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The refugee situation has been an ongoing process for several countries all around the world. Individuals from countries that are not as providing, or as safe as other countries, flee from their nations for several reasons, particularly survival. Majority of the refugees do not flee from their countries unless they see their lives under threat. As of today, the general population of refugees is estimated to approximately 250 million.

Alan Vernon, from the office of the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) delivered an address on the situation of the refugees in Malaysia, the challenges the refugees face as well as the opportunities that can be provided to them.

Prior to getting in to detail with the situation of refugees in Malaysia, Alan Vernon addressed some points that needed to be clarified.

Refugees are individuals that have a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, political opinions and so on. However, despite the clarity of the refugee situation, people still have a major misunderstanding between refugees and migrants. Migrants for instance, leave their countries for better opportunities, whereas refugees flee from their countries because they feel threatened.

The Refugee Situation in Malaysia

Malaysia has had a large population of refugees that have fled from their prospective countries to find a better life since 1976.  The estimation of the refugees in Malaysia is approximately 100,000 asylum seekers. Refugees that come and seek refuge come from various countries like Somalia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and several other countries. However, the largest populations of refugees in Malaysia are the ones that come from Myanmar. There are several issues that were addressed about the situation of the refugees in Malaysia. The main concern is that the majority of the asylum seekers in Malaysia are not recognized as refugees. These asylum seekers do not receive the necessary documents to keep them safe, and due to that they get arrested and put in jail. The issue in this situation is that if the refugees are not provided with the necessary documents that prove that they are refugees, they face two possible consequences: 1) Be put in jail and, 2) the possibility of being sent back home. If these refugees are sent back home, they are put in danger since their initial reasons to leaving their homes were that their lives were threatened. The other issue with regard to the refugees is that these refugees are treated as illegal migrants simply due to the fact that they have not been provided with documents to prove their stay.

Another issue that was addressed in the talk is the education system. The refugees in Malaysia have no access to government schools, and so do not receive the necessary education they require for knowledge. The only available education for the refugee children are extremely basic, lacking materials and the teachers are unqualified. These refugees receive their education from NGOs that have put in that effort to send volunteers, and from retired teachers that are not skilled.

 

The UNHCR Key Messages

The UNHCR provided several key messages that they consider to being a doorway to providing help to the refugees while at the same time reducing the severity of the situation of the refugees in Malaysia.

1. The Malaysian government should take greater responsibility in the issue of the refugees.
2. The UNHCR and several NGOs are already supporting and will do more to support the government.
3. Opinion leaders can help sensitize the government and the public.
4. Start with allowing the refugees to work legally.
5. Start with improving education opportunity for refugee children.

The UNHCR also provides the refugees with the necessary documents that will help them gain the refugee status in Malaysia.

Solutions for the Refugees in Malaysia

The UNHCR has taken several measures to ensure that the refugees are treated with the utmost respect, and can receive healthcare at a low cost.

1. UNHCR provides the asylum seekers with the necessary documents and register them in their system.
2. Prior to providing them with the documents, the UNHCR assess their cases.
3. UNHCR provides assistance for the vulnerable.
4. Since the refugees from Myanmar are particularly in danger if they get back to their countries, they are more likely to get the refugee status.
5. UNHCR provides the refugees with health support. If the UNHCR documents are presented in hospitals, refugees only pay 50% of the medical expenses off of the foreigner’s original price.
6. UNHCR provides the refugees with the option of returning to their countries if they choose to return.
7. UNHCR are attempting to provide the refugees with local integration.
8. UNHCR provides the refugees the opportunity for resettlement (moving them to other countries e.g. USA, UK, etc.)

What Needs to Happen Now

As of today, the UNHCR is attempting to talk with the government about the refugee situation. Particularly, they are trying to make the government allow the refugees to work in Malaysia legally. Without that, the refugees still face the dangers of getting arrested or even worse, being sent back to their countries.

The UNHCR are also trying to establish pilot programmes for lower primary aged children to attend government schools. Apart from the pilot programmes, they are also trying to legalize the refugee community schools under the framework of UNHCR. Finally, the UNHCR have always and will always support NGOs to open more refugee schools so that every child that is a refugee receives the necessary education that is essential for their development.

By: Sarah Ahmed Madhi and Jennifer Kate Tennant

 

It is with sincere humility and growing excitement that we announce to you the convening of the first annual InterFaith Film Festival in 2011CE (“IFFF 2011CE”).

The IFFF 2011CE is an opportunity for all of us, as an international and intrinsically interreligious community on Earth, to share our respective stories with each other in order to gain better understanding, respect, and compassion for each other.  The IFFF 2011CE features short films (of less than ½ hour) that inform and inspire.  These short films convey respective religious/secular experiences, beliefs, principles, and teachings.  It is our intention that the IFFF 2011CE build bridges between our respective religious/secular communities, and particularly amongst our respective youth, for the prospect of better cooperation and a more enduring, bountiful, and mutually experienced prosperity.  For this to work, we need your stories.

We are soliciting contributions of short films that inform and inspire, including:  amateur or professional videos, documentaries, short stories, fables, lectures, sermons, parables, comedy, interviews, speeches, animation, slide shows, variety programmes, musical performances, poetry readings, Scriptural recitations/chanting, and additionally.  We are particularly interested in securing contributions from our respective youth.

The IFFF 2011CE is being convened through the internet via YouTube.  This is done without monetary compensation to us, the organisers, and without monetary cost to our contributors and audience.  We screen each entry for appropriateness before including the short film within the IFFF 2011CE account on YouTube.  The result is a mosaic of stories where we each maintain our own respective religious/secular identity and learn from each other’s respective religious/secular identities and experiences.  We are dedicated to providing a welcoming forum for our respective beliefs and Faith.  The InterFaith Film Festival is convened on the honour system and in Good Faith on the part of all participants.

We, the conveners of the IFFF 2011CE, are a modest group of interFaith activists, from around Earth, who share an interest in enhancing understanding, respect, compassion, cooperation, productivity, Peace, prosperity, and Happiness amongst our many religious communities throughout Earth and the Universe.  Many of us meet at a gathering of the North American InterFaith Network this past Northern Summer.  Since that time, we begin to consider how we may share our respective stories in a manner that is relevant to our contemporary circumstances.  And thus, the idea of the InterFaith Film Festival is formed.  We are officially endorsed by the World Peace Prayer Society and the International Movement for a Just World.

Admittedly, this correspondence is a form letter specifically designed to be received by many different leaders and adherents respectively from many different religious communities;  thus it is comparatively generic.  We look forward to learning more about each of you and your respective endeavours as you learn more about us and each other.  The methodology in identifying you, specifically, as a recipient of this correspondence involves a comparatively expedient process of searching within your organisation for an interFaith liaison, and then for the person who is ultimately responsible for the daily affairs of your organisation.

We humbly request that you share this information regarding the InterFaith Film Festival with your respective constituencies:  our respective Congregations, Shuls, Sanghas, Ummas, Churches, Gurdwaras, Temples, Synagogues, Masjids, and additional affiliates, organisations, communities, and gatherings.  We humbly request that you encourage your respective constituents, our respective families and friends, to contribute short films of our respective beliefs and Faith.

We are accepting short film contributions through 31 January 2011CE and we are planning to convene the actual InterFaith Film Festival in April 2011CE.  I am attaching two documents with this correspondence:  1.)  a flyer that may be posted on the bulletin boards/walls of our respective Houses of Worship and Meditation, community centres, and additional gathering places;  and 2.)  a description of the general guidelines of the IFFF 2011CE.

Any questions, concerns, comments, can be forwarded directly to me via this email address, ifff2011ce@gmail.com.

We thank you for your time and consideration.

May we all continue to flourish together with enlightened spirits, healthy minds, and strong bodies, as an international and interreligious community of Earth that acknowledges and respects our differences whilst building upon our commonalities.

Love and Peace,

Peter

—

PS:  The proceeding is a basic listing of the recipients of this correspondence, including leadership and adherents respectively from Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, the Baha’i, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, and additionally.  If you are aware of any additional organisations or religious communities that are omitted from this listing, you are welcome to share this information with such an organisation/religious community and/or notify me directly.

African Hebrew Israelites, www.africanhebrewisraelitesofjerusalem.com, Ben Ammi (Anointed Spiritual Leader)

International Council of Jewish Women, www.icjw.org, Mary Lilling (Chairperson, InterFaith and Intercultural Committee)

Orthodox Union, www.ou.org, Rabbi Steven Weil (Executive Vice President)

Union for Reform Judaism, www.urj.org, Naomi Abelson (Social Action Specialist)

United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, www.uscj.org, Rabbi Steven C Wernick (Executive Vice President)

United Synagogue Youth, www.usy.org, Jules Gutin (Director)

World Jewish Congress, www.worldjewishcongress.org, Isabella Nespoli (Director of InterFaith Affairs)

World Union for Progressive Judaism, www.wupj.org, Steve Bauman (Chairman)

World Zionist Organisation, www.wzo.org.il

Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, www.jrf.org, Rabbi Shawn Zevit (Director of Congregational Relations, Outreach, and Tikkun Olam)

Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual Organisation, www.brahmakumaris.org, BK Karuna (Director of Public Relations and Communication)

Hindu Student Council, www.hindustudentcouncil.org, Sarath Velagaleti (President)

International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres, www.sivananda.org, Swami Mahadevananda (Executive Board Member)

Sri Aurobindo Society, www.sriaurobindosociety.org.in, Vijay,

Vishva Hindu Parishad, www.vhp.org, Sarvpalli Radhakrishnan,

Hindu Global Electronics Network, www.hindunet.org

Shamayita Math International Women’s Religious Centre, www.shamayitamath.org

Ramakrishna Math and Mission, www.belurmath.org, Swami Atmasthanandaji Maharaj (President)

Divine Life Society, www.divinelifesociety.org

BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, www.swaminarayan.org, Pramukh Swami Maharaj

Buddha Dharma Education Association, www.buddhanet.net, Venerable Pannyavaro

Buddhist Peace Fellowship, www.bpf.org, Sarah Weintraub (Executive Director)

Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, www.fwbo.org, Urgyen Sangharakshita (Founder)

Soka Gakkai International, www.sgi.org, Daisaku Ikeda (President)

World Fellowship of Buddhist Youth, www.buddhistyouth.org, Anurut Vongvanij (President)

World Fellowship of Buddhists, www.wfbhq.org

Sakyadhita: International Association of Buddhist Women, www.sakyadhita.org, Christie Yuling Chang

Rissho Kosei Kai, www.rk-world.org, Nichiko Niwano (President)

International Network of Engaged Buddhists, www.inebnetwork.org, Sulak Sivaraksa (Founder and Chair)

Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, www.drba.org, Bhikshu Wondrous Dharma

Dharma Drum Mountain, www.dharmadrum.org, Venerable Guo Dong (Abbot President)

Association Zen Internationale, www.zen-azi.org/en

Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey, www.throssel.org.uk, Reverend Master Daishin Morgan (Abbot)

Honolulu Diamond Sangha, www.diamondsangha.org, Michael Kieran,

Rochester Zen Center, www.rzc.org, Roshi Kjolhede (Abbot)

Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, www.dalailama.com

Lama Gangchen World Peace Foundation, www.lgpt.net/lama_found.htm

Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, www.fpmt.org, Lama Zopa Rinpoche

Dechen Community, www.dechen.org, Karma Thinley Rinpoche

Rigpa, www.rigpa.org, Sogyal Rinpoche

Shambhala, www.shambhala.org, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Rokpa International, www.rokpa.org, Dr Akong Tulku Rinpoche (President and Founder)

Gampo Abbey, www.gampoabbey.org, Ani Pema Chodron

Diamondway Buddhism, www.diamondway-buddhism.org, HH 17^th Karmapa Trinley Thaye Dorje

Friends World Committee for Consultation (Religious Society of Friends), www.fwccworld.org, Nancy Irving (General Secretary)

Global Fellowship of Christian Youth, www.globalfellowship.net, Leif Rasmussen (Chief Executive)

Pax Romana, www.icmica-miic.org, Javier Maria Iguiniz Echeverria (President)

Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/index.htm, Cardinal Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran

Society of Jesus, www.sjweb.info, Father Adolfo Nicolas (Superior General)

Unitarian Universalist Association, www.uua.org, Gini Courter (Chief Governance Officer)

World Council of Churches, www.oikoumene.org, Reverend Dr Olav Fykse Tveit (General Secretary)

World Young Women’s Christian Association, www.worldywca.org, Susan Brennan (President)

World Alliance of Young Men’s Christian Associations, www.ymca.int,

United Methodist Church, Dr Bart Shaha (Secretary General)

Lutheran World Federation, www.lutheranworld.org/lwf/, Dr Kathryn Johnson (Assistant General Secretary for Ecumenical Affairs)

Order of Saint Benedict, www.osb-international.info, Noktar Wolf (Abbot Primate)

Comunita di Sant Egidio, www.santegidio.org, Professor Andrea Riccardi

Anglican Communion, www.anglicancommunion.org, Reverend Rana Youab Khan (International InterFaith Dialogues Assistant)

International Presbyterian Church, www.ipc-presbytery.com, Graham Weeks (Presbytery Moderator)

United Church of Christ, www.ucc.org, Reverend Geoffrey A Black (General Minister and President)

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, www.lds.org, Thomas S Monson (President)

Worldwide Association of Jehovah’s Witnesses, www.watchtower.org

African Methodist Episcopal Church, www.ame-church.com, Dr Clement W Fugh (General Secretary and Chief Information Officer)

International Baptist Convention, www.ibc-churches.org, Jimmy Martin

Islamic Cultural Centre and London Central Mosque, www.iccuk.org, Dr Ahmad Al Dubayan (Director General)

Islamic Development Bank, www.isdb.org, Dr Ahmad Mohamed Ali Al Madani (President)

Motamar Al Alam Al Islami, www.motamaralalamalislami.org, Dr Abdullah Bin Omar Nasseef (President)

Muslim Student Association, www.msanational.org, Iman Sediqe (President)

Muslim World League, www.themwl.org/Profile/default.aspx?l=en, HE Dr Abdullah Bin Abulmohsen Al Turki (Chairmen)

Organisation of the Islamic Conference, www.oic-oci.org, Dr Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu (Secretary General)

Federation of Muslim Women, www.fmw.org, Zahida Murtaza (Chair)

Council on American Islamic Relations, www.cair.com, Nihad Awad (Executive Director and Co-Founder)

International Association of Sufism, www.ias.org, Shah Nazar Seyyed Dr Ali Kianfar (Co-Founder)

Threshold Society of the Order of Mevlevi, www.sufism.org, Kabir Helminski

Islamic Society of North America, www.isna.net, Sayyid M Syeed (National Director of the ISNA Office for InterFaith and Community Alliances)

World Subud Association, www.subud.org, Luke Penseney (Chair)

Susila Dharma International Association, www.susiladharma.org, Virginia Thomas (Executive Director)

Baha’I International Community, www.bahai.org, Albert Lincoln (Secretary General)

World Sikh Council, www.worldsikhcouncil.org, Dr Tarunjit Butalia (Chairperson of the National InterFaith Council)

Sikh Youth Federation, www.sikhyouthfederation.com, Gagandeep Singh (Founder and President)

World Zoroastrian Organization, www.w-z-o.org, Darayus S Motivala (Chairman)

Digamber Jain Sangh of North America, www.djsna.org, Dr Mahendra Pandya (Coordination Committee)

Jaina:  Federation of Jain Associations in North America, www.jaina.org, Arvind Vora (InterFaith Activities Committee)

 

 

HAITI: UNDERDEVELOPMENT AND GENOCIDE

Just a few months ago, on July 26, 2010, Lucius Walker, the head of the American organization Pastors for Peace, at an encounter with Cuban intellectuals and artists, asked me what the solution for Haiti’s problems would be.

Without a second’s delay, I told him: “In today’s world, there is no solution, Lucius; in the future of which I am speaking, there is.  The US is a great food producer, it can feed 2,000 million people, it would be able to build homes that stand up to earthquakes; the problem is the way in which resources are distributed.  We have to return even the forests to Haitian territory; but there is no solution in today’s world order.”

Lucius was referring to the problems of this mountainous, over-populated country, stripped of trees, of fuel for cooking, communications and industries, with a high rate of illiteracy, diseases such as HIV and being occupied by United Nations troops.

“When those circumstances change ―I added ― you yourselves, Lucius, will be able to take American food to Haiti.”

The noble and humanitarian leader of the Pastors for Peace died a month and a half later, on September 7^th, at the age of 80, passing on the legacy of the seed of his example to many Americans.

An additional tragedy had not yet appeared: the cholera epidemic which, on October 25^th, reported more than 3,000 cases.  To such a harsh calamity, add the fact that on November 5^th, a hurricane ravaged its territory, causing flooding and rivers to overflow.

We must dedicate to this body of dramatic circumstances the attention it deserves.

Cholera appeared for the first time in modern history in 1817, year in which one of the great pandemics occurred devastating humanity in the nineteenth century; it had a huge mortality rate principally in India. In 1826, the epidemic reappeared, invading Europe, including Moscow, Berlin and London, moving on to our hemisphere from 1832 to 1839.

In 1846, a new even more harmful epidemic is unleashed, striking at three continents: Asia, Africa and America. Throughout the century, epidemics affecting those three regions were repeated occurrences. However, in the course of more than 100 years, taking in almost the entire twentieth century, the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean saw themselves freed from this disease, until January 27^th, 1991 when it appeared in the Chancay Port in northern Peru; first it extended along the Pacific coast and subsequently along the Atlantic seaboard, to 16 countries; 650,000 persons became ill in a period of 6 years.

Without the least doubt, the epidemic affects much more than poor countries in whose cities over-populated neighbourhoods are massed together, many times lacking drinking water, and the sewers which are carriers of the vibrio cholerae that spreads the disease pour into the drinking water.

In the special case of Haiti, the earthquake destroyed the water and sewer network wherever they had existed, and millions of people live in tents that often even lack latrines and everything gets mixed up together.

The epidemic that affected our hemisphere in 1991 was the Vibrio cholerae 01 biotype El Tor Ogawa serotype, exactly the same one that penetrated Peru that year.

Jon K. Andrus, Associate Director of the Pan American Health Organization, informed that the bacterium that was present in Haiti was precisely that. From it derived a series of circumstances to bear in mind, which at an opportune moment will determine important considerations.

As we know, our country is educating excellent Haitian medical doctors and providing health services in that sister country for many years now. There were very serious problems in that field and we were moving forward, year after year. Nobody could imagine, since there was no history of it, that there would be an earthquake that would kill more than 250,000 persons and cause innumerable wounded and injured. In the face of that unexpected blow, our internationalist doctors pitched in with greater zeal and tirelessly dedicated themselves to their work.

In the midst of the harsh natural disaster, barely a month ago, the cholera epidemic broke out with a fury; and as we have already stated, in such unfavourable circumstances, the hurricane struck.

Faced with the serious nature of the situation, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Valerie Amos, yesterday declared that 350 doctors and 2,000 nurses were needed to battle the disease.

The official made a call to extend the aid further than Port-au-Prince and revealed that supplies of soap and clean water were only reaching 10 percent of the families living outside of the capital, without indicating how many were being reached in that city.

Different UN officials were lamenting the fact in the last few days that the response from the international community to the call for aid made to confront the situation was not even reaching 10% of the 164 million dollars urgently being requested.

“Amos called for a swift and urgent reaction to prevent more human beings from dying of cholera”, informed a news agency.

Today another agency communicated that the numbers of Haitians who had died had now reached “1,523 persons, 66 thousand 593 have been cared for, and more than a million inhabitants are still sleeping in public squares”.

Almost 40% of the sick have been looked after by members of the Cuban Medical Brigade which has 965 doctors, nurses and technicians who have managed to reduce the number of dead to less than 1 for each 100.  With that level of care the number of dead would not reach 700. As a norm, the people dying were extremely weakened by malnutrition or other similar causes.  Children who are detected on time, generally do not die.

It is of vital importance that we avoid the epidemic extending to other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean because in today’s circumstances this would cause extraordinary harm to the nations in this hemisphere.

We urgently need to seek efficient and rapid solutions in the fight against that epidemic.

Today the Party and the Government [of Cuba] made the decision to reinforce the Cuban Medical Brigade in Haiti with a contingent of the Henry Reeve Brigade, made up of 300 doctors, nurses and health technicians, that would add up to more than 1,200 collaborators.

Raul was visiting other regions of the country and was informed in detail about everything.

The people of Cuba, the Party and the Government, are once again measuring up to their glorious and heroic history.

Fidel Castro Ruz

November 26, 2010

9:58 p.m.

 

ScienceDaily (Nov. 17, 2010) — The overall warming of Earth’s northern half could result in cold winters, new research shows. The shrinking of sea-ice in the eastern Arctic causes some regional heating of the lower levels of air — which may lead to strong anomalies in atmospheric airstreams, triggering an overall cooling of the northern continents, according to a study recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

“These anomalies could triple the probability of cold winter extremes in Europe and northern Asia,” says Vladimir Petoukhov, lead author of the study and climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Recent severe winters like last year’s or the one of 2005-06 do not conflict with the global warming picture, but rather supplement it.”

The researchers base their assumptions on simulations with an elaborate computer model of general circulation, ECHAM5, focusing on the Barents-Kara Sea north of Norway and Russia where a drastic reduction of ice was observed in the cold European winter of 2005-06. Those surfaces of the sea lacking the ice cover lose a lot of warmth to the normally cold and windy arctic atmosphere. What the researchers did was to feed the computer with data, gradually reducing the sea ice cover in the eastern Arctic from 100 percent to 1 percent in order to analyse the relative sensitivity of wintertime atmospheric circulation.

“Our simulations reveal a rather pronounced nonlinear response of air temperatures and winds to the changes of sea-ice cover,” Petoukhov, a physicist, says. “It ranges from warming to cooling to warming again, as sea ice decreases.” An abrupt transition between different regimes of the atmospheric circulation in the sub-polar and polar regions may be very likely. Warming of the air over the Barents-Kara Sea seems to bring cold winter winds to Europe. “This is not what one would expect,” Petoukhov says. “Whoever thinks that the shrinking of some far away sea-ice won’t bother him could be wrong. There are complex teleconnections in the climate system, and in the Barents-Kara Sea we might have discovered a powerful feedback mechanism.”

Other approaches to the issue of cold winters and global warming referring to reduced sun activity or most recently the gulf stream “tend to exaggerate the effects,” Petoukhov says. The correlation between these phenomena and cold winters is relatively weak, compared to the new findings referring to the processes in the Barents-Kara Sea. Petoukhov also points out that during the cold winter of 2005-06 with temperatures of ten degrees below the normal level in Siberia, no anomalies in the north Atlantic oscillation have been observed. These are fluctuations in the difference of atmospheric pressure between the Icelandic low and the Azores high which are commonly associated with temperature anomalies over Europe. But temperatures in the eastern arctic were up to 14 degrees above normal level. However, distinct anomalies in the north Atlantic oscillation could interact with sea-ice decrease, the study concludes. One could amplify the other and more anomalies would be the result.

Petoukhov’s study is not about tomorrow’s weather forecast but about longtime probabilities of climate change. “I suppose nobody knows,” he says, “how harsh this year’s winter will be.”

By Science Daily

21 December, 2010

Science Daily

Tensions remain high in the Bangladeshi garment industry as a result of Sunday’s bloody crackdown by the Awami League government, in which police fatally shot four striking workers, followed two days later by a factory fire that killed more than 30 workers near Dhaka, the capital.

Details of the fire, and how many workers perished, are still unclear. The blaze engulfed the ninth floor of the 10-storey Ha-Meem Group’s sportswear factory in the Ashulia industrial area at lunchtime on Tuesday. Flames later spread to the 10th floor, a dining area, where about 150 workers were having their lunch. Most of the 6,000 workers were outside, preventing the death toll from being far higher.

Abdul Kader, who escaped from the fire, told Asia Times Online that he saw 50-60 workers forced to jump off the tenth floor because “the emergency exits were closed.” Other factory workers also said the doors were locked. The Independent, a Bangladeshi newspaper, reported: “As the fire spread fast on the top floor, the workers tried to rush to a safer place, but they found the collapsible gate on the top floor locked. Later, the workers tried to come down from the top floor using fabrics as ‘rope’ but many of the workers fell down and received injuries.”

Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) Delwar Hossain, a Ha-Meem deputy director, insisted that the factory exits were not locked. However, it is a common practice for garment factory owners to lock in workers to prevent them from leaving their machines and to force them to focus on production. This is despite the danger of garment factory fires due to highly combustible piles of clothes. According to Bangladesh’s Fire Service and Civil Defence Department, 414 garment workers lost their lives in 213 factory fires between 2006 and 2009.

Even with the cause of the fire yet to be established, the New York Times reported that Hossain had sought to reopen the first eight floors of the factory immediately, because the company was under pressure to “meet all pending orders”. Under the name of That’s It Sports Wear, the factory makes pants for major clients in the US and Europe, including Gap, the largest American clothing supplier. Gap issued a hypocritical statement, saying it was “terrible saddened” by the deaths. Yet, the tragedy is the direct result of its drive to maximise profits by sourcing clothes from sweatshops around the world.

Several hundred That’s It Sports Wear workers demonstrated outside the factory yesterday over the fact that many of their co-workers are still missing since the fire. Hossain said the company had so far recovered the bodies of 23 employees, but registers at nearby hospitals and clinics indicated that at least 31 had died and more than 100 had been injured. The protesting workers also objected to being forced to work tomorrow, a public holiday, to make up for lost time.

Across Bangladesh, many workers appear to have been pushed back to work on Tuesday after unions appealed to employers to honour a July agreement between the government, the unions and the garment companies to lift the minimum wage to US$43 a month. This is still far less than what workers had been demanding during five days of strikes and protests during July.

According to Bangladesh Export Processing Zone (EPZ) Authority chairman Brigadier General Zamil Ahmed Khan and Chittagong EPZ general manager Adbur Rashid on Tuesday, 148 factories had resumed production. This indicates the scale of the unrest that began to erupt last Friday over the refusal of employers to pay the increase, which was due last month.

Also on Tuesday, about 4,000 workers at a sweater factory in Uttara EPZ, 400 kilometres from Dhaka, walked out indefinitely to fight for wage increases. They demanded the suspension of a personnel officer who had discriminated against workers, and the reinstatement of workers he had sacked. Workers at Apcot Apparels and the Hotapara garment factory in the northern Gazipur EPZ remained on strike over wages.

The scale of Sunday’s fatal clashes, in which police shot down workers in the port city of Chittagong, became clearer when Prothom Alo, a daily newspaper, reported that the police had fired 550 rounds of rubber bullets and 95 tear gas shells. Some 20 factories had been damaged. Police attacked initially peaceful protests by workers after the South Korean-owned YoungOne group closed its 11 factories in retaliation for stoppages last week. The YoungOne workers had demanded the reinstatement of a 250-taka (3.5 US cents) lunch allowance that had been withdrawn when the new wage scheme was introduced.

Broader protests and strikes could erupt again as none of the issues has been resolved. A worker at the Nassa Group’s Kimia Apparels in the Dhaka EPZ told the Daily Star on Tuesday that employees had returned to work only after management promised to properly implement the wage increases. Nassa Group’s managing director in Dhaka, Mohammad Abdullah, claimed that the management had made “some mistakes in the calculations of salaries” last month, and pledged to “adjust the salary within the next seven days”. In reality, the employers have used various devices, including job reclassifications, to cut wages.

In order to intimidate garment workers, police have arrested at least 65 workers and lodged cases against 25,000-30,000 people on charges of vandalism, obstructing roads or attacking police officers during Sunday’s demonstrations.

Serious charges have also been laid against Garment Workers Unity Forum president Moshrefa Mishu, who was arrested on Tuesday. She has been accused of “vandalising” a Dhaka factory, damaging and setting fire to vehicles and impeding police duty on June 30, during the widespread garment workers’ protests six months ago. Monirul Islam, deputy commissioner of police detectives, told the media that Mishu had then played “a vital role in the recent unrest”. According to media reports, the police have accused her of having links with other countries “competing with Bangladesh in the garments sector” and of “trying to destroy the sector in the country”.

These allegations mirror the words of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed. On Monday, she railed against “possible conspiracies to create unrest in the nation’s top-earning sector”. Such charges seek to block Bangladeshi workers from linking up their struggles with those of their class brothers and sisters in Cambodia, India, China and other parts of the world. The Bangladeshi government has relied both on the unions and open police repression to contain the opposition of garment workers to poor pay and conditions.

Garment workers have been pitted against each other by giant multinational companies such as Gap, Wal-Mart and Tesco, which scour the globe for the cheapest labour. Under the impact of the deepening global economic crisis, the exploitation of garment workers has intensified, causing a wave of struggles this year. Earlier this month, 16 Cambodian clothing factories dismissed nearly 800 workers for taking part in a nationwide strike in September that involved 210,000 workers, or two-thirds of the country’s garment workforce.

As a result of Bangladesh’s low wages, the country is now the third largest garment exporter after China and Turkey, with 5,000 factories and three million workers. According to the charity ActionAid, the new $43 monthly wage in Bangladesh amounts to just 21 cents per hour—the lowest rate in the world. Like other administrations around the world, Prime Minister Hasina’s government and the Bangladeshi ruling class, which now depend on garments for 80 percent of the country’s exports, have turned to police violence to suppress workers’ demands for wage rises.

By W.A. Sunil & John Chan

16 December, 2010

WSWS.org

On 22 November a jury of international experts announced their verdict that compelling evidence shows corporate complicity in Israeli violations of international law. The verdict followed two full days of presentations in London at the second international session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine from 20 to 21 November.

The session examined the role of corporations in Israel’s violations of international law. It called experts and witnesses to present cases to the international panel of jurors. Although companies were invited to defend their actions, only Veolia Environnement, PFZW pension fund and security company G4S responded to the tribunal in writing.

The jurors included former French ambassador Stephane Hessel; Irish Nobel Laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire; South African professor John Dugard; South African politician Ronald Kasrils; English lawyer Michael Mansfield; Spanish emeritus judge Jose Antonio Martin Pallin; former US congresswoman Cynthia McKinney; and UK barrister Lord Anthony Gifford.

According to the jurors, the corporations’ violations related to their supply of weapons and the construction and maintenance of illegal Israeli settlements and the Israel’s wall in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The jury called for the mobilization of civil society to end the involvement of companies in Israeli human rights violations (Public Statement of the Russell Tribunal [PDF]).

Seven corporations were named by the jury for being complicit in Israeli violations. They include:

The British-Danish firm G4S, which supplies equipment used at Israeli checkpoints in the occupied West Bank and Israeli prisons.

Elbit Systems, a leading Israeli company which collaborates closely with the Israeli military.

US-based Caterpillar, which supplies the Israeli military with modified D9 bulldozers used to demolish Palestinian homes.

Cement Roadstone Holdings, an Irish multinational corporation, which purchased 25 percent of the Israeli Mashav Initiative and Development Ltd. Israeli Mashav Initiative and Development Ltd., owns Nesher Israel Cement Enterprises Ltd., which is Israel’s sole cement producer, supplying 75-90 percent of all the cement in Israel and the occupied West Bank.

Dexia, a Franco-Belgian corporation that finances Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank via its subsidiary Dexia Israel Public Finance Ltd.

Veolia Transport, a French corporation is involved in the construction of the Jerusalem light rail which connects Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank with annexed East Jerusalem. Veolia is due to operate the light rail and also operates bus services to illegal Israeli settlements.

Carmel Agrexco, an Israeli corporation that exports agricultural produce including oranges, olives, and avocados from the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

During the Tribunal, Dutch divestment activist Saskia Muller presented the case of the Dutch pension fund Pensioenfonds Zorg en Welzijn (PFZW). The fund holds investments in more than ten international companies involved in Israel’s violations of international law, and one Israeli supermarket chain which provides services to illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. In its six-page letter to the Russell Tribunal dated 12 November, the PFZW board wrote that it is “deeply concerned about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, and the consequential long time occupation of the Palestinian territories by Israel. It is further concerned about ongoing violations of international law in this context, and about possible complicity in such violations by companies that are active in Israel and the occupied territories.”

Representatives of the US peace group Codepink presented the case against Ahava cosmetics to the Russell Tribunal jury. And while the jury was presenting its conclusions on 22 November, the entrance to the Ahava store in London was blocked by activists who chained themselves to a concrete-filled oil barrel. This was the fifth protest by activists against Ahava, which manufactures Dead Sea products in the illegal settlement of Mitzpe Shalem.

At the press conference, juror John Dugard, who recently served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, stressed that when the anti-apartheid movement pressured corporations to disinvest from apartheid South Africa, it was still debated whether apartheid constituted a crime against humanity. Corporations therefore argued that doing business with South Africa was not illegal.

Dugard added that the situation is very different with respect to Israel: “We are dealing with a criminal enterprise on the part of Israel. Under criminal and international law and in many cases under national legal systems, there is an obligation on the part of states to redress such illegality, but if states do not take action, there is also responsibility on the part of corporations and civil society to redress these wrongs.”

Ronald Kasrils, former South African minister, highlighted how mobilization of popular support by the anti-apartheid movement helped to isolate South Africa and overthrow the apartheid regime. At that time, the western countries were the pillars of support for apartheid South Africa, as is the case with Israel today. Kasrils said that the mobilization was not “anti-people, it was anti-system.”

Kasrils added that in South Africa the “particular groundswell internationally would even get through to the minority white people in South Africa. As we see now this [boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS)] call getting through to public opinion in Israel, among Jews in Israel and around the world.” Kasrils emphasized that the importance of BDS can not be “underestimated” and underlined the important role of civil society in pressuring governments to end Israeli impunity and criminal activity.

Juror Michael Mansfield, President of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, stated that “the jury was horrified to note that the Israeli government is currently considering making protest and objection along these lines a criminal offense.” In its final statement, the jury called “on states to protect the rights of all those who initiate or take such lawful BDS actions.”

Meanwhile, the Palestinian BDS National committee (BNC) endorsed the outcome of the Russell Tribunal in London. In a statement the BNC commented that “the tribunal spoke with a strong, clear and moral voice” (“BNC endorses findings of London session of Russell Tribunal on Palestine …,” 30 November 2010).

The tribunal has provided not only important knowledge, but also authoritative encouragement to solidarity groups, social movements, trade unions, political parties and concerned citizens to utilize BDS to hold Israel and its supporters to account. The next Russell Tribunal on Palestine will be held in South Africa, and will consider the applicability of the crime of apartheid in Israel.

By Adri Nieuwhof

Adri Nieuwhof is a consultant and human rights advocate based in Switzerland. Nieuwhof gave a presentation at the Russell Tribunal as the lead expert on public contracts regulations and the French multinational, Veolia, and its business practices in the occupied Palestinian territories.

 

Chris Williams, author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis, explains what’s at stake at the UN-sponsored climate change talks in Cancún.

“If Cancún delivers nothing, or not much, then the UN process is in danger.” So said Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate action, ahead of the UN-sponsored climate change summit taking place in Mexico through December 10.

The negotiations are known as COP-16, short for 16th Conference of the Parties. What does the “16” stand for? If you’re a freshman in college this year, you were probably alive, but still an infant, when the first international climate talks took place 16 years ago.

In other words, the world’s governments have been negotiating for more than half a generation. And what progress has there been in those intervening years?

Last century, on March 21, 1994, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) came into being; 194 countries signed on to it. Article 2 of the UNFCCC states that its ultimate objective, and that of related bodies, such as the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Conference of the Parties, is:

to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.

In 1995, the IPCC released its Second Assessment Report, which stated in part:

The atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases, and among them, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), have grown significantly since pre-industrial times (about 1750 A.D.): CO2 from about 280 to almost 360 ppmv (parts per million by volume), CH4 from 700 to 1720 ppbv (parts per billion by volume) and N2O from about 275 to about 310 ppbv.

These trends can be attributed largely to human activities, mostly fossil-fuel use, land-use change and agriculture. Concentrations of other anthropogenic greenhouse gases have also increased. An increase of greenhouse gas concentrations leads on average to an additional warming of the atmosphere and the Earth’s surface. Many greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere–and affect climate–for a long time.

So we have known for a long time what has been going on and what the likely effects would be. Three things have happened over the intervening decade and a half: CO2 levels have now increased another 30ppm to 390ppm; the scientific consensus on the likely effects of this increase has sharpened, deepened and become even more worrying; and the politicians have done nothing about it even as global awareness, activism and concern with the issue has risen tremendously.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

THE IPCC issued its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007, the year that its work was recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize. The report stated, “There is high agreement and much evidence that with current climate change mitigation policies and related sustainable development practices, global GHG emissions will continue to grow over the next few decades.”

If anyone was in any doubt about where this extremely rapid increase in CO2 levels due to business as- usual might lead, they only need to look at this summer’s heat wave and fires in Russia or the extreme monsoons that have devastated large areas of Pakistan.

These are only the most reported and devastating of recent unusual weather patterns. In August, a cloudburst over the town of Leh in Ladakh, northern India, killed at least 150 people and left hundreds missing and homeless as the deluge washed away the mountainside and much of the town. Ladakh is a high altitude desert and lies in the rain shadow of the Himalayas, so naturally, people don’t build houses there to withstand torrential rain. Perhaps now they will have to.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, May, June and July each were the hottest on record. In New York, for June through August, an astonishing and record-breaking 34 days exceeded 90 degrees, according to the National Weather Service. This came despite a cooler-than-usual start to summer. There are many other examples of regions that are unseasonably wetter, drier or hotter–19 countries so far have set new temperature records for 2010.

As Jack Hedin, a farmer in Minnesota, wrote in an op-ed piece in the New York Times:

The news from this Midwestern farm is not good. The past four years of heavy rains and flash flooding here in southern Minnesota have left me worried about the future of agriculture in America’s grain belt. For some time, computer models of climate change have been predicting just these kinds of weather patterns, but seeing them unfold on our farm has been harrowing nonetheless…

Climate change, I believe, may eventually pose an existential threat to my way of life. A family farm like ours may simply not be able to adjust quickly enough to such unendingly volatile weather.

We can’t charge enough for our crops in good years to cover losses in the ever-more-frequent bad ones. We can’t continue to move to better, drier ground. No new field drainage scheme will help us as atmospheric carbon concentrations edge up to 400 parts per million; hardware and technology alone can’t solve problems of this magnitude.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

GIVEN THE overwhelming preponderance of scientific data pointing toward the growing likelihood of catastrophic climate change–as well as the fact that we are already seeing some of the effects–what is likely to happen at Cancún?

According to the New York Times:

After 16 years of annual climate treaty negotiations, negotiators heading for this meeting…are hoping not for progress, but merely to avoid going backward. Connie Hedegaard, the European Union’s minister for climate action said: “What we will be working toward is that we should not start backsliding.”

So, the answer is…nothing. In fact, most heads of state, unlike COP-15 in Copenhagen, aren’t even bothering to show up. It’s becoming ever more apparent that rational arguments based on sound science aren’t going to persuade politicians to act.

In particular, regarding the U.S., it is also becoming ever more apparent that rhetoric aside, the Democrats and President Obama are equally uninterested in forcing through real change.

Many people who hoped for something different are waking up to the fact that, to quote W.E.B. DuBois, “It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream.” Even actually witnessing climate or environmental devastation–such as with the BP oil spill–doesn’t seem to provoke political leaders into action.

Therefore, as people who do want something to be done, we have to analyze why the response has been so pathetic, and what we can do to force a change in this state of affairs.

In the U.S., many environmental activists and liberals tend to attribute the failure to Obama’s misplaced but genuine attempts at consensus building, the intransigence of moderate Democrats, and the over-bearing power and influence of the corporations.

However, while all these reasons contain elements of truth, there is a more fundamental analysis that Marxists can provide. The underlying reason for the reactionary posture of U.S. politicians, regardless of party affiliation, against any and all meaningful action on climate change, and the creation of alternative energy systems, new infrastructure and millions of green jobs is structural.

The U.S. is in an impossible position: it is regressing economically in the face of new competition internationally, it is already behind in many areas of green technology, it has a chronically outdated transportation and housing infrastructure premised on never-ending cheap oil, and it is fighting two wars to maintain global hegemony. And this is taking place in the context of a global crisis of overproduction of goods.

Internationally, inter-imperial rivalry over diminishing resources in the context of a global economic recession has sharpened, as countries fight to maintain or extend the power of their own national set of corporations in hostile competition with all the others.

The Copenhagen conference could more aptly be described as a confrontation rather than a conference, as countries faced off across the diplomatic table. In the end, any possibility of an agreement was torpedoed by an unholy alliance of five heavy fossil-fuel users and carbon emitters led by the U.S. and including China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

This time around, in Cancún, the big governments reason that there’s no need to turn up because a deal on climate is so unlikely due to the depressed global economic situation and an incipient trade war. Showing up to a failing conference would just be bad PR. Forced austerity, not clean energy, is what’s on the table.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

HEADS OF state from Latin America who will likely attend, such as Evo Morales of Bolivia, are trying to force a change. In April, more than 30,000 activists gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, for the alternative Cochabamba Accords to Protect Mother Earth, which charted an alternative path to reducing carbon emissions, real sustainable social and ecological development, and the provision of development assistance to countries of the Global South most affected by climate change.

As reported on November 26 by Britain’s Guardian newspaper:

The first shots were fired in what are likely to be serious diplomatic clashes at the talks. In an interview with the Guardian, Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN accused rich countries of “holding humanity hostage” and undermining the UN. “[Their] deliberate attempts to sideline democracy and justice in the climate debate will be viewed as reckless and immoral by future generations,” he said. “I feel that Cancún will become a new Copenhagen if there is no shift in the next few days.”

In Cancún, the peasant and farmer organization Via Campesina–in echoes of Che Guevara’s call for “One, two, many Vietnams”–has issued a call for “thousands of Cancúns” across the world and an International Day of Action on December 7 to coincide with mass farmers protests in Cancún.

In the U.S., activists need to take inspiration from these protests and cohere around a set of politics that will help move the environmental and climate justice movement forward. Given the resistance to change on the part of the U.S. ruling class, which fears losing even more ground to its competitors, even modest reforms to national energy, transportation and climate policy are unlikely without a mass movement for social and ecological change.

Such a movement needs to be resolute in its independence and principles, and will have to incorporate, for the first time since the late 1960s, tens of thousands of working-class people. Five key points need to be argued:

— A strong, effective and reinvigorated environmental movement must campaign as much about social justice as it does about ecological justice. We cannot have one without the other.

— This is not about sacrifice; rather, it is about fighting for a higher standard of living and quality of life.

— The problem is the system itself. Therefore, the solution is structural and systemic, not individual, technical or market-based.

— To make real headway, the movement must maintain and make absolute its independence from the Democratic Party.

— We need to fight for intermediate, achievable goals while maintaining a vision of fundamental social change and a completely different, ecologically rational society based on cooperation, worker participation and real democracy.

On this basis, we can build a new and vibrant movement that can campaign for such things as a joint Labor and Climate Justice Conference to help formulate strategy and tactics or a national demonstration for the same.

We can’t wait in vain for President Obama or other politicians to do it for us. Ordinary people must step onto the stage of history to organize to force the change that we want to see and that is so urgently needed.

 

 

 

 

 

Bradley Manning, who allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of secret government documents to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, turns 23 in jail Friday. The Daily Beast’s Denver Nicks, in an exclusive interview with Manning’s attorney, reports on his solitary confinement, what he’s reading (from George W. Bush to Howard Zinn), and his legal strategy.

The last time Bradley Manning saw the world outside of a jail, most Americans had never heard of WikiLeaks. On Friday, Manning, the man whose alleged unauthorized release of hundreds of thousands of classified documents put the website and its controversial leader, Julian Assange, on the map, turns 23 behind bars. Since his arrest in May, Manning has spent most of his 200-plus days in solitary confinement. Other than receiving a card and some books from his family, his birthday will be no different. In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, his attorney, David Coombs, revealed key details about Manning’s imprisonment and kind gestures from his family that provided a bit of comfort in the inmate’s otherwise extremely harsh incarceration.

“They’re thinking about him on his birthday, that they love and support him,” Coombs said of Manning’s family and the card his mother, father, sister and aunt passed along via the lawyer on Wednesday. “They wish they could be with him on his day, but they are not allowed because visitation is only on Saturday and Sunday, and a family member would be going down to see him on Saturday.” Coombs passed a message to Manning from his aunt on behalf of the family; Manning, the lawyer says, asked Coombs to tell his aunt he loved her and wishes he could be with her as well.

Manning asked for a list of books, which his family bought for him and will be delivered over the next few weeks to coincide with his birthday and Christmas. On the list?

Manning is being held at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 hours a day alone in a standard-sized cell, with a sink, a toilet, and a bed. He isn’t allowed sheets or a pillow, though First Lieutenant Brian Villiard, an officer at Quantico, said he is allowed bedding of “non-shreddable” material. “I’ve held it, I’ve felt it, it’s soft, I’d sleep under it,” he told The Daily Beast.

He isn’t allowed to exercise (Quantico officials dispute this), but he has started stretching and practicing yoga.

For an hour every day, a television is wheeled in front of his cell and he’s allowed to watch TV, including news, though usually local news, Coombs told The Daily Beast. He is allowed to read the news as well. Courtesy of Coombs, Manning now has a subscription to his favorite magazine, Scientific American. The November “Hidden Worlds of Dark Matter” issue was his first.

The conditions under which Bradley Manning is being held would traumatize anyone (see Salon’s Glenn Greenwald for a rundown of the legal and psychological issues associated with extended solitary confinement). He lives alone in a small cell, denied human contact. He is forced to wear shackles when outside of his cell, and when he meets with the few people allowed to visit him, they sit with a glass partition between them. The only person other than prison officials and a psychologist who has spoken to Manning face to face is his attorney, who says the extended isolation—now more than seven months of solitary confinement—is weighing on his client’s psyche.

When he was first arrested, Manning was put on suicide watch, but his status was quickly changed to “Prevention of Injury” watch (POI), and under this lesser pretense he has been forced into his life of mind-numbing tedium. His treatment is harsh, punitive and taking its toll, says Coombs.

There is no evidence he’s a threat to himself, and shouldn’t be held in such severe conditions under the artifice of his own protection.

“The command is basing this treatment of him solely on the nature of the pending charges, and on an unrelated incident where a service member in the facility took his own life,” Coombs said, referencing the February suicide of a marine captain in the Quantico brig. Coombs says he believes Quantico officials are keeping Manning under close watch with strict limitations on his activity out of an overabundance of caution. Both Coombs and Manning’s psychologist, Coombs says, are sure Manning is mentally healthy, that there is no evidence he’s a threat to himself, and shouldn’t be held in such severe conditions under the artifice of his own protection.

Manning faces a military court-martial on charges of providing WikiLeaks with classified information in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

His future remains uncertain. Rep John Conyers (D-MI), in Thursday’s congressional hearing on WikiLeaks, called for calm and a measured response to the new challenges the whistleblower’s site presents to the future of governance. “When everyone in this town is joined together calling for someone’s head, it’s a pretty sure sign that we need to slow down and take a look.”

Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) followed with a call for punishment. “I have no sympathy for the alleged thief in this situation,” Poe said, insisting the source of the leak, whoever it is, be held responsible. “He’s no better than a Texas pawn shop dealer that deals in stolen merchandise and sells it to the highest bidder.”

Manning’s fate will be determined over the following months. What is clear today is that he’s being held in extraordinarily harsh conditions—notably harsher than Bryan Minkyu Martin, the naval intelligence specialist who allegedly tried to sell military secrets to an undercover FBI agent, and is currently being held awaiting trial, though not in solitary confinement. Manning, who has been convicted of nothing, has spent the better part of a year incommunicado, living the life of a man convicted of a heinous crime. Coombs challenges the legality of what he says is “unlawful pretrial punishment.” He is working to lift the POI restrictions placed on his client.

By Denver Nicks

Denver Nicks is an editorial assistant at The Daily Beast.

Despite being granted bail, WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange remains imprisoned in London, awaiting extradition proceedings to answer a prosecutor’s questions in Sweden. He hasn’t been formally charged with any crime. His lawyers have heard that a grand jury in the United States has been secretly empaneled, and that a U.S. federal indictment is most likely forthcoming.

Politicians and commentators, meanwhile, have been repeatedly calling for Assange to be killed.

Take Democratic strategist and commentator Bob Beckel, who said on a Fox Business show: “We’ve got special ops forces. A dead man can’t leak stuff. … This guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. And I’m not for the death penalty, so … there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.” U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., called WikiLeaks a “foreign terrorist organization” and said that the website “posed a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.” He went on: “This is worse even than a physical attack on Americans; it’s worse than a military attack.”

One of Assange’s lawyers in London, Jennifer Robinson, told me, in response to the flood of threats: “Obviously we take these sorts of very public pronouncements incredibly seriously. And people making these statements ought to be reported to the police for incitement to violence.”

One of Beckel’s co-panelists on Fox said what needed to be done was to “cut the head off the snake,” a phrase which, ironically, gained more significance when it appeared days later in one of the leaked cables. In the cable, Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Adel al-Jubeir “recalled the King’s frequent exhortations to the U.S. to attack Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons program. ‘He told you to cut off the head of the snake.’ ”

Assange has found support in some surprising quarters. Conservative Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith blogged: “I find myself agreeing with those who think Assange is being unduly vilified … it is not obvious what law he has violated. … I do not understand why so much ire is directed at Assange and so little at The New York Times.” (WikiLeaks has partnered with several news organizations, including The New York Times, in its document releases.)

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff of Secretary of State Colin Powell, joined a group of former government officials in a letter of support for Assange, writing, “WikiLeaks has teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America, who thrive on secrecy, are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in.”

Likewise from a feminist group in Britain. Since the principal, public reason for Assange’s arrest relates to questions about potential sexual crimes in Sweden, Katrin Axelsson, from the group Women Against Rape, wrote in a letter to the British newspaper The Guardian: “Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations. …. Women don’t take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst.”

Assange, in an Op-Ed piece published in The Australian newspaper shortly after his arrest, wrote there is a chorus in the U.S. State Department of “‘You’ll risk lives! National Security! You’ll endanger troops!’ by releasing information, and ‘then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can’t be both.’ ”

In a statement released to Australian television, Assange said: “My convictions are unfaltering. I remain true to the ideals I have expressed. … If anything, this process has increased my determination that they are true and correct.”

Extradition proceedings are complex, lengthy affairs. WikiLeaks, for that matter, is not just Julian Assange, but a geographically distributed network of people and servers, and it has promised that the work of facilitating the release of documents from governments and corporations will continue. The U.S. Justice Department, if it pursues a case, will have to answer the question: If WikiLeaks is a criminal organization, what of its media partners, like The New York Times?

By Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

Besieged Gaza, Palestine: We the Palestinians of the Besieged Gaza Strip, on this day, two years on from Israel’s genocidal attack on our families, our houses, our roads, our factories and our schools, are saying enough inaction, enough discussion, enough waiting – the time is now to hold Israel to account for its ongoing crimes against us. On the 27th of December 2008, Israel began an indiscriminate bombardment of the Gaza Strip. The assault lasted 22 days, killing 1,417 Palestinians, 352 of them children, according to main-stream Human Rights Organizations. For a staggering 528 hours, Israeli Occupation Forces let loose their US-supplied F15s, F16s, Merkava Tanks, internationally prohibited White Phosphorous, and bombed and invaded the small Palestinian coastal enclave that is home to 1.5 million, of whom 800,000 are children and over 80 percent UN registered refugees. Around 5,300 remain permanently wounded.

This devastation exceeded in savagery all previous massacres suffered in Gaza, such as the 21children killed in Jabalia in March 2008 or the 19 civilians killed sheltering in their house in the Beit Hanoun Massacre of 2006. The carnage even exceeded the attacks in November 1956 in which Israeli troops indiscriminately rounded up and killed 275 Palestinians in the Southern town of Khan Younis and 111 more in Rafah.

Since the Gaza massacre of 2009, world citizens have undertaken the responsibility to pressure Israel to comply with international law, through a proven strategy of boycott, divestment and sanctions. As in the global BDS movement that was so effective in ending the apartheid South African regime, we urge people of conscience to join the BDS call made by over 170 Palestinian organizations in 2005. As in South Africa the imbalance of power and representation in this struggle can be counterbalanced by a powerful international solidarity movement with BDS at the forefront, holding Israeli policy makers to account, something the international governing community has repeatedly failed to do. Similarly, creative civilian efforts such as the Free Gaza boats that broke the siege five times, the Gaza Freedom March, the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, and the many land convoys must never stop their siege-breaking, highlighting the inhumanity of keeping 1.5 million Gazans in an open-air prison.

Two years have now passed since Israel’s gravest of genocidal acts that should have left people in no doubt of the brutal extent of Israel’s plans for the Palestinians. The murderous navy assault on international activists aboard the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in the Mediterranean Sea magnified to the world the cheapness Israel has assigned to Palestinian llife for so long. The world knows now, yet two years on nothing has changed for Palestinians.

The Goldstone Report came and went: despite its listing count after count of international law contraventions, Israeli “war crimes” and “possible crimes against humanity,” the European Union, the United Nations, the Red Cross, and all major Human Rights Organizations have called for an end to the illegal, medieval siege, it carries on unabated. On 11th November 2010 UNRWA head John Ging said, “There’s been no material change for the people on the ground here in terms of their status, the aid dependency, the absence of any recovery or reconstruction, no economy…The easing, as it was described, has been nothing more than a political easing of the pressure on Israel and Egypt.”

On the 2nd of December, 22 international organizations including Amnesty, Oxfam, Save the Children, Christian Aid, and Medical Aid for Palestinians produced the report ‘Dashed Hopes, Continuation of the Gaza Blockade’ calling for international action to force Israel to unconditionally lift the blockade, saying the Palestinians of Gaza under Israeli siege continue to live in the same devastating conditions. Only a week ago Human Rights Watch published a comprehensive report “Separate and Unequal” that denounced Israeli policies as Apartheid, echoing similar sentiments by South African anti-apartheid activists.

We Palestinians of Gaza want to live at liberty to meet Palestinian friends or family from Tulkarem, Jerusalem or Nazareth; we want to have the right to travel and move freely. We want to live without fear of another bombing campaign that leaves hundreds of our children dead and many more injured or with cancers from the contamination of Israel’s white phosphorous and chemical warfare. We want to live without the humiliations at Israeli checkpoints or the indignity of not providing for our families because of the unemployment brought about by the economic control and the illegal siege. We are calling for an end to the racism that underpins all this oppression.

We ask: when will the world’s countries act according to the basic premise that people should be treated equally, regardless of their origin, ethnicity or colour – is it so far-fetched that a Palestinian child deserves the same human rights as any other human being? Will you be able to look back and say you stood on the right side of history or will you have sided with the oppressor?

We, therefore, call on the international community to take up its responsibility to protect the Palestinian people from Israel’s heinous aggression, immediately ending the siege with full compensation for the destruction of life and infrastructure visited upon us by this explicit policy of collective punishment. Nothing whatsoever justifies the intentional policies of savagery, including the severing of access to the water and electricity supply to 1.5 million people. The international conspiracy of silence towards the genocidal war taking place against the more than 1.5 million civilians in Gaza indicates complicity in these war crimes.

We also call upon all Palestine solidarity groups and all international civil society organizations to demand:

Boycott Divest and Sanction, join the many International Trade Unions, Universities, Supermarkets and artists and writers who refuse to entertain Apartheid Israel. Speak out for Palestine, for Gaza, and crucially ACT. The time is now.

Besieged Gaza, Palestine

27.December.2010

Countercurrents.org

List of signatories:

General Union for Public Services Workers

General Union for Health Services Workers

University Teachers’ Association

Palestinian Congregation for Lawyers

General Union for Petrochemical and Gas Workers

General Union for Agricultural Workers

Union of Women’s Work Committees

Union of Synergies—Women Unit

The One Democratic State Group

Arab Cultural Forum

Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel

Association of Al-Quds Bank for Culture and Info

Palestine Sailing Federation

Palestinian Association for Fishing and Maritime

Palestinian Network of Non-Governmental Organizations

Palestinian Women Committees

Progressive Students’ Union

Medical Relief Society

The General Society for Rehabilitation

General Union of Palestinian Women

Afaq Jadeeda Cultural Centre for Women and Children

Deir Al-Balah Cultural Centre for Women and Children

Maghazi Cultural Centre for Children

Al-Sahel Centre for Women and Youth

Ghassan Kanfani Kindergartens

Rachel Corrie Centre, Rafah

Rafah Olympia City Sisters

Al Awda Centre, Rafah

Al Awda Hospital, Jabaliya Camp

Ajyal Association, Gaza

General Union of Palestinian Syndicates

Al Karmel Centre, Nuseirat

Local Initiative, Beit Hanoun

Union of Health Work Committees

Red Crescent Society Gaza Strip

Beit Lahiya Cultural Centre

Al Awda Centre, Rafah