Colombia: Open letter by Liliana Obando/Carta publica de Liliana Obando

September 20, 2008 — At the end of the background information below (and HERE) is a link to an open letter to the national and international community sent by imprisoned Colombian trade union and Human Rights campaigner Liliana Obando.

Background

Colombian trade union and human rights activist Liliana Obando was arrested and detained in a maximum security prison on August 8 by the anti-terrorism unit of the Colombian National Police.

She was charged with “rebellion” against the state, a catch-all charge that is regularly used to imprison those who speak out against the government of President Alvaro Uribe Velez, the largest recipient of US military aid in the region.

At the time of her arrest, Obando, the sole breadwinner in her family of two young sons and her mother, was carrying out a study on assassinations of Agricultural Workers Union Federation (Fensuagro) members by paramilitary death squads and government security forces.

Colombia’s state security forces, in conjunction with paramilitary groups, are notorious for their human rights abuses and murder of social movement activists. To date, more than 2500 trade unionists have been killed, with 40 assassinated this year alone. Meanwhile, more than 70 pro-Uribe legislators are under investigation for having direct links to paramilitary death squads.

Obando toured Australia twice in recent years while working for Fensuagro’s international relations commission, and spoke with many organisations about the Uribe government’s abuses of human rights, and the Colombian people’s struggles for peace and justice.

The international campaign to free Obando and have all charges against her immediately dropped has won wide support in many countries. In Australia, many organisations and individuals — including solidarity groups, academics, religious organisations, NGOs, progressive political parties, and Unions NSW, the Maritime Union of Australia, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, and National Tertiary Education Union branches — have passed motions and sent letters of protest to the Colombian and Australian governments in recent weeks.

Unions WA voted on September 16 to also organise a delegation of union leaders to meet with Colombia’s ambassador in Australia and to approach all WA members of parliament, at every level of government, to lobby the federal government for Obando’s release.

However, much more pressure must urgently be put on the Colombian government if Obando is to be freed and her safety guaranteed.

All human rights supporters are urged to:

•put motions condemning Obando’s arrest to your union or other community organisations;

•send letters calling for her release to the Colombian president at auribe@presidencia.gov.co, with copies to Colombia’s Australian embassy at embassyofcolombia@bigpond.com, and to your local MP (please send a copy to Peace and Justice For Colombia at pjfcolombia@gmail.com);

•write to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights at oacnudh@hchr.org.co;

•help organise public protest actions; and

•help raise funds for Obando’s legal defence and to assist her children.

For more information, visit http://www.colombiasolidarity.net.

Pakistan troops ‘repel US raid’

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7628890.stm

Pakistani troops have fired warning shots at two US helicopters forcing them
back into Afghanistan, local Pakistani intelligence officials say.

The helicopters flew into the tribal North Waziristan region from
Afghanistan’s Khost province at around midnight, the reports say.

Tensions have risen after an increase in US attacks targeting militants.

The incident comes amid mounting security fears after a militant bomb attack
on the Islamabad Marriott hotel.

Pakistan’s army has said it will defend the country’s sovereignty and
reserves the right to retaliate to any border violations.

The government has said it will take targeted action against the militants,
promising raids in some “hotspots” near the border with Afghanistan.

Meanwhile in the city of Peshawar, Afghan consul Abdul Khaliq Farahi was
kidnapped after six unidentified men ambushed his car, officials say. His
driver died in the attack.

*’Firing in the air’*

Last week Pakistani troops fired into the air to prevent US ground troops
crossing the border into South Waziristan.

The latest confrontation between US and Pakistani forces took place in North
Waziristan’s sparsely populated Ghulam Khan district, west of the main town
in the region, Miranshah, local officials say.

They told the BBC that troops at border posts in the mountainous region
fired at two US helicopters which crossed into Pakistani territory.

The helicopters returned to Afghanistan without retaliating.

A senior security official based in Islamabad told the AFP news agency that
the helicopters had been repelled by both army troops and soldiers from the
paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC).

“The helicopters were heading towards our border. We were alert and when
they were right on the boundary line we started aerial firing. They hovered
for a few minutes and went back,” the official said.

“About 30 minutes later they made another attempt. We retaliated again,
firing in the air and not in their direction, from both the army position
and the FC position, and they went back.”

A Pakistani military spokesman, Maj Murad Khan, said he had no information
“on border violation by the American helicopters”.

The US military in Afghanistan also said it had no information on the
incident.

The BBC’s Barbara Plett in Islamabad says after increased American
incursions this month, the army stressed that it reserved the right to
retaliate.

Our correspondent says standard procedure would be to first fire warning
shots.

*’Crisis in relations’*

The two countries held talks last week on anti-militant co-ordination.

America’s top military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, flew to Islamabad to
try to calm the crisis in relations but tensions remain high, our
correspondent says.

As well as reported incursions, there have been a number of US missile
attacks aimed at militants in Pakistan territory in recent weeks.

The Americans stepped up their strikes after criticism that Pakistani troops
were unable or unwilling to eliminate Taleban sanctuaries along the border.

Waziristan is one of the main areas from which Islamist militants launch
attacks into Afghanistan.

It emerged earlier this month that US President George W Bush has in recent
months authorised military raids against militants inside Pakistan without
prior approval from Islamabad.

Pakistan reacted with diplomatic fury when US helicopters landed troops in
South Waziristan on 3 September. It was the first ground assault by US
troops in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s army has warned that the aggressive US policy will widen the
insurgency by uniting tribesmen with the Taleban.

Pirates of the Horn: U.S. Backs Reign of Crime and Death in Somalia

The civilian death count from the American-backed “regime change” operation in Somalia is approaching 10,000, with more than 800 killed in the Terror War slaughter since June.

The figures, compiled by the Elman Peace and Human Rights Organization in Mogadishu, are almost certainly an undercount, given the rampant chaos that has ravaged the country in the wake of the Ethiopian invasion, and the Muslim practice of quick burial of the dead. But they are horrific enough, especially when added to another statistic released by the United Nations last month: 3.7 million Somalis are now in need of outside aid in order to survive. This is more than one-third of the entire population.

I have written often of what is happening in Somalia, and the American government’s direct role in it, and the total silence of America’s bipartisan political establishment about this vast atrocity. I won’t recapitulate the horror and terror — and American complicity — here at the moment, but links to many of these pieces can be found in this recent post.

Meanwhile, a new piece in The Times is worth noting. It is offered as a sidebar to a larger story on the continuing plague of piracy based in Somalia, but it contains some telling facts and a good capsule description of the origins of the Terror War operation.

For one thing, it notes something that is almost never mentioned in any story about Somalia, neither in the very rare stories about the conflict itself or the rather more numerous stories about piracy and its effects on commercial shipping (an issue far more important that the lives of 10,000 innocent human beings, of course): the fact that the main backers and bankrollers of the vicious pirate gangs “are linked to the Western-backed government.”

The conservative UK paper then goes on to give an accurate account of how these pirate-backing factions came to power — facts that are almost universally ignored by the “liberal” American media . (Not to mention the “progressive blogosphere;” indeed, you can actually find more references to the Somalia war in the corporate press than among our internet “dissidents.”) :

Years of violence, neglect and misguided policies have left Somalia one of the most dangerous countries and a breeding ground for the pirates attacking one of the world’s busiest shipping routes.

Today the northeast area of the country, including Puntland, has been carved up by warlords who finance themselves by drug and gun running. This is also the heartland of the pirates, whose main backers are linked to the Western-backed government. Radical Islamists control much of the south, including the key port of Kismayo and the porous border area with Kenya, a staunch Western ally.

This has realised a Western nightmare, which was supposed to have been destroyed by Ethiopia’s American-backed invasion of Somalia two years ago in support of a puppet government created by the international community. That alliance spanned the spectrum from extreme radicals to moderate, devout Muslims. The latter were in charge.

Everyone – except Pentagon planners, it seems – knew that Somalia had never proved fertile territory for Saudi-style radical Islam. However, indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas by Ethiopia, Somalia’s historic enemy, with huge casualties, put an end to that. The Islamists were driven out, the moderates went into exile and the hardliners took control of the south with a popular powerbase beyond their wildest dreams.

A puppet government, installed by foreign invasion, riddled with crime and corruption, alienating and radicalizing the population: here we see the quintessential template of the “War on Terror,” replicated faithfully in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia — and soon, perhaps, in Pakistan.

Mass death, mass ruin and immeasurable human suffering: this is what the War on Terror does.  This is what the War on Terror is all about. It can have no other outcome. When someone supports the War on Terror — as Barack Obama, John McCain, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden all do, with eagerness and enthusiasm — this is what they are embracing. They are dipping their hands in innocent blood.

The American War Moves To Pakistan

By Tariq Ali

17 September, 2008
TomDispatch.com

The decision to make public a presidential order of last July authorizing American strikes inside Pakistan without seeking the approval of the Pakistani government ends a long debate within, and on the periphery of, the Bush administration. Senator Barack Obama, aware of this ongoing debate during his own long battle with Hillary Clinton, tried to outflank her by supporting a policy of U.S. strikes into Pakistan. Senator John McCain and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin have now echoed this view and so it has become, by consensus, official U.S. policy.

Its effects on Pakistan could be catastrophic, creating a severe crisis within the army and in the country at large. The overwhelming majority of Pakistanis are opposed to the U.S. presence in the region, viewing it as the most serious threat to peace.

Why, then, has the U.S. decided to destabilize a crucial ally? Within Pakistan, some analysts argue that this is a carefully coordinated move to weaken the Pakistani state yet further by creating a crisis that extends way beyond the badlands on the frontier with Afghanistan. Its ultimate aim, they claim, would be the extraction of the Pakistani military’s nuclear fangs. If this were the case, it would imply that Washington was indeed determined to break up the Pakistani state, since the country would very simply not survive a disaster on that scale.

In my view, however, the expansion of the war relates far more to the Bush administration’s disastrous occupation in Afghanistan. It is hardly a secret that the regime of President Hamid Karzai is becoming more isolated with each passing day, as Taliban guerrillas move ever closer to Kabul.

When in doubt, escalate the war is an old imperial motto. The strikes against Pakistan represent — like the decisions of President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to bomb and then invade Cambodia (acts that, in the end, empowered Pol Pot and his monsters) — a desperate bid to salvage a war that was never good, but has now gone badly wrong.

It is true that those resisting the NATO occupation cross the Pakistan-Afghan border with ease. However, the U.S. has often engaged in quiet negotiations with them. Several feelers have been put out to the Taliban in Pakistan, while U.S. intelligence experts regularly check into the Serena Hotel in Swat to discuss possibilities with Mullah Fazlullah, a local pro-Taliban leader. The same is true inside Afghanistan.

After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a whole layer of the Taliban’s middle-level leadership crossed the border into Pakistan to regroup and plan for what lay ahead. By 2003, their guerrilla factions were starting to harass the occupying forces in Afghanistan and, during 2004, they began to be joined by a new generation of local recruits, by no means all jihadists, who were being radicalized by the occupation itself.

Though, in the world of the Western media, the Taliban has been entirely conflated with al-Qaeda, most of their supporters are, in fact, driven by quite local concerns. If NATO and the U.S. were to leave Afghanistan, their political evolution would most likely parallel that of Pakistan’s domesticated Islamists.

The neo-Taliban now control at least twenty Afghan districts in Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan provinces. It is hardly a secret that many officials in these zones are closet supporters of the guerrilla fighters. Though often characterized as a rural jacquerie they have won significant support in southern towns and they even led a Tet-style offensive in Kandahar in 2006. Elsewhere, mullahs who had initially supported President Karzai’s allies are now railing against the foreigners and the government in Kabul. For the first time, calls for jihad against the occupation are even being heard in the non-Pashtun northeast border provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan.

The neo-Taliban have said that they will not join any government until “the foreigners” have left their country, which raises the question of the strategic aims of the United States. Is it the case, as NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer suggested to an audience at the Brookings Institution earlier this year, that the war in Afghanistan has little to do with spreading good governance in Afghanistan or even destroying the remnants of al-Qaeda? Is it part of a master plan, as outlined by a strategist in NATO Review in the Winter of 2005, to expand the focus of NATO from the Euro-Atlantic zone, because “in the 21st century NATO must become an alliance… designed to project systemic stability beyond its borders”?

As that strategist went on to write:

“The centre of gravity of power on this planet is moving inexorably eastward. As it does, the nature of power itself is changing. The Asia-Pacific region brings much that is dynamic and positive to this world, but as yet the rapid change therein is neither stable nor embedded in stable institutions. Until this is achieved, it is the strategic responsibility of Europeans and North Americans, and the institutions they have built, to lead the way… [S]ecurity effectiveness in such a world is impossible without both legitimacy and capability.”

Such a strategy implies a permanent military presence on the borders of both China and Iran. Given that this is unacceptable to most Pakistanis and Afghans, it will only create a state of permanent mayhem in the region, resulting in ever more violence and terror, as well as heightened support for jihadi extremism, which, in turn, will but further stretch an already over-extended empire.

Globalizers often speak as though U.S. hegemony and the spread of capitalism were the same thing. This was certainly the case during the Cold War, but the twin aims of yesteryear now stand in something closer to an inverse relationship. For, in certain ways, it is the very spread of capitalism that is gradually eroding U.S. hegemony in the world. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s triumph in Georgia was a dramatic signal of this fact. The American push into the Greater Middle East in recent years, designed to demonstrate Washington’s primacy over the Eurasian powers, has descended into remarkable chaos, necessitating support from the very powers it was meant to put on notice.

Pakistan’s new, indirectly elected President, Asif Zardari, the husband of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto and a Pakistani “godfather” of the first order, indicated his support for U.S. strategy by inviting Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai to attend his inauguration, the only foreign leader to do so. Twinning himself with a discredited satrap in Kabul may have impressed some in Washington, but it only further decreased support for the widower Bhutto in his own country.

The key in Pakistan, as always, is the army. If the already heightened U.S. raids inside the country continue to escalate, the much-vaunted unity of the military High Command might come under real strain. At a meeting of corps commanders in Rawalpindi on September 12th, Pakistani Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kayani received unanimous support for his relatively mild public denunciation of the recent U.S. strikes inside Pakistan in which he said the country’s borders and sovereignty would be defended “at all cost.”

Saying, however, that the Army will safeguard the country’s sovereignty is different from doing so in practice. This is the heart of the contradiction. Perhaps the attacks will cease on November 4th. Perhaps pigs (with or without lipstick) will fly. What is really required in the region is an American/NATO exit strategy from Afghanistan, which should entail a regional solution involving Pakistan, Iran, India, and Russia. These four states could guarantee a national government and massive social reconstruction in that country. No matter what, NATO and the Americans have failed abysmally.

Tariq Ali, writer, journalist, filmmaker, contributes regularly to a range of publications including the Guardian, the Nation, and the London Review of Books. His most recent book, just published, is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (Scribner, 2008). In a two-part video, released by TomDispatch.com, he offers critical commentary on Barack Obama’s plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as on the tangled U.S.-Pakistani relationship.

Copyright 2008 Tariq Ali