admiral Cesar Guzetti.

Kissinger met Guzetti first in June 1976, after a ministerial meeting of the Organisation of American States (OAS) in Santiago.

In that meeting, according to a previously released cable by Carter’s top human rights aide based on a conversation with Hill, Kissinger failed to bring up the repression, which at that time had reached its height at about 800 disappearances a month. When Guzetti raised the issue, Kissinger reportedly asked only how much longer it would continue and indicated approval when Guzetti said would last until the end of the year.

In the succeeding months, Hill attempted to convince Guzetti that Washington would not tolerate continuing atrocities by the junta. On the eve of a two-week trip by the foreign minister to Washington, Hill sent a cable to his superiors in which he recounts those efforts, stating that he had told Guzetti that ‘’murdering priests and dumping 47 bodies in the street in one day could not be seen in context of defeating the terrorists quickly; on the contrary, such acts were probably counter-productive.’’

But Guzetti’s visit to Washington - where he held separate meetings with Kissinger, then-Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and Kissinger’s top Latin America aide, Harry Shlaudeman - failed to reinforce that message, according to a subsequent cable from Hill.

Guzetti had left for the United States, he wrote, ‘’fully expecting to hear some strong, firm, direct warnings on his government’s human-rights practices. Rather than that, he has returned in a state of jubilation, convinced there is no real problem with the United States over this issue.’’

Guzetti had told Hill that Kissinger ‘’had assured him that the United States ‘wants to help Argentina’,’’ Hill, now deceased, reported, ‘’(and), that if the terrorist problem was over by December or January (Kissinger) believed serious problems could be avoided in the United States.’’

‘’Based on what Guzetti is doubtless reporting to the (Government of Argentina), it must now believe that if it has any problems with the US over human rights, they are confined to certain elements of Congress and what it regards as biased and/or uninformed minor segments of public opinion,’’ he wrote in what Shlaudeman later called a ‘’bitter criticism’’ of Kissinger’s role.

Shlaudeman responded by insisting that Guzetti may have misunderstood the message he had given the foreign minister in his meeting because of his ‘’poor grasp of English’’ or his desire to ‘’(hear) only what he wanted to hear.’’ But he did not offer a correction of Guzetti’s understanding of his meetings with Kissinger and Rockefeller.

"In the circumstances,’’ he wrote Hill, ‘’I agree that the Argentines will have to make their own decisions and that further exhortations or generalised lectures from us would not be useful at this point.’’

Kissinger’s response to Guzetti was remarkably similar to a conversation he held with Chilean General Augusto Pinochet at the OAS meeting in June 1976.

According to a memorandum of that meeting obtained and released 18 months ago by the National Security Archive, Kissinger reassured Pinochet repeatedly that Washington supported his junta and the ‘’overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here,’’ and that human-rights concerns in Washington were confined to some sectors in Congress and were not shared by the Ford administration.

When Pinochet complained about efforts by Allende’s exiled defence minister, Orlando Letelier to persuade Congress to cut off US support for the junta, Kissinger noted the existence of a ‘’world- wide propaganda campaign by the Communists.’’

Letelier was assassinated in central Washington DC in a Condor operation in late September, 1976, three months after Kissinger’s conversation with Pinochet and just days before Guzetti’s arrival for talks with U.S. officials.

Canadian organic farmers sue Monsanto and Aventis

By Don Kossick

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, Jan. 13— On Jan. 10, 2002, Saskatchewan organic farmers Larry Hoffman and Dale Beaudoin filed a class action law suit against Monsanto and Aventis corporations on behalf of all certified organic farmers in Saskatchewan. The suit seeks compensation for damages caused by Monsanto and Aventis genetically engineered canola, and an injunction to prevent Monsanto from introducing GE wheat in Saskatchewan.

In a charged press conference atmosphere organic farmer Arnold Taylor, President of the Saskatchewan Organic Directorate (SOD), outlined the claims against Monsanto and Aventis:

* GE canola has spread across the Prairies and contaminated conventional crops so extensively that most certified organic grain farmers no longer attempt to grow canola;

* Monsanto and Aventis, when introducing their GE canolas, should have known that the genetically engineered canola would spread and contaminate the environment. The companies had no regard for the damage these crops would cause to organic agriculture;

* Loss of canola as an organic crop has robbed organic farmers of a high-paying and growing market. Organic customers have a zero tolerance for genetically engineered crops.

“Organic farmers believe the same thing will happen to wheat if GE wheat is introduced, said Taylor. “Since wheat is the cornerstone of prairie agriculture, and essential for organic crop rotations, losing wheat to genetic contamination would devastate organic farming in Saskatchewan.”

Taylor added, “We’ve been forced to live with GE canola. We’ve asked for a moratorium on GE wheat, we’ve lobbied to change the variety registration process, and we’ve just hit a brick wall. We feel we have no choice left but to pursue legal action. This is a matter of survival for organic agriculture in Saskatchewan.”

The suit seeks to hold Monsanto and Aventis responsible for any GM contamination on multiple grounds including negligence, nuisance, trespass, pollution under the Saskatchewan Environmental Management and Protection Act, and failure to conduct an environmental assessment and seek ministerial approval, as required by the Environmental Assessment Act of Saskatchewan.

If the action is certified as a class action by the court under Saskatchewan’s recently- enacted Class Actions Act, all certified organic farmers in Saskatchewan will be represented, with the possibility that other Canadian certified organic grain farmers residing outside Saskatchewan would be given the option of participating at a later date.

Marc Loiselle, a SOD director and organic farmer from Vonda, Saskatchewan, said, “In Saskatchewan we are directly affected by the introduction of GE herbicide tolerant canola, and possibly wheat in the very near future if it is not stopped soon. GE Canola and other GE crops cannot be contained within specific fields because of the genetic drift of their novel traits, such as the RoundUp Ready gene, by the spreading of pollen and seed, and GE wheat will be no different.”

Loiselle added, “If farmers do not take a stand on limits to patenting and how biotechnology is used to alter seeds such as wheat; we risk losing our market access, loss of income, loss of choice, as well as losing control over what we produce, how we produce it, what value it has, and who will buy it. This would also be an unacceptable situation for consumers who are ultimately the market for the product we produce … We want the right to farm GMO free and the right to eat GMO free.”

Joan Harrison, a non-farmer member of SOD, pointed out that consumers are demanding organic products. Organic sales are growing by 20 percent annually and will reach $3.5 billion by 2005. A recent US study shows that one third of consumers are buying some organic items. Western Europeans have embraced organic food enthusiastically.

Given the Canadian and Saskatchewan reliance on the export of wheat and other crops, the class action suit accentuates the vulnerability of this export market if it is contaminated by GE varieties, and the economic and social jeopardy farm communities may face.

Don Kossick is an independent journalist with www.makingthelinksradio.com
Source: Indymedia: www.indymedia.org