Untitled Document

WORLD NEWS
No. 231, June 19-25, 2003

‘Desert Scorpion’ unleashed to destroy Iraqi resistance
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US firm returns Mexican data, still peddling others
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US wins another exemption from war crimes court
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US stands alone in push to declare Iran in violation of nuclear treaty
Anti-gov’t protests continue in Tehran
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US officials met with Colombian paramilitaries
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Rape victims married off to rapists in Bangladesh
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Iraq-attack think tank turns wrath on NGOs
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‘Desert Scorpion’ unleashed to destroy Iraqi resistance

Compiled by Eamon Martin

June 18 (AGR)— It was just 45 days ago that US President George W. Bush, in a campaign-perfect photo-op, landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California, swaggered across the deck in full flight gear, and declared that Operation Iraqi Freedom had liberated that nation from the evil clutches of former president Saddam Hussein.

But within six weeks, the US Central Command in Baghdad has unleashed a new campaign with a far more ominous name to eradicate Iraqi resistance to the occupation of their country. On Sunday, after banning Iraqis from having any weapons heavier than an assault rifle, the military began its latest sweep. Operation Desert Scorpion is designed, in the words of last Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “to avoid a prolonged guerrilla campaign” that appears to be under way.

US Central Command said the operation would include military actions throughout Iraq and that it is the largest deployment since April 7, the height of the US-led war.

Scorpion arrived just as last week’s Operation Peninsula Strike wrapped up —a 4,000-strong offensive, which reportedly left at least 113 people dead, according to a tally from Iraqi witnesses and US officials.

According to the Journal’s account, the main victims of Peninsula Strike turned out to be members of clans that were opposed to Saddam Hussein.

“Now we’re going to defeat, once and for all, those elements who continue to be subversive,” said Maj. Thomas Dorame of the Army’s 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment.

‘Hearts and minds’

US troops backed by helicopters have stepped up the hunt for fighters, raiding cities, towns and villages across Iraq in what have been described as “search-and-destroy operations.” Thousands of troops are taking part in the mission, which US Central Command has called a “combat and humanitarian operation” designed to take out people they describe as being “Saddam Hussein loyalists.”

The military said Desert Scorpion is intended to win the confidence of local people as well as hunt Iraqi insurgents. The American military sweeps are accompanied by an episodic “hearts-and-minds” campaign orchestrated by the army’s Psychological Warfare Unit. US soldiers are distributing colored leaflets showing a picture of Iraqi children dutifully sweeping the streets under the watchful eye of an American Humvee armored car.

By Tuesday, US soldiers had carried out 69 raids and arrested 412 people in the campaign.

The US military said raids that began Sunday on Iraqi homes and businesses in Baghdad and northern Iraq were meant to “isolate and defeat remaining pockets of resistance.”

Angry locals said troops are ransacking houses and assaulting residents. Iraqis are being rounded up, handcuffed and interrogated even, say townspeople, when they did nothing wrong.

Late Monday, US forces raided an outdoor cafe in Baghdad’s Azamiyah neighborhood where two dozen men were playing backgammon and drinking tea. All were lined up against a fence, blindfolded, forced to kneel and carted away on trucks. Prisoners knelt or sat on concrete blocks surrounded by concertina wire. Some had duct tape over their mouths. They were released later, after none turned out to be suspects.

US soldiers swept into homes in Baghdad and several outlying towns on Monday. Soldiers dug up backyards in search of heavy arms, but the US military announced no major weapons discoveries.

On Tuesday, two people were killed outside of the US administration’s headquarters when troops opened fire on a crowd of ex-Iraqi soldiers who were protesting against the loss of their jobs.

Victor Caivano, a photographer for the Associated Press, said shots were fired when the angry crowd began throwing stones at guards and reporters.

Attacks escalate

An insurgent hit-and-run campaign continues unabated despite the tough US crackdown. United States generals now admit the war is far from over. Since the American command quadrupled its military presence last week, not a day has gone by without an ambush, a rocket-propelled grenade attack, an assault with automatic weapons or a mine blast targeting US forces.

The specter of organized resistance and the scale of the military operations has forced the Bush administration to defend the president’s victory address on May 1. Since then, 49 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, mostly by attack.

Last Thursday, June 12, Iraqi fighters shot down an Apache helicopter gunship.

The next day, American troops fanning out across the countryside came under attack again in at least three separate places north of Baghdad.

In the northern city of Mosul, at least one American soldier was seriously wounded when patrols came under fire from snipers — some of them hurling hand grenades — in the city center.

Also that day, an Iraqi oil pipeline was burning after being sabotaged as the country’s crude was set to return to the world market, and despite the offensive by US-led forces.

Fires blazed on the major pipeline from Iraq’s northern oilfields after what residents said were twin bomb attacks aimed at sabotaging exports through Turkey.

On Thursday, Iraq’s US-led administration awarded a raft of contracts to international oil companies to lift crude, the first since the war which ousted Saddam in April.

Four European companies, a Turkish firm and the US company ChevronTexaco were awarded contracts to buy 9.5 million barrels of Iraqi oil, returning it to the international market after a three-month suspension.

On Sunday, a US convoy in the village of Dujail was ambushed, wounding several soldiers, as they were traveling to assist another convoy that had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in the nearby town of Mushahidah.

On Monday in Khaldiyah, gunmen shot at Americans guarding an ammunition dump. That night, a soldier from the 1st Armored Division was shot in the back, as he sat in a Humvee vehicle in Baghdad. Hours earlier, there were two blasts in the capital, a car bomb and a land mine.

The insurgents took their fight to a new level on Tuesday, June 17, firing shots into the mayor’s office and courthouse in Fallujah and a police station in Khaldiyah — offices that have been cooperating with the US-led occupation.

The day after in Baghdad, US central command said one soldier was shot dead and another wounded in an attack on a petroleum gas distribution plant. Gunmen approached on foot and fired at close range at the soldiers who were guarding the facility.

Far more numerous than these incidents is the unpublicized number of attacks on American positions that do not injure or kill soldiers. Attacks occur daily — more than a dozen every day in the past week, according to some accounts.

Could it be…the Iraqi people?

American forces are still not clear exactly who their opponent is.

At one moment this past week the army was claiming to have detained 74 suspected members of al-Qaida south of Kirkuk, but later decided they had no connection with the organization.

But hostile residents are not shy of threatening more attacks, insisting they are not “loyalists” to Saddam Hussein or because they’re members of his Baath party, but because they’re angry at the US military occupation of their country.

Though part of Desert Scorpion’s mission is to root out “Baathist elements,” in dozens of interviews during the past week, most residents across Iraq said there was no Baathist or Sunni conspiracy against US soldiers. They said that there were only people ready to fight because their relatives had been hurt or killed, or they themselves had been humiliated by home searches and road stops.

Add to those complaints the shortages of water and electricity and delays in establishing a new government, and many Iraqis said they had had enough of America’s help.

Farmers, police, politicians, tribal sheiks, businessmen, cabdrivers and religious leaders across Iraq say there may well be more bloodshed.

“What do you expect from people defending themselves?” said Mahdi Alsumaidy, the imam, or spiritual leader, of the influential Um-Al Tubol mosque in Baghdad. If the United States doesn’t get out of Iraq soon, he said, “more and more people will be killed, the Iraqi people will make a revolution against the American and coalition soldiers ... we believe that if they have many losses, they will leave.”

Last Thursday, residents in At Agilia — a village north of Baghdad — said two of their farmers and five others from another village were killed when US soldiers shot them while they were watering their fields of sunflowers, tomatoes and cucumbers.

“There are no human rights here,” Hitamer Muhammed, a farmer near the shooting, said. “Where is the democracy rule, as they claimed? Tell Bush we are waiting.”

Jaafar Obeid, another farmer, said that five relatives — including a 70-year-old man and three of his sons — were shot by American troops, apparently mistaking them for fleeing militants who had just attacked a US tank patrol.

Townspeople said the five men were trying to douse fires in their wheat fields Friday, set by US flares, when soldiers shot them.

“This action will bring harm to them (the Americans),” Obeid said. “They should have checked before opening fire. They have eliminated a whole family.”

Iraqi multi-millionaire Khalaf Shabib is not used to being manhandled into a tank, blindfolded and being made to wait for six hours with a plastic bag shoved over his head.

With tears rolling down his cheeks, the octogenarian said if US forces continued to treat Iraqis that way they would turn violently against the occupying troops. Shabib, one of the wealthiest businessmen in Iraq, says he feels humiliated.

“I am sad and pained ... because I was humiliated by the Americans. They treated me like an animal,” he said.

“We are not their enemies but they are turning us into enemies. My eyes fill with tears when I remember how they treated me ... Now I would be lying if I said I don’t want the occupiers out.”

Iyad, 32, said he was a soldier in the Iraqi army, but did not fight during the war because he opposed Saddam Hussein.

“I refused to fight Saddam’s war, and now they put me in jail and accuse me and my family of funding the Baath Party,” he said. “What an irony.”

“They stopped my car, pushed me out, threw me on the ground, tied my hands behind my back and left me in the intolerable heat for four hours. They took away my pistol then let me go,” said a 50-year-old teacher who gave his name as Hassan. “They said pistols were not banned. Why did they take it away?” A two-week amnesty for Iraqis to hand in heavy weapons ended on Sunday. Anyone caught with illegal firearms now faces a fine and up to a year in jail.

But the effort to disarm Iraqis, who traditionally own weapons, is proving less than successful with only a drop in Iraq’s ocean of weaponry — 700 guns out of an estimated five million in the country — being handed in so far.

Sources: Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Canadian Press, Financial Times (UK), Guardian (UK), Independent (UK), Inter Press Service, Knight-Ridder, New York Times, Reuters, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, Washington Post

US firm returns Mexican data, still peddling others

By Gabriel Packard

New York, New York, June 13 (IPS)— A US firm that stopped selling confidential data about Mexico’s 75 million voters to government departments here after a probe by Mexican authorities continues to offer information on millions of citizens of other Latin American countries to the US government.

Georgia state-based ChoicePoint says it handed over its Mexican data to the government there last month, and then purged the information from its files after loud complaints about the practice.

For two years, the firm, which is alleged to have controversial ties to the Republican Party of President George W Bush, sold the data to numerous government bodies, in particular the Department of Homeland Security.

ChoicePoint earned 11 million dollars last year for selling its Latin American records — which vary from country to country but can include legal, banking and home ownership information — to more than a dozen agencies, most of which said it needed them for law enforcement purposes.

It returned the Mexican records after an investigation by the country’s Federal Election Institute but ChoicePoint officials are blaming shoddy work by a “vendor” in Mexico for permitting the company to gain access to the private information.

The Mexican government had to labor long and hard with Washington, as well as with the company, to get the data back, says Julio Tellez, advisor to the Mexican Attorney General’s office and a professor specializing in the country’s information laws at Tec de Monterrey University.

The connection between the firm and the Republicans has also been noted by BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast, who has written extensively about the key role that ChoicePoint played in the Florida voting scandal that decided the 2000 presidential election.

The firm was contracted to “scrub” the Florida electoral roles of felons, who are ineligible to vote according to state law. But according to Palast’s inquiries, the company inaccurately scrubbed innocent people — most of them black, and many of them Democrats — who should have been entitled to vote. This, Palast claims, won George Bush the election.

Whether or not the claim is true, ChoicePoint has been given a number of lucrative government contracts — including immigration reviews, airport profiling and DNA cataloguing — many of which have been boosted by the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism.”

The firm also holds more than 17 billion pieces of information on US nationals and businesses, including public records and insurance files and employment background checks that ChoicePoint says are held with individuals’ permission.

In a statement released last month, the firm’s general counsel and chief privacy officer Michael deJanes blamed the scandal over the Mexican data on an unnamed “vendor” who originally sold the records to ChoicePoint for a reported 250,000 dollars, pledging that he had obtained it legally.

ChoicePoint External Affairs Director Chuck Jones says the firm “uses a legal counsel in each of the (Latin American) countries to review the local laws concerning the use of the data.” But in the case of Mexico, and perhaps other countries, this check — along with the pledge of the vendor — was apparently insufficient to detect that the information, most of which came from electoral records, was actually confidential.

Jones said he was unable to say if ChoicePoint would change the procedure in order to avoid similar situations in the future. He also refused to respond when asked if the firm accepts any blame for supplying confidential Mexican information to Washington.

Meanwhile, ChoicePoint continues to provide a number of government agencies with data on citizens and businesses in Argentina, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela, and information on businesses only in Brazil.

Seven of those countries are conducting investigations to determine who sold their data to ChoicePoint and whether the sales were legal.

At present, the only customer for this data is the US government.

Departments using the data include “virtually any agency with a law enforcement function — and there are a lot of those,” says Chris Hoofnagle, deputy counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Washington-based non-government pressure group that first discovered ChoicePoint’s Latin American data.

Hoofnagle estimates 30 agencies use the records, including the departments of Justice and Transportation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. ChoicePoint’s Jones says that the Department of Homeland Security is a major user of the Latin American data.

The records differ for each country, but Nicaraguan authorities, for example, say that ChoicePoint holds information on its citizens’ social security number, tax code, vehicle license plates, outstanding debts, bank accounts, criminal records, lawsuits, number of children, family members and home ownership details.

In its own advertising material, ChoicePoint once offered a “national registry file of all adult Colombians, including date and place of birth, gender, parentage, physical description, marital status, passport number, and registered profession.”

The firm’s usual practice is to keep possession of the database, allowing government officials to search for information only after they have provided a “permissible purpose.”

“For government customers, this most often involves law enforcement agencies that are conducting on-going criminal investigations,” according to Jones.

But the agencies themselves seem to have varying interpretations. Greg Palmore, a public affairs specialist at the Bureau of Immigration and Customs, told the UK-based Guardian newspaper that his bureau uses the data to help trace illegal immigrants who were also guilty of another crime, while Carl Rusnok of the same bureau told IPS the data is used “for a variety of law enforcement purposes.”

Non-government sources have speculated on some other ways that the government may be using the data. “They can use that information to harass and persecute immigrants,” says Luis Pineyro, an expert in security issues from the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico. Speaking before ChoicePoint stopped selling the Mexican data, he called the company’s purchase of the records “an affront and an attack on the Mexican government.”

In addition to selling data on the other eight Latin American countries, the firm continues to acquire new data on six of them.

US wins another exemption from war crimes court

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, June 13— While angry and reluctant members of the UN Security Council voted Thursday to extend its exemption of US soldiers and officials from the jurisdiction of the new International Criminal Court (ICC) for a second year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld threatened to block funding for NATO’s new headquarters in Brussels unless Belgium amended or withdrew a controversial law permitting its courts to try foreigners for war crimes and genocide.

Speaking at a NATO meeting in Brussels, Rumsfeld complained that “by passing this law, Belgium has turned its legal system into a platform for divisive, politicized lawsuits against her NATO allies.”

“It would obviously not be easy for US officials ... civilian or military, to come to Belgium for meetings,” he said. “Certainly, until this matter is resolved, we will have to oppose any further spending for construction for a new NATO headquarters in Brussels.”

Rumsfeld”s threat — which bewildered Belgian officials, who amended the law in April so that US officials or soldiers could not be prosecuted under it — was nonetheless certain to cause new resentment over US demands that its citizens be exempt from prosecution for serious abuses of human rights, renewing tensions over the issue between Washington and its European allies.

Coming on the same day that the Bush administration won a second one-year exemption for US citizens from the ICC, which is strongly supported by the European Union (EU), Rumsfeld”s remarks were likely to underline the growing divide between the US and Europe.

Last June the Bush administration asked the Security Council to approve a blanket exemption from the ICC”s jurisdiction for US nationals, threatening to veto the renewal of UN peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and elsewhere if it did not get its way. But Council members, particularly those associated with the EU, refused to go along.

After intense and often bitter negotiations, the two sides compromised by approving a resolution granting a one-year exemption for all individuals from countries that had not ratified the 1998 Rome Statute establishing the Court, which is mandated to investigate and prosecute war crimes, genocide, and other crimes against humanity. Former President Clinton signed the Statute in the last days of his term, but the Bush administration formally renounced it in May 2002.

The administration has argued that the ICC, likely to hear its first case early next year, gives too much discretion to prosecutors, who might bring cases against US officials for political reasons.

With some 150,000 US troops deployed in Iraq, another 9,000 in Afghanistan, and tens of thousands more in scores of countries across Eurasia and the Gulf, Washington is worried that it could become a prime target for prosecutions by international officials who want to constrain US power. Rights groups and European governments, including Washington’s closest Iraq ally, Britain, have said these fears are groundless.

Last week, however, Washington let it be known that it would seek an extension of the 2002 resolution which expires June 30.

The NGO Coalition for the ICC, a group representing more than 2,000 human-rights groups worldwide, opposed the US move, arguing that the UN Charter does not give the Security Council legal authority to effectively amend an international treaty. The Rome Statute became international law last year after 60 countries — including all EU members — ratified it. Thirty more have ratified it since, while a total of some 140 countries have signed it.

Approving an extension would “increase the risk of its becoming a permanent fixture,” according to Human Rights Watch, tending to further undermine what has been hailed as the most important human rights achievement since the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

Washington had hoped that the Council would quietly vote without debate on the extension this week, but a number of countries, including Canada, New Zealand, Jordan, and Switzerland all requested an open meeting, during which statements by 70 nations — including China, which surprised the Council by announcing for the first time that it was considering ratifying the Rome Statute — were presented in opposition to the extension. China was one of only seven countries who voted against its adoption in 1998.

In the event, the Council voted 12-0 to extend the exemption. However, three countries — France, Germany, and Syria — abstained, depriving Washington of a consensus.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Rumsfeld appeared determined to add growing resentment over Washington”s drive to exempt its nationals from jurisdiction in all non-US courts for rights abuses.

The Bush administration has complained loudly and often about a Belgian law granting its courts universal jurisdiction to hear cases involving rights atrocities, regardless of where they were committed. Since its enactment in 1993, a number of controversial cases have been brought to Belgian courts, including one against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Palestinian Authority President Yassir Arafat, former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and Cuban President Fidel Castro, among others.

Last March seven Iraqi families filed suit against former President George H.W. Bush and several of his top officials for alleged war crimes committed in the first Gulf War, while another case has since been brought against the Gen. Tommy Franks, the Iraq war commander.

Faced with a proliferation of lawsuits, Belgium has progressively narrowed the law”s scope. In April parliament amended the law to permit the government to dismiss complaints against foreign leaders, such as Sharon, Arafat, and the elder Bush, and to transfer other cases to the home countries of the accused. Last month, Belgium did precisely that with regard to all cases brought against US officials.

It was not clear whether Rumsfeld was aware of those changes in the law when he spoke Thursday. He said, however, that US military and civilian officials require specific assurances that they will not face “harassment” from Belgian courts if they travel to Brussels on official business. “It does not make much sense to make a new headquarters if you can’t come here for meetings,” he said.

Source: OneWorld.net

US stands alone in push to declare Iran in violation of nuclear treaty

Anti-gov’t protests continue in Tehran

Compiled by Nicholas Holt

June 19 (AGR)— The United States has demanded that Iran submit to more intrusive inspections after what it called a “deeply troubling” report from the UN nuclear agency.

In a sharp statement delivered to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) board on June 19, US Ambassador Kenneth Brill detailed concerns raised by the internal report that concluded that the Islamic nation had failed to declare how it had used nuclear material.

“Although the investigations are continuing, the report already confirms that Iran’s nuclear program is cause for great concern,” he said. He appealed to the board to meet in a special session to consider the issue.

Brill’s pointed remarks came just hours after Iran’s representative, Ambassador Ali Akbar Salehi, rejected allegations that Tehran failed to honor promises made under a treaty that aims to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

Iran — a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons — has rejected allegations by the IAEA that it has failed to disclose information on its use of nuclear material.

The US wants the UN nuclear agency to declare Iran in violation of the NPT.

Iran denies any wrongdoing, and says its program only concerns nuclear energy — not weapons.

“Iran considers the acquiring, development, and use of nuclear weapons inhuman, immoral, illegal and against its very principles,” he said. “They have no place in Iran’s defensive doctrine.”

However, Salehi acknowledged that the UN nuclear agency and the Islamic country had different interpretations of regulations regarding the import and use of nuclear material.

But he cited other instances of similar troubles worldwide and suggested that Iran was being singled out in this case.

The remarks were delivered as part of a debate on the IAEA report.

At least 18 countries had indicated willingness to speak on the issue, but as the debate wore on, it became clear that the United States was largely alone.

In the days leading to the meeting, the United States had trouble garnering support needed for a tough resolution condemning Iran, Western diplomats speaking on condition of anonymity said.

At least 170 people were arrested during sporadic overnight clashes in Tehran and several other Iranian cities, as anti-regime protests went into their eighth consecutive night, news agencies reported June 14.

Scores of people have been injured or detained over the past week of anti-government protests, the first in six months and which come amid a worsening political deadlock between reformists loyal to President Mohammad Khatami and powerful Islamic conservative hardliners.

However calm has largely returned to the campus and surrounding area, after police turned their attention to “extremist” protesters and hardline vigilantes trying to silence them.

US president George W. Bush has expressed strong support for the anti-regime protesters, calling them “courageous souls who speak out for freedom” and stressing: “They need to know America stands squarely by their side.”

“I would urge the Iranian administration to treat them with the utmost of respect,” said the US leader, who has branded Iran part of an “axis of evil” with North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Washington also says Iran harbors members of the al-Qaida network blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry has accused the United States of “flagrant interference in Iran’s internal affairs” and said the significance of the protests was being deliberately overstated by US officials.

The fact that the protests are being fueled by calls to pour into the streets from opposition-run Persian-language television stations in the United States adds to the unease.

US officials say they would welcome a change of government in Tehran. Although they stop short of embracing a policy of “regime change,” their statements have prompted some alarm in the region after the US-led invasion successfully ousted President Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq.

Sources: Agence France Presse, Associated Press, BBC, Middle East Online, Reuters, The Scotsman

US officials met with Colombian paramilitaries

By Luis Gómez

June 16— Last Thurs., June 12, a report shook Colombia and some circles in the US Congress: Officials from the political section of the US Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia, had brunched with a representative of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC, in its Spanish initials) last month, on May 3, according to a report published in the daily El Colombiano.

In a follow-up report, June 14, in the daily El Tiempo, the State Department publicly admitted that “an official from the Embassy met with a civilian advisor of the AUC,” but, at the same time, he denied that there had been any kind of negotiation (it was “only a reiteration of US policy”) with the paramilitary group led by Carlos Castaño, an act that, in fact, is considered illegal under US anti-terrorism laws and one that can bring a penalty of 10 years in prison, if applied, to officials of the Bush government.

After the news was reported, Jim Foster, spokesman for the US Embassy in Bogotá, categorically stated: “We don’t negotiate with terrorists. There was no negotiation.” However, some media organizations last week received copies of a memorandum in which a member of the AUC provided details of the meeting in which Salvatore Mancuso, considered to be the number-two man in the organization, US officials Alex Lee, Carlos García, and Stewart Tuttle, were mentioned.

An Associated Press wire dated June 12 indicated that the paramilitary member who wrote the document, known only as Pablo, confirmed having conversed with Lee about an amnesty treaty for the principal paramilitary leaders on the part of the United States government if they cooperate with authorities once they are placed under arrest by Washington, and that “Mister” Lee believed that the peace negotiations in Colombia were more important, although the charges filed by the US Justice Department would, at the same time, be considered.

Chatting with narco-traffickers

On Sept. 24, 2002, US Attorney General John Ashcroft made the following statement: Today, the Justice Department is filing charges against leaders of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia for trafficking more than 17 tons of cocaine to the United States and Europe since 1997… In the criminal complaint, five charges of narco-trafficking were filed against AUC leader Carlos Castaño and two other members of the paramilitary command, Salvatore Mancuso and Juan Carlos Sierra Ramírez… The accused would face a penalty as high as life imprisonment if they are found guilty of the charges.”

The AUC are already on the two most important lists of the United States international agenda: that of organizations that are considered to be terrorists, and that of the top drug lords. The first determination, as terrorists, is almost two years old and is well known. And on June 2 they were categorized as narco-traffickers. On this date, an official communiqué established that: “The President has notified Congress for the fourth time about the list of narco-traffickers according to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act [the law that determines the international heads of narco-trafficking]. This is the first year that the President has included foreign groups as kingpins…” Castaño and his gang appeared on the list.

Now, the official communiqué of the State Department indicates that the breakfast with Pablo last May 3 was nothing more than a meeting for purposes of “dialogue” in which the US political agents reaffirmed that “the policy of the US is to extradite Colombians upon whom judicial processes have been opened in the US, and that the violators of human rights must be judged for their crimes…”

However, a couple of months after the charges filed by Ashcroft last year, it became known that Carlos Castaño has sustained, over time, direct contacts with the DEA and other United States government agencies. Not to mention that the government of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe has achieved what no other world power has done: favoring his direct negotiations with the AUC, Uribe succeeded in causing the powerful Bush administration to suspend in mid-air the extradition orders against Castaño, Mancuso, and Sierra... with whom Uribe is now in constant contact.

It is also known that Castaño sent a letter to the Colombian president in which he made proposals to reach a “peace accord,” such as proposing that the Colombian Congress begin to debate a law of “pardon and forget” for paramilitary leaders as well as granting land titles to those paramilitaries who become demobilized and to place minors of age who are AUC soldiers into the custody of the State. In exchange for that, Castaño would provide information to weaken narco-trafficking: location of the transport routes, illicit crops, and data that reveals the mechanisms utilized for money laundering and other illegal activities.

Uribe has already established a government commission to study the letter. It is headed by Interior Minister Fernando Londoño and the top peace talks negotiator Luis Carlos Restrepo who certainly received a copy of the memorandum about the brunch that US officials say was not a negotiation and nothing of the kind was spoken there.

Brunching with the enemy

Carlos Castaño published a book, aided by journalist Mauricio Aranguren Molina: Mi confesión (My Confession) is a book that could (like any other confession) be used against the top leader of the AUC. It includes passages about his participation in the business of narco-trafficking.

“From time to time one or another capo of narco-trafficking bribes me generously to do favors for him…

“I think that if a narco-trafficker wants to give $50 million and it is not necessary to protect him or his illicit business, it is most welcome. Some have plantations an a region and seek security for their lands. His money is received due to his role as investor, not as narco-trafficker. This happens in many regions where the AUC is the authority and we have received $100,000 dollars or $200,000 dollars from time to time.”

“The AUC is anti-subversive... not anti-narco…”

On Sept. 24, 2002, Ashcroft said of the charges filed by the Bush administration against the top AUC leaders: “Today we see, more clearly than ever, the interdependence that exists between the terrorism that threatens the US citizenry and the drugs that threaten the US potential. As today’s charges remind us, the anarchy that produces terrorism is also fertile ground for the narco-trafficking that maintains terrorism. To surrender to either of these threats is to surrender to both of them.”

What he didn’t seem to say is that his government had been in contact with them and that part of the money given by taxpayers in the United States would soon be spent to have brunch with them in order to promise them “leniency.”

Source: Narco News

Rape victims married off to rapists in Bangladesh

By Tabibul Islam

Faridpur, Bangladesh, June 16 (IPS)— Rozina, the 16-year-old daughter of a farmer in this district of Bangladesh, is married to the man who raped her. Trapped by the dictates of village elders, threatened by the rapist’s family, and finding themselves powerless to resist, Rozina’s parents crumbled under the pressure.

On May 27, barely a fortnight after her abduction and rape, her marriage was solemnized in the village of Shibrampur, about 145 kilometers south-west of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.

At first desperate for justice, Rozina’s parents had filed a complaint with the police. But the powerful village leaders — in Bangladesh these are almost always landowners — forced them to drop the case and settle the matter by marrying their daughter off to the man who raped her.

“If a rape victim is forced to marry her tormentor she will suffer from a sense of helplessness and frustration throughout her life silently,” said Ayesha Khanam, secretary of the Bangladesh Women’s Council.

“In such circumstances, she will consider every act of sex with her rapist husband an act of rape,” commented Khanam.

Village elders cite community honor and image as reasons for their decisions. But over the last six months, an equal number of young women have committed suicide, protesting the arbitration of village leaders to marry them off to their rapists.

In truth, “the law does not permit forced marriage between a rape victim and the rapist,” said advocate Abdullah Abu of the Dhaka Bar. “The arbitration by the village leaders to compel a rape victim to marry her rapist is totally illegal.”

Yet Rozina’s is not an isolated aberration. According to media reports, over two dozen such marriages have taken place in the country in the last two years. The practice is also not a recent one — there are accounts of such cases from several generations ago.

Several cases apparently stem from the refusal by the parents of a young girl to a marriage proposal from a man of higher social standing based on his wealth and influence. This is a pattern which was seen in a recent case in a village in Bangladesh’s Patuakhali district.

Harun (not his real name), the son of a rich farming family, made a proposal to the parents of a girl from the same village. The parents refused, which infuriated Harun, and a few days later he sexually assaulted the girl.

Ordinarily, Harun should have been tried and sentenced — under Bangladesh law, rape carries a maximum punishment of rigorous imprisonment for life. But as happened in Shibrampur, Harun’s victim was forced with impunity into becoming his wife, in defiance of the law.

Non-governmental organizations and civil rights groups in Bangladesh cannot pre-empt the ‘marriages’ in remote villages, but they have been able to bring this issue and several related ones to the forefront.

Groups like the Bangladesh Women’s Council, headquartered in Dhaka, work toward having the rights of distressed women recognized, and for their education, empowerment and rehabilitation.

Indeed, a community-based approach is advocated by both Afroza Parveen of Nari Unnyanan Shakti (Power of Women’s Development) and Farida Yasmin, a women’s rights activist.

Rape victims, said Parveen, must be treated with love and kindness by the community they inhabit. “Every one of us should always remember that such an incident could befall any one at any time.”

Yasmin’s view is that enabling the rape victim to become economically independent is a key step toward her rehabilitation. She sees the government and the community as ideally sharing the task. “A prospective suitor will tend to ignore the unpleasant past if a woman is self-reliant economically,” she said.

Yet the reality is usually very different. The conservative Muslim society of Bangladesh often tends to blame the victim’s parents, close relatives and neighbors for the incident. Where the victims live with their families they are stigmatized, and are shunned as being “unmarriageable.”

This is why Prof Hasna Banu, a teacher at the Qamrunnesa Girls’ College in the old Dhaka city, underlined the need for counseling rape victims often to impress upon them that they are not in any way responsible for what happened to them. “These girls should be brought around to understand that the incidence of rape was simply an accident of life,” she said.

“An important attitudinal change in men is required,” added Prof. Sitara Begum, who teaches in a Dhaka college. “Men should not look upon women as sex objects, but as individuals who can achieve whatever men can.”

NGOs are offering legal help and financial assistance to the needy poor who are forced to fight for their rights in court.

They need all the help they can get. A survey conducted by the Institute of Mental Health showed that close to 90 percent of rapists were acquitted by courts for lack of evidence and due to the use of legal loopholes. Carried out four years ago by Dr. Nazmul Ahsan, associate professor of Dhaka Medical College, the surveys conclusions remain valid.

Such a state of affairs may help explain why the number of rape incidents shot up to 3,189 in 2001 from about 300 in 1985. NGOs and civil rights workers say the erosion of social and moral values, judicial delays, the financial clout of criminals and the influence they wield all contribute to the rising rate of rape.

A case in point is the sentencing to death of three policemen by a lower court for raping and then killing a village girl in northern Dinajpur district in 1995. The case is now pending with the Dhaka High Court following an appeal.

There are 30,000 more cases concerning women and child repression that are estimated to be pending with the lower courts in Bangladesh.

Iraq-attack think tank turns wrath on NGOs

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, June 12 (IPS)— Having led the charge to war in Iraq, an influential think tank close to the Bush administration has added a new target: international non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is setting its sights on those groups with a “progressive” or “liberal” agenda that favors “global governance” and other notions that are also promoted by the United Nations and other multilateral agencies.

AEI and another right-wing group, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, announced Wednesday they are launching a new website (www.NGOWatch.org) to expose the funding, operations and agendas of international NGOs, and particularly their alleged efforts to constrain US freedom of action in international affairs and influence the behavior of corporations abroad.

The organizations are especially alarmed by what they see as the naiveté of the Bush administration and corporations that provide NGOs with funding and other support. “In many cases, naive corporate reformers, within corporations and in government, are welcoming them,” complained John Entine, an AEI fellow.

To mark the site’s launch, AEI, which is funded mainly by major corporations and right-wing foundations also held an all-day conference, entitled “NGOs: The Growing Power of an Un-elected Few,” which featured a series of presentations depicting NGOs as a growing and largely unaccountable threat to the Bush administration’s foreign policy goals and free-market capitalism around the world. The conference was co-sponsored by the right-wing Australian think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).

“NGOs have created their own rules and regulations and demanded that governments and corporations abide by those rules,” according to conference organizers. “Politicians and corporate leaders are often forced to respond to the NGO media machine, and the resources of taxpayers and shareholders are used in support of ends they did not sanction.”

“The extraordinary growth of advocacy NGOs in liberal democracies has the potential to undermine the sovereignty of constitutional democracies, as well as the effectiveness of credible NGOs,” they added.

Both the website launch and Wednesday’s conference might normally be dismissed as a pep rally of a far right obsessed with left-wing and European conspiracies to impose world government on the United States and destroy capitalism.

But the fact that no less than 42 senior administration foreign-policy and justice officials have been recruited from AEI and the Federalists and that AEI “fellows” include such prominent figures as Lynne Cheney (the vice president’s spouse), former UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick and the influential Iraq hawk and former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, suggests that Wednesday’s events may herald a much more antagonistic attitude towards NGOs on the part of the government.

The conference was also held on the heels of harshly critical remarks late last month by Andrew Natsios, the director of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which often contracts with NGOs for relief and development work. Natsios reportedly charged that NGOs that received USAID funding for projects in Afghanistan and elsewhere were not giving sufficient credit to the US government as the source of the aid.

His remarks coincided with moves by USAID to use more private contractors, instead of NGOs, for work in Iraq and other countries, and to impose stricter rules regarding contacts between NGOs working on USAID projects and the press that would reduce their independence.

In that context, according to one international NGO official who asked not to be identified, the AEI conference could be seen as part of a troublesome pattern. “There are a number of things we’re seeing that we want to be sure are nothing more than coincidence,” he said.

The general message at Wednesday’s conference was that, while NGOs like Amnesty International, CARE, Oxfam, and Friends of the Earth, have performed valuable work in promoting human rights, development, and environmental protection, their general policies, particularly at the international level, may be inimical to US interests and free-market principles.

According to George Washington University political science professor Jarol Manheim, international NGOs are pursuing “a new and pervasive form of conflict” against multi-national corporations, which he calls “Biz-War,” the title of his forthcoming book.

NGOs, for example, work with like-minded institutional investors, such as union and church-based pension funds, to sponsor shareholder resolutions demanding that corporations adopt more environment- or human rights-friendly policies.

Such efforts, he said, should be seen as “part of a larger, anti-corporate campaign,” which includes consumer boycotts and other efforts to influence corporate behavior. Companies are increasingly engaging in joint projects with NGOs, using them as consultants, or even hiring former NGO officials to protect themselves against negative publicity.

This was echoed by John Entine, an AEI adjunct fellow, who called the “social investing” movement, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

“Anti-free market NGOs under the guise of corporate reform are extending their reach into the boardrooms of corporations,” he said.

Cornell University government professor Jeremy Rabkin was particularly contemptuous of corporations that tried to establish good relations with NGOs by, for example, working on joint projects or contributing money or other kinds of support. “Why are NGOs in a position to confer legitimacy?” he asked. “A lot of this is a kind of protection racket.”

On the political front, international NGOs, which in recent years led the fight for the global ban on anti-personnel mines, the Kyoto Protocol to fight global warming, and the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC), are pursuing a “liberal internationalist” vision that “wants to constrain the United States,” said American University law professor Kenneth Anderson.

The groups prefer a world order based on “global governance” and the rule of international law to one that is based on “democratic sovereignty,” where nation-states whose governments are subject to the vote of the people are the highest authority. In this quest, they are aided by UN agencies, which see in international NGOs and the global civil society they claim to represent an “alternative form of legitimacy beyond democracy,” Anderson said.

“If you think about it, of course this is a left-wing program,” added Rabkin. “The whole enterprise of global governance is going to appeal more to the parties of the left ... If it is global, it is anti-national,” he said, at one point noting that the original notion of a non-governmental organization was a “Stalinist concept.”