20 February 2012. A World to Win News Service. With the approach of 8 March, International Women's Day, marked by revolutionary mobilizations in many countries, we are reprinting the following article which first appeared in the 7 March 2005 AWTWNS.
Prostitution is one of the fastest growing components of today’s world economy. Some NGOs and international agencies like to call women who engage in prostitution "sex workers" and refer to the "sex industry" as if prostitution were just another job, like working at a food stand, in a garment factory or at a call centre, but in fact most of the women are youths and children and little more than modern slaves. Workers create commodities, but like old-fashioned slaves these women are commodities to be bought and sold as if they were things, and not human beings. Many hundreds of thousands of women are trafficked every year from the world’s poorest areas to Western Europe, Australia, Israel, Japan, the US, the Arab Gulf states and other countries. This contemporary slave trade generates billions of dollars every year.
There are 400,000 to 500,000 child prostitutes in India. Many are trafficked from Nepal and Bangladesh. An estimated 200,000 women and children fall victim to human trafficking in Southeast Asia alone every year.
Many Southeast Asian villages have been emptied of their 13-19 year-old girls. The tourist industry in many of these countries revolves around prostitution to a large extent. Some 800,000 youth and teenagers in Thailand have been forced into prostitution. It is estimated that the "sex industry" earns 10-14 percent of the country's gross domestic product. While Thailand is the worst, according to an International Labour Organization report, the figures for the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia are similar.
The South-east Asian countries do not openly promote prostitution, but their economies are dependent on it to some degree and their policies have to take this into account. They know what brings many of the tourists and what the young women are being sent abroad to do. The hard currency helps pay their debts to the IMF and the World Bank, who in this sense can be considered the world’s biggest pimps. Governments thrive on the official and unofficial taxes (bribes) that come from issuing licenses for bars, restaurants, hotels and other centres that are covers for brothels, and the income these places earn enters into many other businesses and industries. In fact, prostitution is an integral component of the economy of these countries. Whole layers of capitalists directly engaged in this industry or indirectly benefiting from it have been created and fattened. Despite some talk about combating sex tourism by the governments in the region, they have done nothing real to limit it. In Thailand and Cambodia senior government officials are said to be directly involved, but even if they were not, any serious attack on prostitution would undermine the economy these officials are pledged to develop.
Most women engaged in prostitution have been forced into it by poverty and the malfunctioning of the economy of their country. The economic crisis that overtook South-east Asia in the late 1990s made the situation worse. The number of women driven to prostitution increased dramatically, and countries that earlier had not experienced large-scale prostitution were drawn in. Vietnam and Cambodia – which were largely closed to tourism just a decade ago – are now at risk of becoming established sex tourism destinations like Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
The kind of development promoted by imperialist capital in these countries produces more prostitution, not less. For example, while capitalist industries have developed enough in some parts of Thailand to make that country a "tiger" admired for its economic growth, the collapse of the economy in rural areas that has accompanied this has made life in the villages near impossible, with few opportunities for the peasants to find work that will ensure their survival. In Thailand, prostitutes send $300 million a year to their families in the villages. In Cambodia, 98 percent of girls in prostitution are the main providers for their families. In a survey conducted by the NGO Escape, many women reported that if they gave up prostitution their parents and/or children would starve.
The collapse of the Soviet bloc produced another source of enormous profits for those who mine this human misery. Albania, Ukraine, Romania and Moldova, Europe’s poorest country, are the main but not the only source of countries from which women are abducted or tricked into enslavement in the West.
Each year many women from former Soviet-bloc countries like Slovakia, Russia, Georgia, Armenia and others whose social structures have imploded are exported to Western Europe and the US. Trafficking has become an integral part of the economies of these countries, too – often the forward edge of the emerging market economy. The prostitution of women and children has paid for many a new concrete tower block in Tirana (Albania) or Chisinau (Moldova). "It is estimated", says a report commissioned by Unicef, "that over the past 10 years, 100,000 Albanian women and girls have been trafficked to Western Europe and other Balkan countries." Some 30,000 prostitutes from Albania are said to be currently working in Western Europe. Documents produced by Unicef and "Save the Children" found "up to 80 per cent of those trafficked from some corners of Albania and Moldova to be children, with reports showing a decline in the average age of children/women being trafficked for prostitution."
Gangs hunt youth and teenage girls through direct contact with a relative, friend or friend of a friend, as well as by posting ads offering fake jobs as waitresses, babysitters or cooks – invariably jobs for women. Most are trafficked by criminal gangs or individual entrepreneurs promising them a better life and the chance to earn a lot of money. Once across the border, they will be auctioned and sold to their next owner. By now, they owe a vast amount of money to the trafficker for 'facilitating" their journey, and will be made to work off debts by servicing up to tens of customers a day, seven days a week. Their debts can never be cleared because they have to pay half of all they earn to the brothel owner and the rest to the trafficker. They are told that if they go to the police for help, they will be arrested and their families back home will have to pay the price.
Often they are threatened with torture and death if they try to escape; for most, finding their way home again would be impossible anyway. Some who dare to escape are re-trafficked quickly.
While South-east Asia and Eastern Europe are the main providers of teenage girls for Western consumers, now nearly every poor region in the world is a target for this profitable business. Some 1,000 Mozambicans aged between 14 and 24 are smuggled every year to Johannesburg, where they are forced to work in restaurants or as prostitutes. The UN estimates that in Brazil two million young people under the age of 18 are involved in prostitution. Thousands of Colombian women are lured to Japan with false job offers. The women do not know what is in store for them on arrival but the Japanese government knows very well what will happen when it issues them special visas as "entertainers".
Even Islamic countries like Iran, Morocco and Tunisia – where keeping women covered has been the most common open expression of their oppression and domination – have recently been drawn into global prostitution in a more hidden way. Most women forced into prostitution are meant for domestic consumption but some are exported to Arab Gulf states. According to the Iranian student agency Ilna, every day an average of 54 Iranian girls 16 -25 years old are traded in Karachi, Pakistan, mainly for re-export.
The international scale of this crime is difficult to quantify. The US State Department last year said it believed between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across borders annually. Profits are estimated to be in the billions of dollars.
At an Athens conference it was revealed that up to 20,000 foreign women, the majority from the former Soviet bloc, are working as sex slaves in a billion-dollar industry servicing more than a million men across Greece.
"There are now as many as 80,000 women working as prostitutes in the UK. In London alone, an academic study found that men spend £200 million a year on sex, almost half in massage parlours and saunas… Across the UK, the industry is believed to be worth about £770 million a year, with street prostitution accounting for only about five per cent…. about 600,000 people are illegally brought into the EU each year, the vast majority of them for sexual exploitation." (Observer, 18 April 2004)
"Last year, the [London] Metropolitan police's clubs and vice unit took 300 girls and women, including 10 children, out of brothels. Only 19 percent were British. The rest were from Eastern Europe (25 percent), South-east Asia (13 percent), Western Europe (12 percent) and Africa (2 percent). Country by country, the largest numbers were from Thailand, Russia, Brazil and Kosovo. Superintendent Chris Bradford said: 'It's like a slave market.'" (Guardian, 19 August 2004)
The situation is no better in France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden.
Pornography is a sister to prostitution in its treatment of women, and can be considered a part of the "sex industry" in the broader sense. In the US it is estimated to be worth $10 billion a year. Porn movie revenues are bigger than Hollywood’s domestic box-office receipts, and the profits greater, thanks in large part to imported women from Eastern Europe. In the UK, the chief executive of one of the country’s many legal pornography magazine publishers has been identified by BBC as a major contributor to Blair's Labour Party.
This is the reality of today’s world. Two characteristics stand out in these horror stories. First of all, the process of globalisation that exploded after the collapse of the Soviet bloc is one of the main reasons for the new and unprecedented rise in the trafficking of women. Unemployment, poverty, a ruined economy and a torn social fabric are part of the real outcome of an ever more market-driven global economy, especially for people in the third world. In this distorted structure the poverty and misery of the majority is a rich source for the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few. And among them women are the first victims of this new phenomenon of capitalism. Millions of children and young women have been enslaved and robbed of their lives so that investors in the sex industry based in the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany, France, Japan, etc. can accumulate more and more capital.
The other characteristic of world capitalism revealed in the sex industry is the international division of labour. Certain countries are assigned to provide certain commodities in the service of world finance capital. Many of those assigned to provide human material for the so-called sex industry in the world market are poor countries that lack other "natural resources", or whose other products are not enough in high demand globally, or simply ones that have been plundered into devastation by imperialists and colonialists and ruined by years of war. This isn’t a matter of a conscious conspiracy; what happens is that certain countries have been assigned to supply whatever they can produce "best" (most competitively on the world market) by the objective workings of imperialist capital, and people do what they can to survive within this context.
It is undeniable that imperialism is creating global prostitution on a scale never before seen in history. The imperialists are unable to put an end to the trafficking in women, even if they wanted to – which is doubtful, though they might want to keep it more hidden – because their system is grounded in the oppression and exploitation of women. Prostitution can never be wiped out so long as this remains.
The US hijacked the recent UN conference on women's equality by insisting that it formally declare that abortion is not a right for women. Almost completely isolated, the American representative coupled this with a call for a worldwide ban on prostitution, which she called the only way to stop the trafficking of women.
The whole Bush-led crusade against abortion is the US and abroad by is a perfect illustration of the convergence of the rulers in the "advanced" imperialist West and the "backward" countries. Do women have the right to make their own decisions about their sexuality and reproduction, or are their bodies not really their own? Christian fascists and Islamic fundamentalists alike proclaim their "respect" for women while totally opposing the emancipation of women from male authority and the concrete measures that are necessary to change that situation.
Further, this debate at the UN and among NGOs on how to end prostitution has been fruitless. Some countries have made prostitution illegal like the US (in most states) and Sweden; and others have made it legal, like Germany and the Netherlands. But in all of these countries it continues to exist. Whenever these governments decide to crack down on the traffic in women they pass harsher immigration laws, target the prostitutes and pick up a few and deport them. Who can believe that such measures can help end this horror? Their main effect is to put more pressure on victims, who find themselves with even less hope of any acceptable way out of their situation and become more deeply enslaved to their owners.
The morality Bush and his ilk want to protect in opposing this traffic, whether hypocritically or not, seeks to preserve the oppression of women in another form. Under the slogan "family values", what their traditional morality seeks is to maintain women as the property not of many men but one, the woman’s husband. People (fathers and mothers who find themselves obliged to enforce patriarchal values) in impoverished villages and other places left hopeless by the global march of capital end up considering selling their daughters because imperialism has turned them into a hot commodity that men will buy in the rich corners of those countries and the world as a whole. Sellers and buyers alike share the view of females as fated to serve men in one form or another. This idea reflects the whole organisation of class society for several thousand years.
The globalisation of prostitution combines the inequality of nations and the inequality of the sexes in one hideous phenomenon. What kind of world is this where the more wealth is created and the more the world is drawn into a single whole, instead of human progress the result is greater tragedy for millions? Today's explosion in the traffic in human females is driven by the catastrophic convergence of two things, one new and the other very old: the destruction wreaked by an unprecedented development of global capitalism that is reaching deep into backward countries and pre-capitalist social systems and reducing everything in the world to something to be bought and sold, and the oppression of women that goes back to the earliest development of private property and the division of society into classes.
The oppression of women has persisted under every exploiting system and been justified by every traditional morality. There is no way to end these crimes without putting an end to the imperialist system and completely revolutionising all of the relations prevailing in today’s world.
Posts mit dem Label Maoist Parti Merkezi werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen
Posts mit dem Label Maoist Parti Merkezi werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen
Donnerstag, 23. Februar 2012
Montag, 17. Oktober 2011
Secret cables reveal US combat operations in the Philippines
3 October 2011. A World to Win News Service. The following article is reprinted from philippinerevolution.net.
The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) today [16 September] called attention to secret cables from the US Embassy in Manila published by the website Wikileaks.org revealing the use of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and the annual Balikatan joint military exercises as "legal cover"for the involvement of US military forces in combat operations in the Philippines.
The CPP statement coincided with the 30th anniversary of the historic Philippine Senate decision of September 16, 1991 to abrogate the Military Bases Agreement of 1946. The abrogation paved the way for the dismantling of Subic Naval Base, Clark Air Base and several other American military installations in the Philippines.
"Thirty years after the abrogation of the MBA, US military forces continue to trample on Philippine sovereignty by maintaining permanent presence, engaging in local combat operations, advising the AFP in strategic planning and using the Philippines as a platform for its 'power projection' activities in the Pacific region," said the CPP.
In a cable dated January 19, 2005 titled "AFP/DND Talks Produce Progress on Counterterrorism Scenarios, former US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone reported to the US State Department that Philippine military and security officials held a working meeting with representatives of the US Pacific Command and succeeded in "developing a range of enhanced US-GRP counterterrorism scenarios”.
In the said meeting, officials and legal counsels of the Department of National Defense (DND) assured the US military that "(we are trying to) push the envelope to combat-related activities" but asserted that such activities "should fall under 'the rubric of exercise' because of the difficulty the word 'operation' posed for the Filipino side." DND officials gave assurances that the VFA and Philippine Supreme Court decisions covered such operations.
"This and other secret cables clearly reveal that so-called joint exercises regularly conducted by the US and Philippine militaries merely serve to camouflage the direct involvement of US military forces in combat operations in the Philippines," said the CPP. According to the CPP, US military forces are involved in combat operations not only in Southwestern Mindanao where the 700-strong Joint Special Operations Task Force (JSOTF)-Philippines is based, but also against the New People's Army in various parts of the country.
"Aside from actually joining combat operations in the field, US forces set up position in tactical command posts, embed themselves in AFP combat units, join so-called civil-military activities, provide surveillance and intelligence information and help in the mobilization of troops," said the CPP.
"Even so-called humanitarian missions are being used as a 'public diplomacy tool' with the aim of drowning the issues of sovereignty and military interference," pointed out the CPP. In another cable prepared by former Ambassador Kristie Kenney dated January 17, 2008, she said that these "'humanitarian missions" "are relatively inexpensive activities (which) are critical to ensuring future access to these ports and deflecting leftist and elitist critiques of US- Philippine military engagement."
"The US imperialists continue to treat Philippine sovereignty with utter contempt,"said the CPP. "The Filipino people must heighten their patriotism and continue to struggle to put an end to US military interventionism."
The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) today [16 September] called attention to secret cables from the US Embassy in Manila published by the website Wikileaks.org revealing the use of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and the annual Balikatan joint military exercises as "legal cover"for the involvement of US military forces in combat operations in the Philippines.
The CPP statement coincided with the 30th anniversary of the historic Philippine Senate decision of September 16, 1991 to abrogate the Military Bases Agreement of 1946. The abrogation paved the way for the dismantling of Subic Naval Base, Clark Air Base and several other American military installations in the Philippines.
"Thirty years after the abrogation of the MBA, US military forces continue to trample on Philippine sovereignty by maintaining permanent presence, engaging in local combat operations, advising the AFP in strategic planning and using the Philippines as a platform for its 'power projection' activities in the Pacific region," said the CPP.
In a cable dated January 19, 2005 titled "AFP/DND Talks Produce Progress on Counterterrorism Scenarios, former US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone reported to the US State Department that Philippine military and security officials held a working meeting with representatives of the US Pacific Command and succeeded in "developing a range of enhanced US-GRP counterterrorism scenarios”.
In the said meeting, officials and legal counsels of the Department of National Defense (DND) assured the US military that "(we are trying to) push the envelope to combat-related activities" but asserted that such activities "should fall under 'the rubric of exercise' because of the difficulty the word 'operation' posed for the Filipino side." DND officials gave assurances that the VFA and Philippine Supreme Court decisions covered such operations.
"This and other secret cables clearly reveal that so-called joint exercises regularly conducted by the US and Philippine militaries merely serve to camouflage the direct involvement of US military forces in combat operations in the Philippines," said the CPP. According to the CPP, US military forces are involved in combat operations not only in Southwestern Mindanao where the 700-strong Joint Special Operations Task Force (JSOTF)-Philippines is based, but also against the New People's Army in various parts of the country.
"Aside from actually joining combat operations in the field, US forces set up position in tactical command posts, embed themselves in AFP combat units, join so-called civil-military activities, provide surveillance and intelligence information and help in the mobilization of troops," said the CPP.
"Even so-called humanitarian missions are being used as a 'public diplomacy tool' with the aim of drowning the issues of sovereignty and military interference," pointed out the CPP. In another cable prepared by former Ambassador Kristie Kenney dated January 17, 2008, she said that these "'humanitarian missions" "are relatively inexpensive activities (which) are critical to ensuring future access to these ports and deflecting leftist and elitist critiques of US- Philippine military engagement."
"The US imperialists continue to treat Philippine sovereignty with utter contempt,"said the CPP. "The Filipino people must heighten their patriotism and continue to struggle to put an end to US military interventionism."
Mittwoch, 27. Juli 2011
German tanks roll across the Mid East, thanks to Israel
18 July 2011. A World to Win News Service. Berlin's recent decision to sell 200 Leopard-2 tanks to Saudi Arabia sheds light on both Germany's active participation in repressing Arab peoples and Israel's centrality in that repression.
The sale of these tanks was supposed to be a secret. Unusually, someone in the German national security council leaked the news to Der Spiegel, which instead of ignoring it, provoked a scandal, leading some observers to believe that there is dissension in the highest circles about this issue.
These 62-tonne tanks are equipped with advanced weapons systems. Their stabilization mechanism allows them to fire their cannons with great accuracy while advancing at top speed over rough terrain. Israel used its own Merkava tanks based on earlier Leopard-2 designs and imported German components for its last invasion of Lebanon. But this particular Leopard-2 model is also equipped for use against unarmed civilians. They have plow-like "clearance blades" in front, designed to sweep away barricades, and "non-lethal" features for "crowd control".
"This would be the perfect tank to drive into Bahrain and crack down on any uprising," a researcher at the Bonn International Centre for Conversion commented to The New York Times 7 July. Last March Saudi Arabia sent tanks, armoured cars and troops into Bahrain to put down a protest movement demanding that the monarchy grant the same rights to the Shia majority as the Sunni elite. Four dozen hospital doctors and nurses are now facing prison for having treated wounded demonstrators. Many have been tortured into giving televised "confessions". Two protesters have been sentenced to death. "It's also a good tank to fight any demonstrations in Riyadh", the Saudi capital, he added.
Saudi Arabia had a causeway built to allow its armed forces to roll into the tiny neighbouring Bahrain archipelago for the same reason that it has always worked to hold sway over other neighbours, like Yemen: the Saudi royal family fear that any instability and popular stirrings would threaten their reign. Obama's apologists for the Saudi monarchy usually make the following realpolitick argument: Shia Iran is encouraging the Bahraini Shias to demand their rights as a way to threaten the Saudi rulers, who fear a revolt against their despotism by the Shia minority in Saudi Arabia. What this reasoning deliberately overlooks is the question of right and wrong. The subtext is that Shias shouldn't have equal rights because that might be bad for American interests.
German officials took a different tactic in defending these weapons sales, to the extent that they commented at all. In general, the government tried to suffocate the scandal with what some media dubbed "an iron silence" and refused to confirm or deny the reports. But a foreign policy spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union argued that the deal was morally defensible because it was meant to protect Israel.
"Every step that we take in the region we take with the condition that it promotes the security and the right to exist of Israel," Philipp Missfelder said. (NYT)
Quoting an unnamed official, the Suddeutsche Zeitung reported that Israel and the US had both backed the deal, offering as proof that neither government raised public objections even after the scandal broke.
You might ask how, and against whom, these German tanks are supposed to defend Israel. After all, even if you were to swallow the specious argument about the existential threat to Israel posed by Iran, no one claims it could take the form of Persian armies marching across the Arabian peninsula to Tel Aviv.
Those tanks have only one plausible target, and that is the people of the peninsula itself. As even the NYT went on to explain, "Once viewed by Israel as a potential threat, the government in Saudi Arabia is increasingly viewed as a guarantor of stability in a region in upheaval, as revolutionary fervour sweeps through the Middle East."
"Promoting the security and right to exist of Israel" means supplying some of the world's most modern tools for killing people to one of the world's most medieval regimes (even worse than the Islamic Republic of Iran when it comes to women's rights) to preserve "stability" – defending, from their own people, the network of reactionary and mostly US-dependent regimes that extends from Morocco to Turkey, along with defending Israel from the people who were cleared out and put down to build the Zionist state.
Germany's dedication to Israel has nothing to do with atonement for the crimes it committed against Jews, any more than those crimes justify further crimes against other people. Weapon sales to Israel played an important role in German rearmament, starting in the 1950s when German companies began building weapons for Israel that the German armed forces were not yet allowed to have under the terms of the treaty that ended World War 2. The development of arms technology and manufacturing with and for Israel (often in conjunction with the US, UK, Spain and other powers) helped Germany become the world's number three arms exporter, an industry that has been central to the wealth of its finance capitalists, and at the same time build an extraordinarily well-equipped army even as it was supposedly renouncing its wartime past.
The sale of Leopard-2 tanks to Saudi Arabia will bring in about 1.7 billion euros for leading German companies. Although the American press has criticized Germany for being "mercantilist, with a foreign policy that is, first and foremost, concerned with its own economic interests" (NYT), this rings hollow in light of the fact that "The Saudis are also in talks with US companies for 41 billion euros worth of defence equipment that would become the largest US contract ever." (Agence France Press) But this recycling of petrodollars into Western coffers goes along with much broader economic interests and a politics that represents them.
While Merkel's Social Democrat rivals have used this occasion to accuse her of "a frightening lack of judgement" (Die Welt Online), they followed the same politics when they led the government. In 2005, on its last day in office, the "red-green" coalition of Social Democrats and Greens signed a contract to sell Israel more Dolphin submarines than it could use to deploy its nuclear missiles throughout the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, aimed mainly at Iran and Pakistan, thus bringing hundreds of millions of people under the increased threat of a nuclear holocaust.
Germany's strategic alliance with Israel has been a substantial factor in enabling its monopoly capitalist rulers to once again flourish after their defeat in the world war. In fact, the domination of the Middle East for which Israel is the current linchpin has been a major factor in the prosperity of all the Western imperialist powers.
(For more on the history of German-Israeli arms cooperation, see "In the Water, on the Land, and in the Air" by Otfried Nassauer, 3 April 2009, on the bits.de Web site.)
The sale of these tanks was supposed to be a secret. Unusually, someone in the German national security council leaked the news to Der Spiegel, which instead of ignoring it, provoked a scandal, leading some observers to believe that there is dissension in the highest circles about this issue.
These 62-tonne tanks are equipped with advanced weapons systems. Their stabilization mechanism allows them to fire their cannons with great accuracy while advancing at top speed over rough terrain. Israel used its own Merkava tanks based on earlier Leopard-2 designs and imported German components for its last invasion of Lebanon. But this particular Leopard-2 model is also equipped for use against unarmed civilians. They have plow-like "clearance blades" in front, designed to sweep away barricades, and "non-lethal" features for "crowd control".
"This would be the perfect tank to drive into Bahrain and crack down on any uprising," a researcher at the Bonn International Centre for Conversion commented to The New York Times 7 July. Last March Saudi Arabia sent tanks, armoured cars and troops into Bahrain to put down a protest movement demanding that the monarchy grant the same rights to the Shia majority as the Sunni elite. Four dozen hospital doctors and nurses are now facing prison for having treated wounded demonstrators. Many have been tortured into giving televised "confessions". Two protesters have been sentenced to death. "It's also a good tank to fight any demonstrations in Riyadh", the Saudi capital, he added.
Saudi Arabia had a causeway built to allow its armed forces to roll into the tiny neighbouring Bahrain archipelago for the same reason that it has always worked to hold sway over other neighbours, like Yemen: the Saudi royal family fear that any instability and popular stirrings would threaten their reign. Obama's apologists for the Saudi monarchy usually make the following realpolitick argument: Shia Iran is encouraging the Bahraini Shias to demand their rights as a way to threaten the Saudi rulers, who fear a revolt against their despotism by the Shia minority in Saudi Arabia. What this reasoning deliberately overlooks is the question of right and wrong. The subtext is that Shias shouldn't have equal rights because that might be bad for American interests.
German officials took a different tactic in defending these weapons sales, to the extent that they commented at all. In general, the government tried to suffocate the scandal with what some media dubbed "an iron silence" and refused to confirm or deny the reports. But a foreign policy spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union argued that the deal was morally defensible because it was meant to protect Israel.
"Every step that we take in the region we take with the condition that it promotes the security and the right to exist of Israel," Philipp Missfelder said. (NYT)
Quoting an unnamed official, the Suddeutsche Zeitung reported that Israel and the US had both backed the deal, offering as proof that neither government raised public objections even after the scandal broke.
You might ask how, and against whom, these German tanks are supposed to defend Israel. After all, even if you were to swallow the specious argument about the existential threat to Israel posed by Iran, no one claims it could take the form of Persian armies marching across the Arabian peninsula to Tel Aviv.
Those tanks have only one plausible target, and that is the people of the peninsula itself. As even the NYT went on to explain, "Once viewed by Israel as a potential threat, the government in Saudi Arabia is increasingly viewed as a guarantor of stability in a region in upheaval, as revolutionary fervour sweeps through the Middle East."
"Promoting the security and right to exist of Israel" means supplying some of the world's most modern tools for killing people to one of the world's most medieval regimes (even worse than the Islamic Republic of Iran when it comes to women's rights) to preserve "stability" – defending, from their own people, the network of reactionary and mostly US-dependent regimes that extends from Morocco to Turkey, along with defending Israel from the people who were cleared out and put down to build the Zionist state.
Germany's dedication to Israel has nothing to do with atonement for the crimes it committed against Jews, any more than those crimes justify further crimes against other people. Weapon sales to Israel played an important role in German rearmament, starting in the 1950s when German companies began building weapons for Israel that the German armed forces were not yet allowed to have under the terms of the treaty that ended World War 2. The development of arms technology and manufacturing with and for Israel (often in conjunction with the US, UK, Spain and other powers) helped Germany become the world's number three arms exporter, an industry that has been central to the wealth of its finance capitalists, and at the same time build an extraordinarily well-equipped army even as it was supposedly renouncing its wartime past.
The sale of Leopard-2 tanks to Saudi Arabia will bring in about 1.7 billion euros for leading German companies. Although the American press has criticized Germany for being "mercantilist, with a foreign policy that is, first and foremost, concerned with its own economic interests" (NYT), this rings hollow in light of the fact that "The Saudis are also in talks with US companies for 41 billion euros worth of defence equipment that would become the largest US contract ever." (Agence France Press) But this recycling of petrodollars into Western coffers goes along with much broader economic interests and a politics that represents them.
While Merkel's Social Democrat rivals have used this occasion to accuse her of "a frightening lack of judgement" (Die Welt Online), they followed the same politics when they led the government. In 2005, on its last day in office, the "red-green" coalition of Social Democrats and Greens signed a contract to sell Israel more Dolphin submarines than it could use to deploy its nuclear missiles throughout the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, aimed mainly at Iran and Pakistan, thus bringing hundreds of millions of people under the increased threat of a nuclear holocaust.
Germany's strategic alliance with Israel has been a substantial factor in enabling its monopoly capitalist rulers to once again flourish after their defeat in the world war. In fact, the domination of the Middle East for which Israel is the current linchpin has been a major factor in the prosperity of all the Western imperialist powers.
(For more on the history of German-Israeli arms cooperation, see "In the Water, on the Land, and in the Air" by Otfried Nassauer, 3 April 2009, on the bits.de Web site.)
Montag, 16. August 2010
Massive protests in Kashmir against the barbarities of the Indian State
9 August 2010. A World to Win News Service. Sharp protests took place across Kashmir in July in defiance of an Indian government round-the-clock curfew. Crowds of people torched police vehicles in the city of Srinagar shouting ″Azadi″ (freedom) and chanting anti-Indian slogans. Indian security forces repeatedly fired into unarmed crowds, killing and wounding many people.
The ingredients in the complex Kashmir situation range from the just aspirations of the Kashmiri people for independence to the historical conflict that has hovered near outright war between Pakistan and India over who will control the Jammu-Kashmir area almost since Britain engineered the partition of its colony into two countries in 1947. Both have fanned various ethnic groups and Hindu and Muslim forces against each other over the last couple of decades. While this underlying conflict has long existed, the U.S.-led so-called war on terror and the Afghanistan war have tremendously fuelled this conflict and rivalry, giving further impetus to the rise of religious fundamentalism and further destabilizing the whole region.
In addition to severe repression, including the rape and murder of the local people by the Indian occupation forces, the Indian government sometimes resorts to choking economic blockades that prevent farmers from getting the fruits of their labour to markets in India and prevents petrol and other essential items from reaching the Kashmiri people.
We are reprinting an edited article which details some of the recent atrocities inflicted on the Kashmiri people by the Indian government from Maoist Information Bulletin-18 (1 July 2010, available at bannedthought. org). It does not take into account the role of Pakistan and Pakistan-Indian contention, which will be the subject of a future article from A World to Win News Service.
In the eyes of the olive green-khaki mercenaries hired by the Sonia-Manmohan –Chidambaram gang [Sonia Gandhi is the leader of the now governing Congress Party, Manmohan is the Prime Minister and Chidambaram is the Home Minister and brutal architect of Operation Greenhunt against the Maoists and their mass supporters in a swath across India] to unleash a blood-bath in Kashmir Valley, every Kashmiri is a terrorist to be eliminated. No matter if it is a school boy or girl, a government employee, a shopkeeper, an unemployed youth, or an old man or woman. With unlimited freedom granted by Delhi and Srinagar to these uniformed mercenaries hired by the Indian State to kill, maim, rape and harass ordinary Kashmiri men and women, the Valley has been turned into a killing field ever since 1989 and continues to bleed profusely under every reactionary regime. Of late, under the pretext of checking cross-border terrorism, these killing machines have stepped up their brutal murderous offensive in Kashmir Valley, ending up in cruelly murdering ordinary people in cold blood.
The recent murders committed by the Indian occupation army, paramilitary and local police are mind-chilling. Week after week innocent youth are picked up from the villages and towns and are bumped off in the name of terrorists from across the border. Every brutal act committed by these uniformed mercenaries has the sanction of the Indian rulers and is justified by the political establishment. This has become glaringly evident right from the time of the Pathribal "encounter" of 2000 to the latest killing of a youth in Sopore when five Kashmiri youth were murdered in cold blood by the Indian Army in March 2000. The then Union Home Minister L K Advani, representing the saffron Hindu fascist terrorists [the then-governing BJP Party], claimed that five Lashkar [Islamist] terrorists were eliminated in a fierce gun-battle with the Indian Army and the police. They were dubbed as terrorists responsible for the killing of 36 Sikhs in Chittisinghpora. It was only due to public outrage and sustained agitation in the midst of threats and intimidation by the army and police that the case was taken up for investigation. The CBI, in one of the rarest cases of ferreting out the truth in its entire history, concluded that the encounter was indeed fake. It charged five Army officers for the murder. Meanwhile the culprits were even promoted pending investigation.
The Pathribal exposures did not act as a deterrent for the trigger-happy army mercenaries whose anti-Muslim bias and their urge to show results and obtain gallantry medals in return, had only increased the number of Pathribal- type killings. Armed with the draconic Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) which exempts the army officials from the normal criminal proceedings when they murder or rape anyone, the soldiers virtually have nothing to fear. The immunity of these super citizens from the country's criminal laws has led to massive escalation of the atrocities against ordinary citizens in Kashmir.
To get rewards the Army had also organized fake surrenders and fake encounters. In 2005, for instance, 41 villagers from Chrar-e-Sharief were taken to Delhi and kept in illegal Army custody for six months. They were later produced before the Corps Commander and the DGP in a stage-managed surrender ceremony. Even after this fake surrender was exposed neither the Brigadier nor the other Army officers involved were punished.
In 2007 the Army's counter-insurgency wing called Rashtriya Rifles and the Jammu-Kashmir police abducted five villagers in Ganderbal and murdered them dubbing them as militants.
Thus the case of the brutal horrifying murder of Shahzad, Shafi and Riyaz by the Army officials on 30 April is not surprising. Such atrocities had been commonplace in the Valley but they acquire prominence only when people come out in massive protests and press relentlessly for justice. The three youth were lured with the promise of jobs, and handed over to a Major on April 29 in exchange for Rupees 1.5 lakh [1 lakh is 200,000] and a few bottles of whiskey. The Army officials killed the three innocent youth that night in Machail in Kupwara district. The Army's policy of rewarding the soldiers monetarily for every terrorist or infiltrator killed has led to a spate of such stage-managed encounter killings of innocent people either abducted or lured with jobs by Army agents. All these claimed to be terrorists or infiltrators from Pakistan. It was only the people's protests which had forced the authorities to exhume the bodies from their graves and conduct autopsies. Despite the fact it had been proved that the murders of the three youth were organized by the Major and other Army officials there is nothing that the country's laws can do about it since these officials are protected by the AFSPA.
It is yet another thing that the country's laws themselves are impotent and biased against the common people that they can punish none from the rich and influential sections of the society and the state's various armed forces.
Hence, while the Indian Army is protected from prosecution, the local police too have nothing to fear even if they commit cold-blooded murders publicly. Not one in a hundred cases of such inhuman atrocities had been dealt with seriously by the government. Hence the blood-bath continues with Sonia, Manmohan, Chidambaram, Antony and others watch without ever speaking any evil against their forces committing murders, tortures, rapes etc., against the Kashmiri people. Delhi's puppet chief minister Omar Abdullah – the Hamid Karzai of Kashmir – too watches these atrocities on his own people, letting out an occasional whimper about the excesses of the CRPF [central security forces]. His own policemen had raped and murdered three women in Shopian which lead to months of turmoil due to the attempts of cover-up indulged in by Abdullah's government.
The latest incidents in the Valley which killed 8 people, including a 9-year-old boy, has given rise to massive protests in several areas with people from every section of society coming out into the streets and fighting the most sophisticated enemy in uniform with what the people have access to – stones. In fact, stone-pelting has become a great new form of struggle in Kashmir. One had witnessed this on a major scale in the Palestinian Intifada. Today when virtually all forms of peaceful protest have proven futile and are brutally crushed by the Army, CRPF and the police, there is no other option left for the people than to fight with whatever weapon they can get hold of without being charged with weapons possession. And in many cases the use of bare hands have become powerful weapons against the notorious army, paramilitary and police mercenaries who fall into the people's hands.
It is time that every Indian raises his/her voice in support of the Kashmiri nation's Azadi [freedom]. The Kashmiris have the inalienable right to form their own independent sovereign state if they feel so. Today when the vast majority of the Kashmiris think they would be better off by seceding from India, then what prevents the Indian State from accepting this democratic demand of an entire nation? It is only the expansionist nature of the Indian rulers, their ambition to have as much territory as possible under their country, and the lure of the riches of Kashmir which will never allow them to accept the democratic aspirations of the people of Kashmir.
The ingredients in the complex Kashmir situation range from the just aspirations of the Kashmiri people for independence to the historical conflict that has hovered near outright war between Pakistan and India over who will control the Jammu-Kashmir area almost since Britain engineered the partition of its colony into two countries in 1947. Both have fanned various ethnic groups and Hindu and Muslim forces against each other over the last couple of decades. While this underlying conflict has long existed, the U.S.-led so-called war on terror and the Afghanistan war have tremendously fuelled this conflict and rivalry, giving further impetus to the rise of religious fundamentalism and further destabilizing the whole region.
In addition to severe repression, including the rape and murder of the local people by the Indian occupation forces, the Indian government sometimes resorts to choking economic blockades that prevent farmers from getting the fruits of their labour to markets in India and prevents petrol and other essential items from reaching the Kashmiri people.
We are reprinting an edited article which details some of the recent atrocities inflicted on the Kashmiri people by the Indian government from Maoist Information Bulletin-18 (1 July 2010, available at bannedthought. org). It does not take into account the role of Pakistan and Pakistan-Indian contention, which will be the subject of a future article from A World to Win News Service.
In the eyes of the olive green-khaki mercenaries hired by the Sonia-Manmohan –Chidambaram gang [Sonia Gandhi is the leader of the now governing Congress Party, Manmohan is the Prime Minister and Chidambaram is the Home Minister and brutal architect of Operation Greenhunt against the Maoists and their mass supporters in a swath across India] to unleash a blood-bath in Kashmir Valley, every Kashmiri is a terrorist to be eliminated. No matter if it is a school boy or girl, a government employee, a shopkeeper, an unemployed youth, or an old man or woman. With unlimited freedom granted by Delhi and Srinagar to these uniformed mercenaries hired by the Indian State to kill, maim, rape and harass ordinary Kashmiri men and women, the Valley has been turned into a killing field ever since 1989 and continues to bleed profusely under every reactionary regime. Of late, under the pretext of checking cross-border terrorism, these killing machines have stepped up their brutal murderous offensive in Kashmir Valley, ending up in cruelly murdering ordinary people in cold blood.
The recent murders committed by the Indian occupation army, paramilitary and local police are mind-chilling. Week after week innocent youth are picked up from the villages and towns and are bumped off in the name of terrorists from across the border. Every brutal act committed by these uniformed mercenaries has the sanction of the Indian rulers and is justified by the political establishment. This has become glaringly evident right from the time of the Pathribal "encounter" of 2000 to the latest killing of a youth in Sopore when five Kashmiri youth were murdered in cold blood by the Indian Army in March 2000. The then Union Home Minister L K Advani, representing the saffron Hindu fascist terrorists [the then-governing BJP Party], claimed that five Lashkar [Islamist] terrorists were eliminated in a fierce gun-battle with the Indian Army and the police. They were dubbed as terrorists responsible for the killing of 36 Sikhs in Chittisinghpora. It was only due to public outrage and sustained agitation in the midst of threats and intimidation by the army and police that the case was taken up for investigation. The CBI, in one of the rarest cases of ferreting out the truth in its entire history, concluded that the encounter was indeed fake. It charged five Army officers for the murder. Meanwhile the culprits were even promoted pending investigation.
The Pathribal exposures did not act as a deterrent for the trigger-happy army mercenaries whose anti-Muslim bias and their urge to show results and obtain gallantry medals in return, had only increased the number of Pathribal- type killings. Armed with the draconic Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) which exempts the army officials from the normal criminal proceedings when they murder or rape anyone, the soldiers virtually have nothing to fear. The immunity of these super citizens from the country's criminal laws has led to massive escalation of the atrocities against ordinary citizens in Kashmir.
To get rewards the Army had also organized fake surrenders and fake encounters. In 2005, for instance, 41 villagers from Chrar-e-Sharief were taken to Delhi and kept in illegal Army custody for six months. They were later produced before the Corps Commander and the DGP in a stage-managed surrender ceremony. Even after this fake surrender was exposed neither the Brigadier nor the other Army officers involved were punished.
In 2007 the Army's counter-insurgency wing called Rashtriya Rifles and the Jammu-Kashmir police abducted five villagers in Ganderbal and murdered them dubbing them as militants.
Thus the case of the brutal horrifying murder of Shahzad, Shafi and Riyaz by the Army officials on 30 April is not surprising. Such atrocities had been commonplace in the Valley but they acquire prominence only when people come out in massive protests and press relentlessly for justice. The three youth were lured with the promise of jobs, and handed over to a Major on April 29 in exchange for Rupees 1.5 lakh [1 lakh is 200,000] and a few bottles of whiskey. The Army officials killed the three innocent youth that night in Machail in Kupwara district. The Army's policy of rewarding the soldiers monetarily for every terrorist or infiltrator killed has led to a spate of such stage-managed encounter killings of innocent people either abducted or lured with jobs by Army agents. All these claimed to be terrorists or infiltrators from Pakistan. It was only the people's protests which had forced the authorities to exhume the bodies from their graves and conduct autopsies. Despite the fact it had been proved that the murders of the three youth were organized by the Major and other Army officials there is nothing that the country's laws can do about it since these officials are protected by the AFSPA.
It is yet another thing that the country's laws themselves are impotent and biased against the common people that they can punish none from the rich and influential sections of the society and the state's various armed forces.
Hence, while the Indian Army is protected from prosecution, the local police too have nothing to fear even if they commit cold-blooded murders publicly. Not one in a hundred cases of such inhuman atrocities had been dealt with seriously by the government. Hence the blood-bath continues with Sonia, Manmohan, Chidambaram, Antony and others watch without ever speaking any evil against their forces committing murders, tortures, rapes etc., against the Kashmiri people. Delhi's puppet chief minister Omar Abdullah – the Hamid Karzai of Kashmir – too watches these atrocities on his own people, letting out an occasional whimper about the excesses of the CRPF [central security forces]. His own policemen had raped and murdered three women in Shopian which lead to months of turmoil due to the attempts of cover-up indulged in by Abdullah's government.
The latest incidents in the Valley which killed 8 people, including a 9-year-old boy, has given rise to massive protests in several areas with people from every section of society coming out into the streets and fighting the most sophisticated enemy in uniform with what the people have access to – stones. In fact, stone-pelting has become a great new form of struggle in Kashmir. One had witnessed this on a major scale in the Palestinian Intifada. Today when virtually all forms of peaceful protest have proven futile and are brutally crushed by the Army, CRPF and the police, there is no other option left for the people than to fight with whatever weapon they can get hold of without being charged with weapons possession. And in many cases the use of bare hands have become powerful weapons against the notorious army, paramilitary and police mercenaries who fall into the people's hands.
It is time that every Indian raises his/her voice in support of the Kashmiri nation's Azadi [freedom]. The Kashmiris have the inalienable right to form their own independent sovereign state if they feel so. Today when the vast majority of the Kashmiris think they would be better off by seceding from India, then what prevents the Indian State from accepting this democratic demand of an entire nation? It is only the expansionist nature of the Indian rulers, their ambition to have as much territory as possible under their country, and the lure of the riches of Kashmir which will never allow them to accept the democratic aspirations of the people of Kashmir.
Abonnieren
Posts (Atom)