Zion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Zion (Hebrew: צִיּוֹן; Tiberian vocalization: tsiyyôn; transliterated Zion or Sion) is a term that most often designates the Land of Israel and its ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zion - 37k - Cached - Similar pages -Zion (The Matrix) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
30 Jan 2009 ... Zion is a fictional place in The Matrix films. It is the last human city on the planet Earth after a cataclysmic nuclear war between ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zion_(The_Matrix) - 39k - Cached - Similar pages -
More results from en.wikipedia.org »Lauryn Hill Zion
6 min - 11 Apr 2007 -
Lauryn Hill To zion this is such a beautiful song hope you all like it ... Lauryn Hill Zion beautiful to ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktgHNJ4RmIY -Zion - Zun Dada
3 min 59 sec - 1 Jun 2007 -
Zion Zun Dada The Perfect Melody Baby Records -· zon A zero ·- For Download "Zion - The Perfect Melody" Click Here: http:/ ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0CBSAW5YfM -Zion National Park (U.S. National Park Service)
To experience Zion, you need to walk among the towering cliffs, or challenge your courage in a small narrow canyon. These unique sandstone cliffs range in ...
www.nps.gov/zion/ - 37k - Cached - Similar pages -Welcome to Zion Computers Pvt.Ltd | A Complete IT Solution
Zion is a leading IT Infrastructure Solutions Provider and Technical Support Services outsourcing Company. We enable global and local enterprises with value ...
www.ziongroup.com/ - 11k - Cached - Similar pages -Zion Guitar Technology :: Custom, Hand Made, Premium Electric ...
Zion Guitar Technology has been designing and building high end, custom, hand-made electric guitars for serious guitarists since 1980.
www.zionguitars.com/ - 9k - Cached - Similar pages -Mount Zion College of Engineering and Technology, Pudukkottai ...
23 Jan 2009 ... Website of Mount Zion College of Engineering and Pudukkottai, Tamil Nadu, India.
www.mount-zion.net/ - 27k - Cached - Similar pages -Welcome to the City of Zion, Illinois
Official Web site for the city of Zion. Lane Harrison, Mayor. Located between Chicago and Milwaukee on the shores of Lake Michigan.
www.cityofzion.com/ - 23k - Cached - Similar pages -Texe Marrs - Thunder Over Zion (RARE Video!)
57 min - 22 Dec 2006 -
: Thunder Over Zion - Illuminati Bloodlines and the Secret Plan for a Jewish Utopia and a New World Messiah Pastor Texe Marrs chronicles the ...
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6543199457904083932 -News results for ZION
Zion Oil Commences Drilling Rig Mobilization - 21 Mar 2009 Zion anticipates that the required Turkish rig crew work visas will be granted soon and due to the time required to ship the drilling rig (which has already ...FOXBusiness - 10 related articles »Zions stock shows signs of recovery, but questions remain - Salt Lake Tribune - 11 related articles »
| zionism | zion y lenox | zion lyrics | scion |
| zion the perfect melody | zion store | zion train | zion golan |
Zion Oil Commences Drilling Rig MobilizationFOXBusiness - Mar 21, 2009 Zion anticipates that the required Turkish rig crew work visas will be granted soon and due to the time required to ship the drilling rig (which has already ... Cedartown beats Mt. Zion 6-2 in baseball actionCedartown Standard - 22 hours ago Their latest win came Saturday when they clipped the wings of the Eagles of Mt. Zion-Carroll in a 6-2 non-region win. Despite the win that tied their best ... Utah lawmakers approve liquor law changesmsnbc.com - Mar 19, 2009 Currently, a partition known as a "Zion Curtain" separates bartenders from customers. The term is a nod to the state's religious history as the Land of Zion ... Salt Lake City mayor looks to 'normalize' city booze laws Salt Lake Tribune Last call for arcane drinking laws in Utah The Associated Press Zions stock shows signs of recovery, but questions remainSalt Lake Tribune - Mar 18, 2009 By Paul Beebe Shares of Zions Bancorp returned above $10 this week after scraping a 17-year low two weeks ago, as analysts debate whether the bank is ... Zion, writ in stoneHa'aretz - Mar 19, 2009 By Nir Hasson "The Arab stonecutter and his three sons had already completed the preparation of the three stone slabs for the work," writes Meir Shalev in ... We salute Colonel Khoza’s rise through the ranksThe Times - 19 hours ago M’zion Mofokeng, Pirates’ No1 supporter, is back after cataract surgery last weekend. Just two days after the operation he travelled to Durban with the ... Lyman "Gene" BashoreZanesville Times Recorder - 6 hours ago Eugene was a member of the FFA and an honorary member of the Sheridan FFA, American Legion Post 58 in Somerset, life long member of Zion Ridge Reformed UCC, ... 'Dogs flex their muscles in 13-1 win over Mt. ZionCedartown Standard - Mar 20, 2009 by Brad Easterwood The Cedartown Bulldogs held their own personal home run derby Thursday at Mt. Zion-Carroll. Cedartown hit five home runs on their way to ... Focus on Faith: Jewish artist Ramsdale expresses Christian beliefs ...Schenectady Gazette - 10 hours ago During this month and through April 26, a celebration of her work will be on display at the Zion Lutheran Church at 153 Nott Terrace in Schenectady. ... Shandy Wesley Jones was Tuscaloosa County’s first black elected ...Tuscaloosa News (subscription) - 7 hours ago He was an abolitionist, a business owner, a barber, a pastor of two AME Zion Churches, an elder in the AME Zion Church, an educator, a customs inspector and ... |
Israeli Spying in the United States
By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
CounterPunch, March 12, 2009 - Excerpts
http://www.counterp unch.org/ ketcham03122009. html
Scratch a counterintelligence officer in the U.S. government and they'll tell you
that Israel is not a friend to the United States. This is because Israel runs one
of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the U.S..
The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject oft-discussed in
the media or in the circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the
U.S.-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which
punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. The void where
the facts should sit is filled instead with the hallucinations of conspiracy
theory -- the kind in which, for example, agents of the Mossad, Israel’s top
intelligence agency, engineer the 9/11 attacks, while 4,000 Israelis in the
Twin Towers somehow all get word to escape before the planes hit. The
effect, as disturbing as it is ironic, is that the less the truth is addressed,
the more noxious the falsity that spreads.
Israel's spying on the U.S., however, is a matter of public record, and
neither conspiracy nor theory is needed to present the evidence. ....
Shah N. Khan
Editor http://www.netvert.biz
http://www.mmawards.com
Over one million workers protest across France
Xinhua
March 20, 2009
More than 1 million people marched against President Nicolas Sarkozy across
France on Thursday in a nationwide strike and protest over what they see as
the government's unjust economic policies.
Across the country an estimated 2.6 million people attended around 200
rallies, according to the General Confederation of Labor, one of the
nation's largest unions.
Police, however, put the number of protesters at 1.2 million. Nevertheless,
the national strike, the second of its kind in only seven weeks, was
reported as one of the biggest since Sarkozy took office in May 2007.
The protests showed dissatisfaction of French people with social
consequences of the global financial crisis.
"The replies from the bosses and the government are not enough," said
Francois Chereque, leader of the big CFDT union federation.
"Salaried workers won't any longer accept being the victims of this crisis,
which they had nothing to do with," Bernard Thibault, secretary of the
workers' confederation, was quoted as saying by BFM Radio.
The unions jointly called on the government to do more to safeguard jobs and
to improve workers' purchasing power.
Trains, government offices and schools were disrupted but public transport
in Paris worked almost as normal.
According to the Education Ministry, about 30 percent of France's teachers
were on strike Thursday.
Meanwhile, utilities, ports and refineries were also disrupted. Air France
said most of its flights were operating normally from Charles de Gaulle
Airport, while about one-third of its flights from Orly Airport had been
canceled.
Thursday's marches included an unusually large number of private sector
workers as the past month has seen a daily roll-call of factory closures.
In the northern town of Clairoix, around 10,000 people protested over the
closure of a tyre plant by the German Continental company with the loss of
1,120 jobs.
Many others are worried about job losses as 2 million were already
unemployed and 350,000 more layoffs are expected this year.
According to opinion polls, up to 80 percent of the public supported the
protests.
France faces mounting dissatisfaction amid rising unemployment as a result
of the economic downturn. French companies shed the most jobs in 40 years
during the fourth quarter of last year.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon, referring to the huge national deficit,
declined further measures to push the economy.
He said protesters voiced a "legitimate concern" but he urged the people to
wait for the 26-billion-euro (35.5-billion-U.S.-dollar) stimulus package
launched in December last year to bear fruits.
A similar strike on Jan. 29 with civil service stoppage and street marches
ended after the government pledged over 2 billion euros (some 2.73 billion
dollars) of new benefits for the low-paid and unemployed.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-03/20/content_11041859.htm
From: Soumya Guhathakurta <s_guhathakurta@hotmail.com>
Date: Mar 21, 2009 11:17 AM
Subject: Ross Mallick on Marichjhanpi
To:
Please find attached an article By Ross Mallick on Marichjhanpi.
Request, circulate the article to the best possible extent.
thanks,
soumya guhathakurta
To: sanhati@yahoogroups.com
From: koustav2007@gmail.com
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 01:20:53 +0530
Subject: Re: [sanhati] An interesting piece on the Marichjhapi massacre by the CPM
30 years from the Marichjhanpi massacre, the interest in the incident is growing. This I feel is indeed a shocking but important incident in the political history of Bengal. Firstly it exposed the class and cast bias of the Bengal intelligentsia, they largely kept quiet to this horrifying genocide of refugees,majorly namasudras. And secondy it should have right then made it very clear the attitude of CPI(M), mainly thier intollerance of anything positive happening without them, beyond them. Right then Marichjhanpi should have made clear to everyone that CPI(M) was never a party that could have taken a positive path and the side of the 'have-nots'.
We must try and cultivate the subject further becasue not only is it the most brutal act by a state in Indepedent Inida but especially as it can be the overlooked cornerstone of rural bengal as far as alternate development is concerned.
In this respect Tushar Bhattacharya's documentary film about Marichjhanpi is worth mentioning, it is a work of tremendous effort and research.
Also there is an article on Marichjhanpi by Anu Jalais, that was published on 23rd April 2005 edition of EPW, it is both beautifully written and is a wealth on the subject in material as well as the references. I have a pdf copy from her but cannot uplaod it without the permission of the author.
Also another article by Ross Mallick appeared in JSTOR February 1999.(http://www.jstor.org/pss/2658391) However the site is irritatingly stringent in giving access to interested people. (And guess that is exactly why I'm uploading my copy without bothering for their permission)
Lastly a book 'Marichjhanpi, Naishabdyer Antoraal-e' (possibly meaning Marichjhanpi, behind the silence of darkness) by Jagadish Chandra Mondal is the most comprehensive book on the subject that I have come across.
I would ask all interested persons to look into these references. get back to me if anything requires more elaboration/clarification.
Regards,
Koustav.
On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 7:48 AM, Garga Chatterjee <drgarga@gmail.com> wrote:
Refugees and Bengali Identity All through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s
Bengali Hindus from what had become East Pakistan and subsequently
Bangladesh entered West Bengal in the hope of settling down. They
were however sent to various inhospitable areas outside West Bengal
with the assurance that they would eventually be relocated in West
Bengal. Soon after the Left Front came to power, in 1978 they found
their refugee supporters return; amongst them, about 30,000 managed
to sail to Morichjhanpi – one of the northern-most forested islands
of the Sundarbans – from where they were brutally evicted for
violating the Forest Acts. Based on nearly two years' fieldwork in
the Sundarbans, this paper looks at how the memory of Morichjhanpi
was evoked by the islanders to talk about their resentment about the
unequal distribution of resources between them and the Royal Bengal
tigers of the Sundarbans reserve forest. This paper looks at how the
government's primacy on ecology and its use of force in Morichjhanpi
that saw hundreds of refugees dying, was seen by the Sundarbans
islanders as a betrayal not only of refugees and of the poor and
marginalised in general, but also, of the Bengali `nimnobarno'
identity.1 In fact, the Morichjhanpi massacre was considered a double
betrayal by the Sundarbans islanders. They argued that it was because
they were considered as lesser mortals situated at the periphery and
marginalised due to their social inferiority by the `bhadralok'2 – by
which is meant the anglicised, well-connected, educated, moneyed,
essentially Hindu upper caste, and mainly urban, Bengalis – that
tigers, taking the cue, had started feeding on them.3 As developed by
Ross Mallick,4 the reasons leading to the Morichjhanpi massacre have
to be understood in relation to the long history which led to the
partition of Bengal and the intricacies of caste, class and communal
differences. Briefly, in the colonial period, the East Bengal
namasudra movement had been one of the most powerful and politically
mobilised dalit movements in India.5 In alliance with the Muslims,
they had kept the Bengal Congress Party in opposition from the 1920s.
The exclusion of the bhadralok from power led to the Hindu elite and
eventually the Congress, pressing for the partition of Bengal at
independence, so that at least the western half would return to their
control.6 Partition, however, meant that dalits lost their bargaining
power when divided along religious lines of Hindus and Muslims and
became politically marginalised minorities in both countries.7 With
the partition of India, threatened by their Muslim and lower-caste
tenants, the upper-caste landed elite formed the first wave of
migrants from East Pakistan into West Bengal. Subsequent migrants
were rural middle class cultivators and artisans. If the richest
amongst them found a niche amongst relatives and friends in Kolkata
and its outskirts, the poorer amongst them squatted on public and
private land and tried to resist eviction. In the 1960s and 1970s
(especially after the Bangladesh war of independence in 1971, Mujibur
Rahman's assassination in 1975 and Zia-ur-Rahman's coming to power)
communal agitations started to hereafter be directed against the
poorest and low caste Hindus who had remained in East Bengal. They
now sought refuge in West Bengal. Unlike their richer counterparts,
who were backed by family and caste connections, many of these poorer
migrants did not find a way of living in Kolkata and were sent to
various inhospitable and infertile areas – most infamous amongst them
being Dandakaranya, a semi-arid and rocky place in east-central India
which included part of Orissa, and former Madhya Pradesh and Andhra
Pradesh, now in present-day Chhattisgarh – thus an area entirely
removed, both culturally and physically, from the refugees' known
world. The opposition, denounced the Congress' attempts to evict the
refugees from West Bengal and promised that when they came to power
they would settle the refugees in West Bengal;8 and that this would,
in all probability, be on one of the islands of the Sundarbans.9 Many
refugees, especially those from Khulna, had preferred settling in the
inhabited islands of the Sundarbans – where they had erstwhile
neighbours and relatives who had come from Khulna to clear the
forests in the West Bengal part of the Sundarbans during the early
part of the century – rather than go to the totally alien area of
Dandakaranya. In 1975, many of those who had been sent to these camps
started to move to a sand band called the Morich chak which was part
of Morichjhanpi island in the Gosaba police station. It was thought
to be possible to settle 16,000 families there, another 30,000
refugees in nearby Dattapasur,10 and in other Sundarbans places that
had `cultivable waste land'.11 However, in their repeated attempts to
settle there they were brutally evicted from the various train
stations where they congregated on their way to West Bengal, were
starved of water and food whilst in Morichjhanpi, and finally were
even shot at before being brutally evicted from there.12 The growing
polarisation of West Bengal and East Bengal as separate `homelands'
for Hindus and Muslims respectively, affected most the lower caste,
poor, rural population, especially of lower Bengal who were not
divided so much along religious lines as along the cultural and
economic divide of bhadralok/nimnoborner or `nimnoborger lok'. The
contending elements in being both `Bengali' and `Muslim' has often
been addressed,13 however, the tension that exists when one is
`Bengali' but not a bhadralok has been less studied and needs to be
recognised to comprehend why the islanders believed that they had
become `just tiger-food' for Kolkata's bhadralok. Though there has
been a growing emphasis – especially following the publication of
Ranajit Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial
India (1983) and subsequently in the Subaltern Studies series – on
rural communities' consciousness through the study of rural movements
in colonial Bengal,14 but as Das Gupta argues,15 these studies focus
overwhelmingly on the religious discourse of the nimnobarger lok,
especially in relation to resistance. While understanding religion is
important, privileging it over all else distracts from the equally
important economic and political spheres, and from alternative, less
well known, cultural spheres. In this case the framing of community
consciousness was not so much undertaken through the valorisation of
religion but through a divide along caste/class which was expressed
through local narratives on Morichjhanpi and tigers turning man-
eaters. Here, through the rejection of the tiger as an animal one
needs to be proud of due to its status as `national animal' (of both
Bangladesh and India), the islanders' narratives of tigers
highlighted their perceptions of an unjust history. What this paper
attempts to underscore is how the Sundarbans islanders internalised
the injustice they felt had been levelled at the poorer refugees'
claims for settlement in West Bengal and why they thought their
request had been trivialised. Soon after my arrival, I was told that
the main reason why tigers had become man-eaters could be traced to
the violent events of Morichjhanpi. Many islanders explained to me
that they and tigers had lived in a sort of idyllic relationship
prior to the events of Morichjhanpi. After Morichjhanpi, they said,
tigers had started preying on humans. This sudden development of
their man-eating trait was believed to have been caused by two
factors. One was the defiling of the Sundarbans forest due to
government violence, the second was because of the stress which had
been put thereafter on the superiority of tigers in relation to the
inhabitants of the Sundarbans. The brutality and rhetoric with which
the refugees had been chased away, coupled with measures for
safeguarding tigers which the government initiated soon after the
events of Morichhapi, had, explained the villagers, gradually made
tigers `self-important'. With this increased conviction of their self-
worth, tigers had grown to see poorer people as `tiger-food'. The
anthropomorphisation of tigers in relation to the villagers' history
intrigued me. The essence of one's `bhadra' identity is often
revealed through one's romanticised vision of nature, in this case of
the Sundarbans – which literally means `beautiful forest' – and of
wildlife – here of the Royal Bengal tiger. Bhadralok sensitivity to
the Royal Bengal tiger with its association to both the regal and
colonial images of hunting as well as to its current position as
national animal has often been deployed to mark the urgency of having
the Sundarbans named a World Heritage Site and prime tiger area. But
the anthropomorphisation of tigers into that of a `bhadra' symbol of
national animal (an image I shall not dwell on in this paper) was
questioned by the islanders through their presentation of another
image of the tiger. Shrugging off the colonial and national drape off
this bhadra tiger, it portrayed the animal as one whose gentle
inoffensive nature was irretrievably transformed into that of a man-
eater following the bloody events of Morichjhanpi. Highlighting this
transformation of their tiger was a way, for the villagers, of
reclaiming the forgotten pages of a history which had relegated them
to oblivion, an injustice they felt they had been done by the
urbanised elite who believed tigers were more precious than them, the
nimnobarner or nimnobarger lok. II Brutal Evacuation of Refugees from
Morichjhanpi In 1977, when the Left Front came to power, they found
their refugee supporters had taken them at their word and sold their
belongings and land to return to West Bengal. In all, 1,50,000
refugees arrived from Dandakaranya16 expecting the government to
honour its word.17 Fearing that an influx of refugees might
jeopardise the prospects of the state's economic recovery, the
government started to forcibly send them back. Many refugees however
managed to escape to various places inside West Bengal, one of these
being the Sundarbans where they had family and where they would be
able to survive by working as fishers. From the month of May the same
year about 30,000 SC refugees, under the leadership of Satish Mandal,
president of the Udbastu Unnayansil Samity, a former close associate
of the Communist Party's refugee programme, sailed to Morichjhanpi
and set up a settlement there.18 Morichjhanpi, an island in the
northern-most forested part of the West Bengal Sundarbans, had been
cleared in 1975 and its mangrove vegetation replaced by a
governmental programme of coconut and tamarisk plantation to increase
state revenue. However, though this was not an island covered in
mangrove forest, the state government was in no mood to tolerate such
a settlement. It stated that the refugees were `in unauthorised
occupation of Morichjhanpi which is a part of the Sundarbans
government reserve forest violating thereby the Forest Acts' and that
refugees had come `with the intention of settling there permanently
thereby disturbing the existing and potential forest wealth and also
creating ecological imbalance'.19 The government placed primacy on
ecology, but this argument, believed the villagers, was more to
legitimise their ejection from Morichjhanpi in the eyes of the
Kolkata bhadralok. The argument that this might be a precedent for an
unmanageable refugee influx from Bangladesh was also heatedly argued
as baseless. Indeed, as Ross Mallick argues, by then, the last wave
of East Bengali migrants had been forcefully driven out of the state
and those who would have settled in Morichjhanpi would not have been
a financial liability for the state government.20 The refugees from
Dandakaranya were joined by people from the villages of the adjoining
Sundarbans islands of Satjelia, Kumirmari, Puinjali and Jharkhali.
Many islanders, being the descendants of immigrants from Khulna in
East Bengal brought by the British even as late as the 1930s and
1940s to reclaim the forest, identified with the refugees. A lot of
them also shared close blood ties with the refugees, ties reignited
through visits and gifts of paddy and vegetables. Young landless
couples were urged to settle with the Morichjhanpi dwellers; their
intimate knowledge of that part of the forest and generous lending of
boats and dinghies were further recompensed by the refugees'
eagerness that they too settle in Morichjhanpi to strengthen their
case. When narrating their memories, if some of the islanders evoked
their dismay at finding their ponds emptied of water overnight due to
the refugees' initial dependence on the adjoining islands' pond water
for their survival, most islanders also drew on memories of fraternal
bonding. Morichjhanpi island, being 125 square miles, was so big that
the refugees were keen that the islanders join them so as to have
`hands raise bunds and voices carry our pleas to Kolkata'; to help
improve the dire economic situation of the Sundarbans region as a
whole rather than squabble over land which, being neither fertile nor
theirs to distribute, was not worth fighting over. The settlers –
both refugees as well as islanders who had come from the adjoining
villages, initially built some makeshift huts along the cultivated
area of the island, beneath the government's coconut and tamarisk
trees. Most of them survived by working as crab and fish collectors
in the forest, and with the help of the islanders, by selling their
products in the nearby villages. In the memories of their time there,
the Sundarbans islanders often underlined the fraternal bonding they
shared with the refugees and their immense relief to have finally
come across vocal leaders. In contrast to the ruling elite of their
villages, composed essentially of large landowners who aspired to
migrate towards Kolkata, they saw the East Bengali leaders as more
apt to represent them. They explained that this was because they were
poor, rural, and low caste and hence not afraid to take up manual
work, such as fishing, and knew, through the twists of fate what it
was like to fight for their rights. As a whole, the refugees were
looked up to by the Sundarbans islanders of the islands adjoining
that of Morichjhapi because they were better educated and more
articulate than themselves and because, having lost everything, they
were seen as having the moral courage to face the Kolkata ruling
class with their rural concerns. The islanders often expressed their
awe at the way the East Bengali refugees rapidly established
Morichjhanpi as one of the best-developed islands of the Sundarbans –
within a few months tube-wells had been dug, a viable fishing
industry, saltpans, dispensaries and schools21 established, and this
contrasted lamentably with the islands they came from, where many of
these facilities were, and are, still lacking. Stories abounded about
the spirit of bonhomie and solidarity between refugees and islanders
whose similar experiences of marginalisation brought them together to
bond over a common cause which was to fight for a niche for
themselves; this would become a metaphor for the reclamation of
`voice' in the new West Bengal. The villagers explained the refugees'
bid to stay on in Morichjhanpi as a dignified attempt to forge a new
respectable identity for themselves as well as a bid to reclaim a
portion of the West Bengali political rostrum by the poorest and most
marginalised. They had also hoped that this would be taken up by the
government as an opportunity to absolve itself of the wrong it had
done to the poorer refugees by sending them away from West Bengal.
Unrepentant, and despite this display of self-help and cooperative
spirit, the government persisted in its effort to clear Morichjhanpi
of the settlers. On the January 31, 1979 the police opened fire
killing 36 persons. The media started to underscore the plight of the
refugees of Morichjhanpi and wrote in positive terms about the
progress they were making in their rehabilitation efforts.
Photographs were published in the Amrita Bazar Patrika of the
February 8, 1979 and the opposition members in the state assembly
staged a walkout in protest of the government's methods of treating
them. Fearing more backlash, and seeing the public growing warm
towards the refugees' cause, the chief minister declared Morichjhanpi
out of bounds for journalists and condemned their reports saying that
these contributed to the refugees' militancy and self-importance and
instead suggested that the press should support their eviction on the
grounds of national interest. After the failure of the economic
blockade (announced on January 26 – an ironical twist to Republic
Day!) in May the same year, the government started forcible
evacuation. Thirty police launches encircled the island thereby
depriving the settlers of food and water; they were also tear-gassed,
their huts razed, their boats sunk, their fisheries and tube-wells
destroyed, and those who tried to cross the river were shot at. To
fetch water, the settlers had now to venture after dark and deep into
the forested portion of the island and forced to eat wild grass.
Several hundred men, women and children were believed to have died
during that time and their bodies thrown in the river. The Calcutta
High Court ordered a two-week lifting of the ban but this was not
properly implemented. Based on Sikar (1982) and Biswas' (1982)
pieces, Ross Mallick estimates that in all 4,128 families who had
come from Dandakaranya to find a place in West Bengal perished of
cholera, starvation, disease, exhaustion, in transit while sent back
to their camps, by drowning when their boats were scuttled by the
police or shot to death in Kashipur, Kumirmari, and Morichjhanpi by
police firings.22 How many of these deaths actually occurred in
Morichjhapi we shall never know. However, what we do know, is that no
criminal charges were laid against any of the officials or
politicians involved. Even then prime minister Morarji Desai, wishing
to maintain the support of the Communists for his government, decided
not to pursue the matter. Many refugees and villagers had voted for
the government coalition based on their stated commitment to
resettling the refugees in West Bengal. The refugees saw the
brutality of the government as one that had been possible because it
was backed by the bhadralok who perceived the refugees and the
Sundarbans islanders as lesser beings who came behind tigers in their
classificatory scheme of importance. With the betrayal of
Morichjhanpi, the islanders voiced how they felt that the distinction
between the urban as central and the rural as peripheral was
reinforced. II Morichjhanpi: A Double Betrayal In the villagers'
memories, these events were recounted as a `war' between two groups
of people, one backed by state power and modern paraphernalia, the
other dispossessed and who had only their hands and the spirit of
companionship. Jayanta, an islander who had gone there as a young man
with his wife and baby child, gave a poignant narrative of the course
of events at Morichjhanpi. He remembered how when the refuges saw
their children dying of cholera and starvation they tried to break
the cordon formed by the police and the military launches. They sent
arrows made with wood, aimed pieces of brick and dried mud from their
slings and verbally abused the government officials. The officials
urged the police to retaliate by throwing tear-gas bombs and use
firearms. A `war' was on, one group fighting with wooden arrows and
stones, the other with tear-gas, guns, and loudspeakers. For greater
protection, the 30 launches were covered with a wire netting and
police camps were established in the surrounding villages. As one
islander put it, the launches started looking like `stinging swarms
of floating bee-hives'. The ease and brutality with which the
government wiped off all signs of the bustling life which had been
built there in the last 18 months were proof for the villagers that
they were considered completely irrelevant to the more influential
urban Bengali community, especially when weighed against tigers. In
two weeks' time all the plots had been destroyed and the refugees
`packed' off. `Were we vermin that our shacks had to be burned down?'
rhetorically asked one of the villagers. The refugees were then
forcefully put in launches and sent to Hasnabad where lorries carried
them back to Dandakaranya or to the Andamans. Many of the islanders
who had been rounded up along with the refugees, now fled, often with
some of their newfound refugee companions from the lorries taking
them back to Dandakaranya. They came back to their former islands and
settled along the embankments. Many others built shacks along railway
lines or in places like Barasat, Gobordanga, or Bongaon – in West
Bengal. To understand the identification of the islanders to the
refugees, the social context of life on these islands has to be
underlined. The Sundarbans – a cluster of about 300 islands, of which
half were reclaimed and inhabited under the British, is situated in
the delta of the Ganges, and stretches between West Bengal and
Bangladesh. It is crisscrossed by numerous rivers making access to
the islands difficult. The forested Sundarbans islands of both West
Bengal and Bangladesh put together (about 10,000 sq kms) provide the
largest remaining natural habitat of Bengal tigers and are home to
some 600 of them. With the success of Project Tiger, launched a few
years before the events of Morichjhanpi (in 1973), the Sundarbans'
fame grew phenomenally and has since 1985 been included in the
UNESCO's list of world heritage sites. The usual portrayal of the
Sundarbans is that of an exotic mangrove forest full of Royal Bengal
tigers rather than that of a region which is often referred to as
`mager mulluk' for the lawlessness and violence which characterises
it; moreover, the lack of basic infrastructure such as electricity,
drinking water and health centres make it one of the poorest regions
of West Bengal. The Sundarbans region is also referred to as
`Kolkata's servant' (`Kolkatar jhi'), due to the large number of
people from this region working as servants in the houses of
Kolkata's affluent. Before the introduction of shrimp seed collection
in the 1980s the islanders had barely enough to eat. For many
islanders, especially those who owned no land, working in the forest
was the only way of making a living. Jayanta, reflecting on the hope
the arrival of the settlers had brought them, had longed to start a
new life in Morichjhanpi where for once, the aspirations and rights
of the lowest would be established. But he and his family had barely
been there five months when their shack was burned down by the
police. He wondered why the government was bent on reclaiming
Morichjhanpi for tigers when it wasn't even part of the tiger
reserve. The other sore point was that the refugees had been promised
land in the Sundarbans. He saw the betrayal by the government as the
proof that for the Kolkata bhadralok they were just `tiger-food' –
disposable people who could be shot and killed because they wanted
the homestead they had been promised. Within the CPIM there were
divisions over the way the party leadership had handled the matter.
The CPIM cadres felt that the leadership had washed themselves off
the responsibility of the poorer refugees in a `bureaucratic way'
when it could have used the issue to develop a mass movement against
the central government's discrimination and neglect towards Bengali
refugees vis-à-vis the Punjabi ones. However, the CPIM state
committee's Political-Organisational Report, was keen to close the
matter and issued a statement saying that there was now `no
possibility of giving shelter to these large number of refugees under
any circumstances in the state'.23 Accusations were made, the land
revenue minister Benoy Chowdhury made the unsubstantiated allegation
that some foreign agencies were behind Morichjhanpi;24 the CPIM also
blamed vested interests, reactionary forces, Congress (I), and P C
Sen for using the issue for political gain and claimed that it had
met the challenge and had ultimately achieved success with the return
of the refugees to Dandakaranya in May 1979. The islanders had bonded
with the refugees not only because they shared with them a common
place of origin which was eastern Bengal but also because they could
identify with the terrible hardship they had gone through. Stressing
his affinity with them, Jayanta recounted how during the time they
had settled in Morichjhanpi they had `all become one big family' as
they had `the same hopes, went through the same ordeal, fought on the
same side'. That was till the moment Kolkata let them down, after
that, he said "we each went back to the islands or camps we had come
from with broken hearts and bloody hands; a broken, disunited and
utterly weakened group". The chapter was quickly closed. A few
journalists questioned the capacity of the upper class people,
Communists or others, to represent the poorest strata of Bengali
society. As noted by a journalist in the Bengali paper Jugantar: "The
refugees of Dandakaranya are men of the lowest stratum of society (…)
They are mainly cultivators, fishermen, day-labourers, artisans, the
exploited mass of the society (…) So long as the state machinery will
remain in the hands of the upper class elite, the poor, the helpless,
the beggar, the refugees will continue to be victimised."25 "Why have
our dead remained unaccounted for and un-mourned by the babus of
Kolkata, forced to hover as spirits in the forest, while a tiger who
enters our village and then gets killed puts us all behind bars?"
asked Jayanta voicing a general bitterness.26 IV New Repository of
Bhadralok Violence Now half-broken embankments and the few fruit
trees planted by the settlers during their stay remain as the only
vestiges of previous human habitation on Morichjhanpi, the rest has
been reclaimed by the forest. We shall never know exactly how many
people lost their lives. According to many of the islanders only 25
per cent of those who had come to Morichjhanpi left the island alive.
This figure is important more because it reflects what the villagers
feel rather than for its factual veracity. The main thrust of the
argument about the bloody events of Morichjhanpi was that the people
of the Sundarbans felt that they had been betrayed by the government
and the Kolkata urbanites. In many ways, Mujib's assassination was
seen by the villagers as marking the end of the new-found friendship
between India and Bangladesh, Hindus and Muslims, bhadralok and
nimnobarner lok, people and tigers. The villagers explained that
tigers, annoyed at the disturbances caused by the unleashed violence
in the forest had started attacking people and that this was how they
ended up getting a taste for human flesh. Others argued that it was
the corpses of killed refugees that had floated through the forest
that had given them the taste. Morichjhanpi was a turning point after
which man-eating became part of the tiger's `nature' or `behaviour'.
If in the early days, explained the islanders, tigers, to keep a
balance with their fellow human neighbours did not reproduce quickly,
it was believed that now their reproduction rate had gone up because
the government gave them fertilising injections in the hope that they
would reproduce faster. "Yes, and they have created hybrid tigers
which are even more dangerous; fearing a mass revolt the government
hides the true figures of tigers and always quote ridiculously small
numbers" said an islander. It was often expressed that the government
was happy as long as the tigers thrived, and that in contrast,
whether the islanders lived or died, as had been the case for the
refugees, made no difference, because they were just `tiger-food'.
These measures – which were believed to reflect the government's
inherent conviction about tigers being more important than the
fishers, honey-collectors and wood-cutters of the Sundarbans – were
taken to be one of the more important reasons for tigers turning man-
eaters. `After Morichjhanpi, tigers had become `arrogant',' I was
often told. As an old woman explained, tigers initially were fine
animals that were afraid of people. They were compassionate and were
agreeable to the fact that the products of the forest and rivers were
to be shared with people. But now, she lamented, due to the
legitimising of killings in their name, they had turned egotistical
and did not hesitate to attack people. Now tigers were no longer the
neighbours with whom the forest had to be shared but `state-
property', and backed by the ruling elite they had begun to treat the
islanders as `tiger-food'. In a final show of desperate anger, the
refugees had cut down the government plantation of coconut and
tamarisk before leaving the island of Morichjhanpi; just as now,
every time the islanders were angry with the representatives of the
state they destroyed public property – cut down trees, broke solar
lights and looted greedily from the various schemes launched by the
government. "As we are treated as lesser beings, we act as is
expected of them" said one of the islanders. After Morichjhanpi, the
tigers' importance only kept increasing. All through the 1980s,
various experts argued in the leading Kolkata dailies over the
Sundarbans tigers' `natural' propensity for man-eating.27 The
government devised ruses to thwart the tiger's predilection for human
flesh. Between November 1986 and October 1987, it took up the project
of digging fresh-water ponds inside the jungle, placing four
electrified dummies dressed in used clothing (to give them a human
smell) in strategic spots in the forest, and distributed 2,500
plastic masks free of cost among honey-collectors and wood-cutters
permitted to work in the buffer zone of the Sundarbans. The main
intention for digging these ponds was to `sweeten' the nature of
tigers. The dummies were installed with the belief that the tiger
would stop attacking humans after it had received an electric shock
(a safety fuse and a low current of 20-25 milliamps ensured that it
was not fatal to the animal). Each dummy was connected to a 12-volt
battery through an energiser that delivered a current of 230 volts.
The masks, were to be worn front-side back as it was believed that
the tiger – in his custom of attacking from behind, on seeing another
pair of eyes peering at him would leave his target puzzled and
chastised. These were believed by the villagers to be baseless
preventives because they did not address the real issue, which was
that there were increasing numbers of people killed by tigers,
because the existing means of livelihood was the only mechanisms the
poorest could rely on for their subsistence. The current average is
of 150 people killed per year by tigers and crocodiles in West Bengal
alone. Getting killed by a tiger in the Sundarbans in the 1980s was a
terrifying prospect for family members, co-workers, even the entire
village, of those who worked in the forest. The victim's body had to
be abandoned in the forest for fear that the forest officials would
get to know about it. The new widow and the victim's children were
forbidden to cry and taught to say that their father had died of
diarrhoea because if exposed, the family members were exhorted to pay
for the dead trespasser, and were, in effect, treated like criminals.
V Conclusion: Reclaiming Voices Subaltern Faced with people getting
killed by tigers, the only remedial procedures the West Bengal
government could come up with, were geared towards changing a tiger's
`nature' – a `nature' understood along the bhadralok's views of
tigers and nature. There was absolutely no engagement with the local
ways of understanding the reasons for tigers having become man-
eaters. Such a privileging of one understanding of tigers' nature
over another continues to establish hierarchical divisions between
peoples. In other words, a discourse on tigers' man-eating nature's
`naturalness' was (and still is) a way, as the villagers explained,
of legitimising, by the bhadralok leftist government, the relative
unimport
From: leofsaldanha@gmail.com <leofsaldanha@gmail.com>
Subject: [PMARC] Endorse Appeal to Prime Minister of India to stop amendment to EIA Notification 2006
To: "Dalits Media Watch" <PMARC@dgroups.org>
Date: Friday, 20 March, 2009, 8:45 PM
Sincere apologies for Cross Postings
REQUEST YOUR ENDORSEMENT TO AN URGENT APPEAL TO THE PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA
Dear Friends,
On behalf of Campaign for Environmental Justice - India, we request you to sign on an appeal to the Prime Minister of India urging him to direct the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), of which he is incharge, to immediately stop a comprehensive retrograde amendment to the Environment Impact Assessment Notification - 2006.� MoEF in a notification issued recently proposes to amend the EIA Notification in such a manner that it will negate the very purpose of the Notification, besides compromising human rights of hundreds of project affected communities and the ecological security of India.
It is striking to note that amendment is proposed at the time of General Elections, and that the beneficiaries are the some of the largest corporate houses involved in mining, petrochemicals, manufacturing, construction, infrastructure development, dam building, etc.� All of these sectors are highly polluting and environmentally destructive and the benefit of a weak environmental regime, including exemptions from compliance with significant provisions of environmental regulatory procedures, would help these sectors save thousands of crores in monetary terms alone.� In effect therefore,� the proposed amendments amount to the extension of a largesse from the State to highly profit making industrial and infrastructure sectors.�
It is well known that corporate houses fund political parties and have consistently demanded and lobbied for a weak environmental clearance regime, including exemptions. This is exactly what is now proposed by the move to amend the EIA Notification (which is anyway very weak).�
The Election Commission of India has a Code of Conduct for political parties which requires that a Party in power should not initiate significant shifts in policies, schemes and regulatory practices that may secure benefits for some sectors and amount to the extention of largesse of the State.� The timing of the proposed amendments and the proposed changes in law leave little doubt about the possibility that the UPA Government at the Centre may have initiated these reforms to secure support of benefiting corporates to its party coffers.
The Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh is incharge of MoEF.� We have enclosed an appeal to him highlighting our concerns urging him to direct MoEF to immediately announce that the proposed amendments are kept in abeyance till such time a new Government has taken charge at the Centre.� This letter is enclosed and is self-explanatory.
We request you to endorse this letter, and also to circulate it amongst various networks for support.� We will fax this letter with your endorsements to the Prime Minister of India, and send a copy to all political parties, the Election Commission of India and the media on Monday, 23 March 2009.� .
You are requested therefore to endorse the letter by noon on Monday.� Subsequent endorsements will also be accepted and forwarded appropriately.
You may email your endorsements providing (full name, organisation and address, and optionally a brief comment) to esg@esgindia.org (Please keep the subject line above intact to help us sort email).� You can also sign online and leave comments at: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/eianotification2009
We thank you for your cooperation and support as always.
Yours sincerely,
Leo F. Saldanha, Bhargavi S. Rao, Nandini Chami, Sruthi Subbanna, K. R. Mallesh, Divya Ravindranath
Environment Support Group, Bangalore
for Campaign for Environmental Justice - India
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
APPEAL TO PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA
CAMPAIGN FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE � INDIA
Dr. Manmohan Singh
Prime Minister of India
(i/c) Union Ministry of Environment and Forests
South Block, Raisina Hill,
New Delhi,
India-110 011.
Telephone: 91-11-23012312
Fax: 91-11-23019545 / 91-11-23016857
19 March 2009
Reg.: MoEF Notification proposing an amendment to the EIA Notification � 2006, offering various concessions to project developers, is in violation of Code of Conduct of Election Commission
Respected Sir,
We address you in your capacity as a Member of the Union Cabinet incharge of the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF).
As you are aware, your Ministry has proposed a major amendment to the Environment Impact Assessment Notification � 2006 (EIA Notification - 2006) by way of Notification S.O. 195 (E) issued on 19 January 2009. Following the closure of the public commenting period of 60 days, MoEF proposes to go ahead with the amendments anytime now.
The EIA Notification � 2006 requires that projects that cause pollution, displacement, destruction of natural resources, etc., be they in the nature of expansion or as greenfield ventures, must go through a series of clearance steps as per standards and with the prior consent of a variety of statutory agencies, both at the State and Central levels, as applicable. The procedures laid down require project developers to comply with various national legislations such as the Environment Protection Act, Forest Conservation Act, Wildlife Protection Act, Water and Air (Control of Pollution) Act, and a range of international treaties, in particular the Rio Declaration of 1992. In addition a variety of legal principles that are part of the rubric of Indian law, such as Polluter Pays Principle, Doctrine of Public Trust, Precautionary Principle, etc., are to be adhered to when advancing any developmental project. Failure to comply with the procedures laid down in the EIA Notification is a criminal offence punishable under the Environment Protection Act, 1986 and related criminal procedure laws.
The Amendment Notification, accessible only on the website of the Ministry (in English and Hindi alone), proposes a series of amendments to the EIA Notification - 2006 which will significantly weaken, even negate, the role of the Ministry and other statutory agencies in reviewing the environmental and social impacts of a variety of high impact and polluting projects. In addition, the amendment proposes to grant a range of exemptions from mandatory statutory provisions of applicable environmental law for upto three years. There is also an extraordinary and clearly illegal concession offered to polluters who simply have to declare through a 'self certification' that they cause no additional pollution and thus escape from the need to secure environmental clearance! In a country which is known for its gross failure in enforcement of environmental regulations, and where there is no competent administrative and regulatory infrastructure to independently review compliance with law, this is certain to open the floodgates to environmental destruction and destabilisation of thousands of project affected communities across India. The frequent expose of corporate fraud, even amongst leading companies, cause great discomfort when we consider the consequences of such illegal concessions.
An indicative list of the beneficiaries of the concessions proposed include shipping, dredging and port development, building and construction sector, area development projects, special economic zones, mining, petrochemical sector, modernisation of airports, expansion of all sorts of manufacturing industries, etc. Without doubt each and every one of these sectors have the potential of causing extensive damage to our environment and society, sans effective regulation.
One of the reasons offered for granting such sweeping concessions is that the Ministry failed to create statutory environmental monitoring and clearances agencies, such as the State Environment Impact Assessment Authorities and State Expert Appraisal Committees, in several states since the enactment of the EIA Notification � 2006. Astonishingly, the failure to institute appropriate regulatory infrastructure is now being offered as a reason to comprehensively weaken, even negate, India's environmental regulatory framework.
Nowhere in the history of environmental regulation in the world have such sweeping concessions been accorded by any Government at any point in time. In fact, such a move is likely to be criticised globally as extending unfair advantage to Indian industry by lowering globally acceptable environmental standards for production, a factor that would weigh heavily against India's standing in the climate change negotiations.
All this considered, Sir, we find the reasons cited for the amendment and the timing of the proposed amendments quite specious. Your Government was well aware that its term in office was coming to a close when this Amendment Notification was issued in January 2009, and that too by a Ministry directly under your supervision. The concessions proposed by way of this Amendment Notification, besides being illegal and destructive of democratic decision making, constitute a largesse of the State to the beneficiary industries and infrastructure project developers. The monetary value alone would run into thousands of crores for beneficiaries while severely compromising our ecological security.
It is widely known now that many leading political parties are major beneficiaries of corporate grants. This proposed amendment amounts to your Government taking advantage of its position to harness much needed resources for elections by offering such astounding and clearly illegal concessions that attack the very edifice of environmental regulation in India.
With this in view, we urge you to immediately direct your Ministers of State in charge of Environment and Forests, and the Secretary of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, to issue a public announcement stating that the proposed Amendment has been kept in abeyance till such time a new Government is in power and is able to take a fresh and independent decision on this matter.
We make this fervent request in light of the Code of Conduct issued by the Election Commission of India, wherein it is clearly and categorically stated that no significant change in existing policy, scheme or programme of the State is allowed at the time of elections. Conformance with these guidelines are critical to ensuring a Government in power does not abuse its executive privileges to advantage its party at the time of elections. The proposed amendment to the EIA Notification, being a subordinate legislation, is clearly within the realm of the executive power of the State and thus constitutes a fit case for application of the aformentioned Code of Conduct.
We do hope you will initiate action in this regard with due dispatch. Any failure to initiate such action will compel us to move the matter before the Election Commission of India for effective and appropriate action.
Thank you for your cooperation and support.
Yours truly,
For Campaign for Environmental Justice � India
The Bangladesh Military in Politics - A Brief Analysis
This was the first instance of abdication of political responsibility by the politicians where they failed to provide purpose, direction & control to both the Nation & its military; this was also the beginning of politicization of the Bangladesh Military.
Mahmud ur Rahman Choudhury
DATELINE: Chittagong Circuit House, Zonal Martial Law Headquarters, evening 17 March 1971. Four Bengali Army Officers namely Lt.Col M.R.Choudhury, Major Zia Ur Rahman, Captains Oli Ahmed & Amin Ahmed Choudhury, sat discussing what course of action they need to take under the circumstances then prevailing in East Pakistan. It was decided that they would execute a coordinated revolt against the Pakistan Army; the exact timing of the revolt depending on the situation. It was also decided that communication & liaison with the Awami League (AL) leadership would be established & maintained.
East Pakistan was in turmoil since January 1971. The Bangabandhu, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on 7 March 1971, in a mammoth public meeting, had virtually declared the independence of Bangladesh, calling on the people to resist, to the utmost, any attempt to exert control by force by the Pakistan Government. The people were in open revolt although discussions continued between the representatives of AL & the Pakistan Government, aimed at a settlement acceptable to both parties.
After the meeting on 17 March 1971, attempts were made to establish contact with the AL leadership. At first, there was no response and then a feeble & cautious response to “to hold on as political discussions were continuing”. Bengali members of the Pakistan military, engaged in Martial Law duties, were fully aware that the Pakistan military was reinforcing itself, in East Pakistan, with men, material, armaments & ammunition. They also knew fully well that the Pakistan military would soon “go into action” in East Pakistan - all these were passed to the AL through various channels and still there was no decisive response to revolt. Sure enough starting from the night of 25/26 March 1971, the Pakistan Government took the road of forceful suppression by genocide, of the people of East Pakistan.
Caught totally unawares, the people, including Bengali members of Pakistan military, Police & East Pakistan Rifles were killed “en mass”. Left to fend for themselves, Bengali Officers & men analyzed situations, took decisions & executed the design to revolt against Pakistan. This was the first instance of abdication of political responsibility by the politicians where they failed to provide purpose, direction & control to both the Nation & its military; this was also the beginning of politicization of the Bangladesh Military.
Throughout the Liberation War, from 25 March to 16 December of 1971, the Bangladesh Military not only organized itself & fought but also organized, trained, motivated & led at least a million men & women in a brutal & ruthless war to liberate Bangladesh. Men in uniform were shoulder to shoulder with civilians, from every walk of life, fighting, bleeding & dying imbued with the same purpose & zeal & some of the same politics too. The ideal of Bangladesh was a political ideal & the liberation of Bangladesh was a tribute to the success of that political ideal - men in uniform were a part of that.
The immediate aftermath of Independence was chaos - social, economic & political. A very small Bangladesh Army, an even smaller Navy & Air Force pulled themselves back from the chaos by taking refuge in cantonments, garrisons & bases. In order to arrest the chaos, the AL Government abandoned the path of persuasion and took the path of compulsion deploying the military in “Aid of Civil Power” to disarm the many guerilla bands still roaming about the countryside, to curb militant & armed leftist movements and in general to establish & maintain law & order. Finding the military not as pliable & as responsive as they would have liked, the AL set about rapidly organizing an alternative in the form of a para-military force called the Jatiyo Rakkhi Bahini or JRB with its manpower recruited from AL cadres, activists & party members.
Many of the military’s better Officers were deputed to it to train & lead the force. The Military was not in the least bit pleased; it had initiated the armed revolt of the Liberation War, it had fought the war to a successful conclusion and it expected its classical role of National Defense to lie with it; it did not want to abdicate this role to anyone, least of all to a political upstart called the JRB.
In the meantime, the leftist movement, in the form of the Jatiyo Shamajtantrik Dal or JSD, very strong in the period 1974-1975, had infiltrated into every nook & cranny of the military, in particular its rank & file. So, when on 15 August 1975, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman with most of his family and a few of his closest colleagues were murdered by a group of Army officers, for reasons still not clear today, the Nation went into a tail spin. At the same time, the JSD instigated and initiated a “Sepahi Biplob” adding to the chaos & setting in motion a chain of coups & counter coups within the military. With great brutality & ruthlessness, chaos was controlled & Martial Law imposed. Meanwhile the politicians abandoned everything & ran for their lives; thus, for the second time abdicating political responsibility & failing to provide direction, purpose & control to the Nation & its Military.
With the imposition of Martial Law and as a response to events, quite unconsciously, the Military as a corporate body had decided not to be a party to politics but to control & direct politics itself and so for the next 5 years set about governing the state. Nation-building became a part of military vocabulary. From 1975 to 1980, all institutions of the state were strengthened and the people were motivated & imbued with the zeal to build the nation. With the Military participating in nation building activities & firmly standing behind, politics was indeed becoming difficult just as General Zia Ur Rahman had promised.
The coup that led to the murder of General Zia Ur Rahman, the President, was short lived. The BNP, the party formed by Zia Ur Rahman, was in government but it failed to take “control of the situation” preferring to leave it to the military to “sort itself out”. Consequently the military without a pause imposed a 2nd Martial Law & assumed the “reigns of government”. Not until 1990 was a serious challenge mounted to the control & domination of the military on both politics & government.
For 15 years from 1991 to 2006, democracy or some form of it prevailed. Politics, elections & parliament became big business. Lacking leadership, foresight, abilities & acumen, politicians & political parties got themselves busy in looting both public & private wealth leaving the Nation to fend for itself. Politics became a “zero-sum game”, where the party in power took everything leaving nothing for the vast majority of “others”. Not surprisingly politics became confrontational. Subjected to either neglect or manipulation every social, political & economic institution of the Sate simply broke down. Hectic attempts at reaching an understanding, which would pave the way for elections in January 2006, broke down. All avenues were now closed and the Military was once again called upon to fill a role that was not theirs to fill, this time in the form of an Emergency Government. For the third time politicians had failed to shoulder their responsibility in providing direction, purpose & control to the Nation & it’s Military.
Carl von Clausewitz, the chief & the most famous theoretician of the Napoleonic wars (mid 18th century), in his book “On War’ states: “War is not merely a political act but also a real political instrument...” The military which fights wars, is thus by association “a real political instrument” guided & controlled by policy -when this fails the military is constrained to decide “policy”. One common red thread runs throughout the 38 years (1971 - 2009) of the history of the Bangladesh Military and that is: a complete absence of political direction & control during times of crisis and “troubles”. Taking this analysis as a background, we shall discuss the reorganization of the Military, one of the 4 Core State Institutions.
The Reorganization of the Bangladesh Military
The Bangladesh military is as structured, organized, as equipped & armed and as trained as any military can be within the limited resources available to it in a Country like Bangladesh. Instead, I would like to focus on the “Higher Direction & Control” aspects of the Bangladesh Military - the whole tenor of our analysis & arguments has led us to the consideration of this single aspect. Again, in suggesting a “Higher Direction & Control” of the military I would concentrate on the functional rather then on the structural aspects of the issue.
Higher Direction & Control ipso facto implies political control of the military at the highest levels of the government through at least a Ministry of Defense (MOD) with the chain of control passing through the MOD to the Prime Minister (PM), thence to the President. That is what our Constitution specifies & that is what exists in theory. In practice, the MOD is moribund and all major & minor policy decisions are taken by the PM. Recommendations, by the Chiefs of Army, Navy & Air Force, is passed on either directly or through the Armed Forces Division (AFD), to the PM. The President, who is the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, is not even consulted. When the Presidential system of government was in vogue, during & after the martial law regimes, the President was the fountainhead of all decisions regarding the military.
Immediately after Independence, the Awami League (AL) government did not envisage a substantial role for the military because a war, even in the distant future seemed unlikely. Bangladesh was surrounded on 3 sides by India with a small stretch of border with Myanmar in the southeast. External threats were limited & whatever threat existed was taken care of by the 25 years Indo-Bangla Friendship Treaty. Internal threats there were but these could very well be tackled by para-military forces like the Jatiyo Rakkhi Bahini (JRB). Therefore, as far as the AL was concerned there was no need for Higher Direction & Control of the military. Subsequent governments, both military & civil, personalized direction & control in the person of the PM or the President. Thus, a formal process & structure of policy & strategic decision-making was never put in place in Bangladesh.
In putting in place a formal process & structure of Higher Direction & Control, one has to ensure a balance of two things: effective control of the military on the one hand and structured participation of the military in the process on the other. Having said that, I would now like to discuss, in the following paragraphs, the essential functional aspects of Higher Direction & Control in the form of a reorganized MOD:
(1) CONTROL OF POLICY & STRATEGIC DECISION MAKING. Policy & strategic guidance provides purpose & direction to the Forces & therefore, this must be the prime function of the MOD. Policy & strategic guidance also provides guidelines for the structuring, organizing, equipping, training & employing of military forces and as such, participation of the Forces ought to be ensured through Chiefs of the 3 Forces (Army, Navy & Air Force) within the process & structure of the MOD. Such organization as the DGF1, Doctrine & Training Command, and tri-service training institutes must be under such control as these provide information & feedback on policy & strategic issues.
(2) CONTROL OF MILITARY PROCUREMENT. Structuring the process of procurement of military armaments & equipment ensures that Forces are equipped for the tasks & functions they are set to perform. This therefore, is an important MOD function that must be incorporated in its organization.
(3) BUDGETARY CONTROL. This control ensures that demands for moneys by Forces are logically & practically constructed & processed. It also ensures that funds placed are utilized for purposes for which they had been demanded. Accountability & transparency is thereby ensured.
(4) CONTROL OF HIGHER COMMANDS. Control of higher command echelons, in our case army Divisions & Independent Brigades, Naval & Air Bases, ensures that such formation react quickly & effectively to directives & situations in peace & in war. It also ensures that such Commands are always deployed & employed with explicit sanctions from the government & never for purposes for which they are not meant. In order to do that the MOD must have the prerogative to promote & position Commanders to such Commands. The process for this must be structured to ensure participation by the Chiefs of the 3 Forces. At the same time, it also must be ensured that the Control of the MOD in no way interferes with Operational & Tactical control exercised by Forces Headquarters when forces are deployed in the field.
(5) PARTICIPATION OF FORCES. This must be ensured by placement of personnel from the 3 forces in every functional area of the MOD. The Chiefs as well as higher commanders of the 3 Forces must form part of appropriate Committees of the MOD, both permanent & temporary. The reasons for this is obvious: military functions are complex & continuous feed-backs are necessary from experts in many functional areas, if policy & strategy are to be practical, logical & executable; additionally a close understanding is necessary between those who formulate policy & strategy & those who implement them.
The Military with its legally sanctioned monopoly of organized violence is a potent instrument of politics but that must be seen in the wider context of International politics & inter-state relationships. Whenever the military is employed for purposes other then this, such as political interventions within the State, it looses both its physical & moral capacity & capability to perform its primary task of war-fighting in wars & deterrence in peace. As we have seen, the Bangladesh Military has for long been intervening, in one form or another, in politics & governance within the State. This has been possible because of the absence of structured Higher Direction & Control of the military at the highest levels of government. The function of political control of the military had been personalized in the person of the PM or the President and in the absence of strong personalities in these positions, control & direction disappeared leaving the military to do as it thought best. If we are to take lessons from history, we must tightly structure the political direction & control of the military in such a way that in peace, crisis & war, direction & control never fails.
The author is the Editor of The Bangladesh Today
http://www.thebangladeshtoday.com/analysis.htm#anlysis-01
Reham Alhelsi - Palestinian Mothers: Homage to Steadfastness and Sacrifice
By Reham Alhelsi • Mar 20th, 2009 at 23:00 • Category: Analysis, Biography, Children's Corner, Culture and Heritage, Israel, Newswire, Palestine, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, War, Zionism
When the women came and told her to leave what she was doing and come and sit in front of the house with them, my grandmother knew what was to come. They sat outside and didn’t talk much. My uncle had been shot in the chest by the IOF that afternoon, and was at that moment being operated. He was in a critical condition, the doctors had told the men who had brought him to the hospital. Some were sent back home to prepare the family for the news and to prepare the refugee camp to welcome the hero, in case the worst happened. Although hope dies last, it was a necessity to prepare everything for a quick funeral and a quick burial. The Israeli army had been known to take bodies of Palestinian martyrs and steal their organs without the Palestinian family’s consent. The organs would then be given to Israelis who needed them. So a Palestinian killed by the IOF, mostly for no reason at all or for defending his country, would be labelled as terrorist by Israel and the biased media, while his organs would be used to save Israeli lives. In other countries, stealing the organs of dead people is considered a crime, but as usual, it doesn’t apply to Israel.
My grandmother sat quiet the whole time, no tears and no words. It was her youngest son, they said. His elder brothers had one time after another been imprisoned for everything that Israel considered “terror”, that she decided at least to spare the youngest the inside of an Israeli prison. Every day she would tell him to go to school and come back directly. “don’t go here or there”. I heard my mother say one time “she thought this way she was keeping him safe from the Israelis; everyday coming back from school after classes were over, and keeping him at her side most of the time.” Till one day, the boys came and told my grandmother that her son had been arrested. ”Arrested for what?” “he was throwing stones.” He hadn’t even bothered to go to school that day.” One of my other uncles said laughingly when the story was brought up once: but we had prepared him for this. And everyone laughed. I laughed too, because I have been though this process as well. Actually, to us kids, it was just another game. One of those bizarre refugee camp games, like the “UNRWA restaurant” game, where we would play little refugee kids standing in line and waiting for our daily portion of a slice of bread and small slice of tomato with salt, and being shouted at by the “UNRWA employee”. The other game, which was to prepare us for future imprisonment by the IOF was the “confession game”. Each one of us would be “tortured” to strengthen our resistance and prevent us from confessing anything in case we are interrogated by the IOF. There was really no “torture” in this game, because there was no real beating. We would be shouted at in a funny way, and the one among us to act the “IOF soldier” would be mimicking Israeli soldiers trying to be brave, but who are in fact afraid of us, little children. We would laugh while being “tortured”, for it was mostly fun for us. Although the game would not really prepare anyone for the barbaric Israeli interrogation and torture, in some way, the game was educational. It gave us the feeling that we are stronger than the IOF and that despite all their weapons, they feared us. So, we would just play being beaten by the IOF, and the one playing the IOF soldier would ask us continuously to confess and we would refuse. He would slash us, though not harshly, on the soles, and demand we confess. We would refuse, laughingly, because for us it was a game, a game that would prove useful one day.
That day, no funeral took place, for my uncle had made it. He had a strong will to live. But every time I think of that moment, I think about my grandmother. The 60 year old woman, who used to divide her week according to visiting days in Israeli prisons. Before one of them was released, another would be arrested, so that they rarely gathered at a dinner table. We were all used to it, not seeing all my uncles at the same time. I rarely heard my grandmother complain, but it was clear to everyone how much she loved her family and how sad she was that they weren’t all around her. She didn’t have to tell her children to go and demonstrate. It was a natural reaction to what these children themselves saw and went through, and it was the love of the land planted in their heart by my grandmother. She would often talk about Jrash, the village from which she and her family and all the residents were ethnically cleansed by the Zionist terror organizations. They were forced to move from one place to another, until they finally reached what is now Dheisheh refugee camp. There she tried to reconstruct her original home by planting some trees in the small piece of land near the UNRWA rooms they were to live in.
The life of my grandmother is typical of the lives of many Palestinian mothers. She was born in a small picturesque village in Palestine, where she grew up, got married and started a family. She would take care of her home, and help the family with the fields. She would care for her small garden and the apple trees which she loved most and would make marmalade for the winter. When the Zionist terror organizations started implementing their plan of ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population, Palestinian villages were attacked one after the other, and horrific massacres took place. The residents of Jrash were finally forced to leave, but not before they fought heroically. My grandparents often talked about these days. During my last visit to Palestine a couple of months ago, I listened to my grandfather as he talked about the fight with the Zionist groups. With sharp memory, he mentioned such details, that for a few seconds I could feel myself there, with them, 60 years ago.
A number of times my grandmother was beaten by the IOF soldiers, some of whom were younger than her own sons and who didn’t care that she was an elderly woman. When IOF soldiers would attempt to arrest someone in the refugee camp, she would hurry with the other women and try and stop them. When Zionist settlers would attack the refugee camp, she would carry the tree stem she hides behind the couch and go protect the camp alongside the men and women. And in the early mornings of the day, when everyone is still fast asleep, after finishing the morning prayer I would hear her asking God to protect her family, her relatives, her neighbours, the refugee camp, the Palestinians and the whole world. I heard her day after day asking forgiveness for the whole world.
In Palestine mothers are sacred. Every one of us has several mothers: the mother that gave birth to us, the olive tree, the land and the mother of all: Palestine. And a Palestinian mother isn’t just a mother to the children she gives birth to, she is mother to all Palestinians. When a Palestinian is being arrested by the IOF, women of all ages will be surrounding the soldiers within seconds, trying to free the prisoner. And for that, sometimes they pay a heavy price, like the 60 year old Mariam Ayyad from Abu Dees. On the night of 20th of September 2008, IOF soldiers broke into her house. After arguing with her, the old woman was repeatedly hit and thrown on the ground by the soldiers until she died in front of her children and grandchildren. During curfews, it is mostly women who would move carefully from one house corner to another and from one street to the other and distribute wheat and milk. When young masked men wanted to go from one place to another, they would be assisted by these mothers, who would check that the roads were clear of IOF soldiers. And when one of their millions of children gets killed by the IOF, they all gather and mourn as one single mother, that it becomes difficult to figure out which one of these mothers is the martyr’s mother. They are the protectors, the helpers and the witnesses of Israeli brutality, for many of them not only carry the pain of losing their children, they carry the scars of more than 60 years of Zionist terror and destruction.
During the Nakba of 1948, Zionist terrorists massacred Palestinians indiscriminately. Even women and children, who are protected during wars under all human laws, were killed in a brutal way. Accounts of the Deir Yassin massacre mention that among the 254 Palestinians victims were 25 pregnant women who were bayoneted in the abdomen while still alive. Another 52 children were maimed in front of their mothers before having their heads cut off by the Zionist terrorists. After the village of Beit Darras had been surrounded by Zionist terror groups and further Zionist mobilization was on the way to occupy the village, the Zionist terror groups called on the Palestinian residents to leave the village safely from the south side. The villagers decided that it was safer for the women and children to leave, since it was the village the Zionists wanted. Upon leaving the village, all the women and children were massacred by the Zionist terrorists. Kafr Qasim, Qibya and many other massacres carry the same pattern of killing unarmed mothers and their children. Other mothers lost their children, and many their lives, after being forced out of their homes to wander the hills of Palestine in search of a safe spot.
The suffering and pain of Palestinian mothers continues till today. Palestinian mothers, including the elderly and the sick among them, are often humiliated at checkpoints in front of their children, and pregnant women are delayed, causing many to give birth at these checkpoint. Women are not only delayed at checkpoints, they are often prevented from reaching hospitals, causing miscarriages and even the death of some of women and infants. Many unnamed children are stillborn at Israeli checkpoints after unnecessary delays or after their mothers were forced to deliver on the dirt road or inside cars at the checkpoint. A report of the Palestinian Ministry of Health published in October 2006 states that since the beginning of the second Intifada in September 2000 some 68 pregnant women gave birth at Israeli checkpoints, leading to 34 miscarriages and the death of four women. In 2002, in two consecutive days two pregnant women on their way to hospital were shot and injured by the IOF soldiers at a checkpoint in the Nablus area. One of the women lost her husband who was shot on the neck and the chest. Others are forced to give birth at home, despite fear of complications because they fear they will be stopped at checkpoints and won’t make it in time to the hospital. In Azzun Atma near Qalqilya pregnant women are even forced to take up residence outside the village until they deliver out of fear that they might not be able to get the necessary medical treatment. The village, encircled by the apartheid wall, is separated by a gate from the rest of the West Bank. This gate is not manned at night, making the village a prison to its residents. According to a B’Tselem report, alone during 2006 some 20 out of 30 pregnant women from Azzun Atma were forced to relocate outside of the village because of their pregnancy.
IOF soldiers don’t hesitate in arresting Palestinian mothers to be used as hostages to pressure wanted Palestinians to give themselves up. In its report “Behind the Bars: Palestinian Women in Israeli Prisons” published in June 2008, Addammeer, Mandela Institute and the Palestinian Counselling Centre state that “As of May 2008, over 9.080 Palestinian political prisoners remain in Israeli prisons, detention facilities and camps; of those 73 Palestinian women (including 2 girls aged 16 and 17 of a total of 327 minors, and 24 mothers with a total number of 68 children.” Many of the prisoners are held without any charges, and are subjected to torture, humiliation and intimidation. There were four cases of women giving birth inside Israeli prisons under difficult conditions. These women had their hands and feet shackled to their beds. They remain so until they enter the delivery room and are chained again after they deliver.
Palestinian mothers are not only to suffer the loss of their children, husbands and other family members, they themselves are also targeted by the IOF. According to Miftah 7141 Palestinians had been killed by the IOF during the period from 28th September 2000 till 28th February 2009, 1138 of whom were children and 581 were women. A recent report of the Palestine Centre for Human Rights on Israel’s war on Gaza confirms that “Over the course of the 22 day Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, a total of 1,434 Palestinians were killed. Of these, 235 were combatants. The vast majority of the dead, however, were civilians and non-combatants: protected persons according to the principles of IHL. PCHR investigations confirm that, in total, 960 civilians lost their lives, including 288 children and 121 women. 239 police officers were also killed; the majority (235) in air strikes carried out on the first day of the attacks. The Ministry of Health has also confirmed that a total of 5,303 Palestinians were injured in the assault, including 1,606 children and 828 women.” Every single child killed had a mother. Human rights organization talked in their reports about mothers being killed together with their children, others witnessing the killing of their children and not able to prevent it, while others died in front of their children. Some of these mothers lost not only one child, but several. Of the many war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza, one horrific story tells the fate of a Palestinian mother of 10. While sitting with her children, the IOF soldiers entered her house and demanded she choose five of her children to “give as a gift to Israel”. After the woman screamed in horror, the IOF soldiers told her they would choose themselves and then killed five of her children in front of her.
Palestinian mothers have been actively participating in resisting the occupation. They are the first to organize sit-ins in front of international organizations and hold marches demanding the release of their children from Israeli prisons or protesting the brutality of the Israeli military occupation. They visit their sons in hospitals and in jails, despite the long wait and the humiliation they endure on the hands of the Israelis jailers. Also, many of these mothers are the supporters of their families. When the father or son is arrested or killed by the IOF, it is the mothers who take on the burden of providing for their families. Those among them who have a piece of land would plant it with vegetables and herbs, to be later sold to neighbours or at the local market. Others use their embroidery skills to stitch Palestinian tradition dresses “thob”, scarves, shawls and pillow covers. They hold their families together, particularly in difficult times.
Biased media, serving only Zionist propaganda, ignores the suffering of Palestinian mothers under Israeli occupation and instead often portrays them as heartless women, who send these children to the streets and encourage them to throw stones so be killed and then celebrate their death. Palestinian parents encourage their children to study and get a good education and build a better future for themselves. Some parents even lock their children inside the house to prevent them from participating in demonstration or any other kind of activity against the IOF because they know the brutality of the IOF and out of fear they might be killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers. Parents work hard to spare their children the suffering they themselves endured under the Israeli occupation. But as long as the Zionists occupy Palestine, Palestinian suffering will continue, and generation after generation will seek to get themselves rid of this brutal occupation, no matter how hard the parents try to keep their children away from it. Living in Palestine, and being confronted with Zionist terror every day, one is not in need of parents or teachers to form an idea about this Zionist state and decide to demonstrate for a better future. That is why many join demonstrations or get politically active without telling their parents. In many cases it is when the children get arrested or are killed that the parents first know of their children’s involvement in resisting the occupation. Palestinian mothers who lose their children often appear composed on TV and in the news, and if asked, most of them talk about their martyred children in pride and calm and without shedding a tear. It is behind the camera that they show their sorrow and anger at the loss of their beloved ones. Palestinians know that these mothers want to send a message to Israel: despite the suffering and the pain, you won’t break us, ever. Few journalists bother to visit these mothers days after their children have been killed. Many of them visit the grave of their killed child daily, and others keep their room as it was when they still lived there. Few reporters bother asking these mothers what memoires they have kept of their children. If they did, they would be shown clothes, hair brushes, notebooks and pictures, all soaked in tears. These mothers would have freely sacrificed their lives to save their children from death on the hands of the IOF and give them a future empty of Zionist occupation.
Mothers are sacred in Palestine because they are the personification of Palestine: the homeland and the mother of all Palestinians. It is the love of this land that is handed over from one generation to the next. Whenever in Dheisheh, we often sat with grandmother as children, listening to her talking about Palestine, the Nakba, the Naksa and the life in a refugee camp. She would talk about her mother and her grandmother, about her brothers and sisters, about my grandfather, and about her children. She was strong and was always there for her family, even at times when she herself was very weak. She was the safe island everyone seeks and the cave that sheltered us from the storm. Even long after her death, I still often think of her and ask for her guidance. She passed down her strength, steadfastness and kindness to her children. My mother continued the tradition of connecting us to the Palestinian landscape. As children, she and my father used to sit with us and tell us stories about Palestine, the history that one would not find in book, the history of the real people who lived on this land and appreciated it. For me, the personal experiences of my grandmother and mother are priceless. I am thankful to my grandmother and my mother for introducing me to a Palestine that was unknown to me, to parts of our history that others work hard to delete, to a heritage that is mine forever. Through our mothers Palestine is celebrated every single day.
In his poem “My Mother”, late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish said:
I must be worth my life
At the hour of my death
Worth the tears of my mother
Sources:
http://mecaforpeace.blogspot.com/2009/01/in-gaza.html
http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/03/20/reham-alhelsi-palestinian-mothers-homage-to-steadfastness-and-sacrifice/
Israelis told to fight 'holy war' in Gaza
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
The Independent - UK Saturday,
21 March 2009
Many Israeli troops had the sense of fighting a "religious war" against
Gentiles during the 22-day offensive in Gaza, according to a soldier who has
highlighted the martial role of military rabbis during the operation.
The soldier testified that the "clear" message of literature distributed to
troops by the rabbinate was: "We are the Jewish people, we came to this land
by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to
expel the Gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land."
The claim comes in the detailed transcript of a post-war discussion by
soldiers, publication of which has triggered a military police inquiry into
allegations about the use of lethal firepower against unarmed civilians.
The investigation was ordered by the military's advocate general Avichai
Mandleblit on Thursday after the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz published
extracts from the transcript describing incidents in which Palestinian
civilians were killed and property wantonly damaged.
In the fuller version of the transcript published yesterday, the soldier, a
unit commander from the Givati brigade, says: "This was the main message and
the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war."
He recalled that his own sergeant was from a hesder yeshiva, a college
combining religious study and military service, who led the whole platoon in
prayer before going into battle. The commander added that he had sought to
talk to the men about Palestinian politics and society and, "about how not
everyone in Gaza is Hamas and not every inhabitant wants to vanquish us".
After the offensive, Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group called for the
dismissal of the military's head chaplain, Rabbi Avichai Rontzki, a
brigadier general. It said that he had distributed to troops a booklet
saying that it was "terribly immoral" to show mercy to a "cruel enemy" and
that the soldiers were fighting "murderers".
The longer transcript conveys a fuller sense of the debate involving
graduates from the Yitzhak Rabin military preparatory course. At one point
Danny Zamir, the head of the course, says he would have questioned the
killing of 180 traffic policemen during bombing on the first day of the
operation. One pilot replies: "Tactically speaking you call them police. In
any case they are armed and belong to Hamas ... during better times they
take Fatah people and throw them off the roofs and see what happens."
The latest casualty figures published by the Palestinian Centre for Human
Rights list the names of 1,434 dead of whom they say 926 were civilians, 236
fighters and 255 police officers.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israelis-told-to-fight-h
oly-war-in-gaza-1650616.html
- Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser
explaining why the CIA should violently intervene to support the Mujaheddin
in Afghanistan, even 6 months BEFORE the reluctant Soviets finally agreed
to heed the Afghan democratic government's request for military intervention
on their behalf.
"The Afghan Mujaheddin are the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers of America."
- Ronald Reagan, honoring Afghan "freedom fighters" at the White House
Afghanistan, Another Untold Story
(posted in 2009)
by Michael Parenti
Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghan history and the role played by the United States.
Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet “invasion” of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as “a good thing.” The actual story is not such a good thing.
Some Real History
Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, corrupt, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators.
The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office. “It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it,” writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time.
The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed.
The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided public education for girls and for the children of various tribes.
A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been “a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city’s university. Afghan women held government jobs—-in the 1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university students were women.”
The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world’s heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a “genuinely popular government and people looked forward to the future with great hope.”
But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government’s dedication to gender equality and the education of women and children.
Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers.
A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.
It should be noted that all this happened before the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted--months before Soviet troops entered the country--that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas.
In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily.
Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style
The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.
After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year.
Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In 2001 Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as “a method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers.’”
Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA’s arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest producer of heroin in the world.
Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah’s name against the purveyors of secular “corruption.”
In Afghanistan itself, by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam called the Taliban---heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the CIA and with the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan---fought its way to power, taking over most of the country, luring many tribal chiefs into its fold with threats and bribes.
The Taliban promised to end the factional fighting and banditry that was the mujahideen trademark. Suspected murderers and spies were executed monthly in the sports stadium, and those accused of thievery had the offending hand sliced off. The Taliban condemned forms of “immorality” that included premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. They also outlawed all music, theater, libraries, literature, secular education, and much scientific research.
The Taliban unleashed a religious reign of terror, imposing an even stricter interpretation of Muslim law than used by most of the Kabul clergy. All men were required to wear untrimmed beards and women had to wear the burqa which covered them from head to toe, including their faces. Persons who were slow to comply were dealt swift and severe punishment by the Ministry of Virtue. A woman who fled an abusive home or charged spousal abuse would herself be severely whipped by the theocratic authorities. Women were outlawed from social life, deprived of most forms of medical care, barred from all levels of education, and any opportunity to work outside the home. Women who were deemed “immoral” were stoned to death or buried alive.
None of this was of much concern to leaders in Washington who got along famously with the Taliban. As recently as 1999, the US government was paying the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official. Not until October 2001, when President George W. Bush had to rally public opinion behind his bombing campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the Taliban’s oppression of women. His wife, Laura Bush, emerged overnight as a full-blown feminist to deliver a public address detailing some of the abuses committed against Afghan women.
If anything positive can be said about the Taliban, it is that they did put a stop to much of the looting, raping, and random killings that the mujahideen had practiced on a regular basis. In 2000 Taliban authorities also eradicated the cultivation of opium poppy throughout the areas under their control, an effort judged by the United Nations International Drug Control Program to have been nearly totally successful. With the Taliban overthrown and a Western-selected mujahideen government reinstalled in Kabul by December 2001, opium poppy production in Afghanistan increased dramatically.
The years of war that have followed have taken tens of thousands of Afghani lives. Along with those killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters, and land mines are those who continue to die of hunger, cold, lack of shelter, and lack of water.
The Holy Crusade for Oil and Gas
While claiming to be fighting terrorism, US leaders have found other compelling but less advertised reasons for plunging deeper into Afghanistan. The Central Asian region is rich in oil and gas reserves. A decade before 9/11, Time magazine (18 March 1991) reported that US policy elites were contemplating a military presence in Central Asia. The discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided the lure, while the dissolution of the USSR removed the one major barrier against pursuing an aggressive interventionist policy in that part of the world.
US oil companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new reserves. A major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from the landlocked region. US officials opposed using the Russian pipeline or the most direct route across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, they and the corporate oil contractors explored a number of alternative pipeline routes, across Azerbaijan and Turkey to the Mediterranean or across China to the Pacific.
The route favored by Unocal, a US based oil company, crossed Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. The intensive negotiations that Unocal entered into with the Taliban regime remained unresolved by 1998, as an Argentine company placed a competing bid for the pipeline. Bush’s war against the Taliban rekindled UNOCAL’s hopes for getting a major piece of the action.
Interestingly enough, neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban government. Such a “rogue state” designation would have made it impossible for a US oil or construction company to enter an agreement with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields.
In sum, well in advance of the 9/11 attacks the US government had made preparations to move against the Taliban and create a compliant regime in Kabul and a direct US military presence in Central Asia. The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public opinion and reluctant allies into supporting military intervention.
One might agree with John Ryan who argued that if Washington had left the Marxist Taraki government alone back in 1979, “there would have been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet intervention, no war that destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and no September 11 tragedy.” But it would be asking too much for Washington to leave unmolested a progressive leftist government that was organizing the social capital around collective public needs rather than private accumulation.
US intervention in Afghanistan has proven not much different from US intervention in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere. It had the same intent of preventing egalitarian social change, and the same effect of overthrowing an economically reformist government. In all these instances, the intervention brought retrograde elements into ascendance, left the economy in ruins, and pitilessly laid waste to many innocent lives.
The war against Afghanistan, a battered impoverished country, continues to be portrayed in US official circles as a gallant crusade against terrorism. If it ever was that, it also has been a means to other things: destroying a leftist revolutionary social order, gaining profitable control of one of the last vast untapped reserves of the earth’s dwindling fossil fuel supply, and planting US bases and US military power into still another region of the world.
In the face of all this Obama’s call for “change” rings hollow.
Michael Parenti’s recent books are Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader and the forthcoming God and His Demons. For further information, visit www.michaelparenti.org.
Michael Parenti is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Michael Parenti
Author's website: www.michaelparenti.org.
http://www.michaelparenti.org/afghanistan%20story%20untold.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11279
http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/michael-parenti-afghanistan-another-untold-story/
http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/3695
See also:
The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan (6 months BEFORE the Soviet intervention)
Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser
Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
I explained to the president [Jimmy Carter] that this support [of Jihad] would in my opinion lead to a military intervention by the Soviets.
- Brzezinski
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/interviews/brz.htm
"The Afghan Mujaheddin are the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers of America."
- Ronald Reagan, honoring Afghan "freedom fighters" at the White House
Soviet Vets, 20 Years On, Warn Obama on Afghanistan
by Conor Humphries
MOSCOW - Soviet veterans marking 20 years since their defeat in Afghanistan warned the United States it would never truly control the country, citing bitter memories of a fiercely proud people and unforgiving landscape.
The withdrawal of the last Soviet troops from Afghanistan on February 15, 1989 ended a decade of fighting that killed an estimated 15,000 Soviet troops and convinced a generation of soldiers they had been sent to fight a war they could not win.
The United States, preparing to pour more troops into Afghanistan to fight a growing Taliban-led insurgency, is reliving their nightmare, they said.
"It's like fighting sand. No force in the world can get the better of the Afghans," said Oleg Kubanov, a stocky 47-year-old former officer with the Order of the Red Star pinned to his chest at an anniversary concert in Moscow.
"It's their holy land, it doesn't matter to them if you're Russian, American. We're all soldiers to them."
Thousands of veterans, some in dress suits, some in combats, gathered Friday for a lavish concert organized by Moscow City Hall. As they embraced and posed for pictures before the show, many cited America's troubles as proof their campaign in Afghanistan had been hopeless from the start.
Reports that U.S. President Barack Obama plans to boost U.S. forces there to 60,000 revived bitter memories for members of the Soviet deployment that steadily climbed to a peak of more than 100,000 troops as the insurgency deepened in the mid-1980s.
There are 36,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan today, split between the 55,000-strong NATO force and separate U.S. missions, both charged with protecting a transitional government from Taliban forces.
"Numbers don't solve anything," said Shamil Tyukteyev, 59, who lead a regiment in Afghanistan from 1986-88. "You can't put a soldier outside every house or a base on every mountain. We saw it ourselves, the more troops, the more resistance."
PULL OUT
Soviet tanks and troops rolled into Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a puppet Communist government in Kabul [editor: some feel this wasn't a "puppet Communist government", but a largely indigineous, populist people's movement. Also Soviet military intervention was requested by the PDP government in Kabul to Moscow, and Moscow was reluctant to acquiesce].
But hopes of a swift victory were dashed as Soviet forces found themselves bogged down in a guerrilla war waged by a fierce mujahideen force that was backed by U.S. arms and money and had access to bases in neighboring Pakistan. [Editor: And Washington intervened 6 months BEFORE Moscow did.]
After a decade of pouring in more and more troops and money, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ordered a withdrawal in 1989.
"They'll send more in and they'll lose more," Andrei Bandarenko, 42, a former special forces officer, said of the U.S. plans. "What does Obama know about the situation on the ground. We had our own fool, Gorbachev, who knew even less."
Two decades on, Bandarenko is still bitter at being forced to withdraw through the mountains in mid-winter temperatures of minus 27 degrees Celsius -- a trip he sketched for friends on a commemorative map pinned to the wall of the concert hall buffet.
The Soviet military leadership, he said, never came to terms with the difficulties of fighting a native force in barren mountains where temperatures could dive from 40 degrees Celsius to freezing within hours.
Like the United States, the Soviet Union tried to mold Afghanistan into a unified state, papering over an ancient web of tribal and ethnic rivalries, he said.
"There is no common language between the ethnic groups, between the clans," he said. "They are impossible to control."
The United States has rejected comparisons with the Soviet failure, saying that by battling Islamic militants and establishing a democratic society based on the rule of law it is bringing freedom to a country Moscow sought to subjugate.
That brought a wry smile from former helicopter pilot instructor Gurgen Karapetyan, 73.
"We went in with good aims too," he said. Soviet soldiers were told Communism would provide schools, roads and electricity, transforming a primitive society.
"I believed we could help the people, make their lives better," he said. "The Americans want to give them democracy, but they don't want it. They live by their own rules."
Yury Shaidurov, a 47-year-old former solider with tightly cropped grey hair and a chest full of medals, said the best lesson the United States could take from the Soviet experience two decades ago was to simply accept defeat.
"They'll never win," he said. "They have to run before it is too late."
Editing by Janet Lawrence.
Published on Saturday, February 14, 2009 by Reuters
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/02/14-6
See also:
Afghanistan: Another Untold Story
http://www.michaelparenti.org/afghanistan%20story%20untold.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11279
http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/michael-parenti-afghanistan-another-untold-story/
http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/3695
The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan (6 months BEFORE the Soviet intervention)
Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser
Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
I explained to the president [Jimmy Carter] that this support [of Jihad] would in my opinion lead to a military intervention by the Soviets.
- Brzezinski
You can read the full interview here:
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/interviews/brz.htm
(As they say, "Birds of a feather...")
"The Afghan Mujaheddin are the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers of America."
- Ronald Reagan, honoring Afghan "freedom fighters" [i.e. drug runners, feudal warlords and religious extremists] at the White House
Saudi Bin Laden Friend of America and Business Partner of America is calling illitrate people of Somalia financed by Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf Countries, to topple the New President who brought peace and Calm in Somalia.
The Zionist has policy "To Devide and Rule", the whole Muslim world is been devided by land, parties, faith and also so called Sharia Court.
But what is the motive of Al Qa'eda, Wahhabi, Salafi, Al Ittihad, Al Shebab all new group with different names and banners under the name of Islam, unfortunately; that claim majority of Sunni Kafir and Shi'a Kafir, gains by deviding Muslim Ummah.
Saudi Arabian Sheikhs who are the in charge of Muslims Holy Places, have direct friendship with Americans and Zionist. Not only that without their permission they can not even do anything. The Arab Gulf sheikhs has the same friendship with Americans and Zionist. The Question is why Saudi born Osama bin Laden does not care about toppling the kingdoms or sheikhdoms? How can a Muslim accept Saudi Osama bin Laden's double standard.
The recent message of Saudi born Bin Laden, Friend of America and Business partner of America to topple newly elected Somali President, has no other meaning accept to devide the innocent people of Somalia and to destroy the rich land of Somalia that has unbelievable natural resources from minerals, agriculture and maritime food - fish.
Since the Suez Canal issue 19th and 20th century, the stay of Zionist state Israel was in danger. Somalia has the longest ever maritime control in the Indian Ocean. And Somali state has full power to control all ships passing towards Suez Canal. In the cold war both Americans and Russians were fighting to gain power for the Somali strategic state.
Why Saudi Arabia is interefering in Somalia, and why Saudi Arabian Al Qa'eda and Al Shebab are killing innocent people of Somalia to create unstablity is Somalia, there is hidden motive for the interest of Saudi Arabia and Zionist state of Israel.
First as we said that all ships passing towards Suez Canal can be easily monitered from Somalia, Second, Somali is very rich in minirals and has enough oil resource. The threat is Somalia state if starts exploring Oil its risk for Saudi Arabian oil wells that they will not get enough oil, because Somalia lyes lower than Saudi state.
This two factors is the main cause why Saudi born Bin Laden who sponsors Al Qa'ida, Al Shebab, Al Ittihad, Al Selaf, Al etc etc. to create disturbance and unstablity in Somalia.
Hope that Muslims and the blind followers of these newly created Muslim faith, Islamist and immotional and desperate people who turn to go for sucide killing, open their eyes and study deeply why Saudi Osama bin Laden want to kill innocent people in the world. Thousands of Muslim population lost their lives because of Saudi Osama bin Laden's teachings and still he is believed to be Muslim?
Labbayk Ya Mahdi
Bin Laden urges overthrow of Somali president
Module body
Thu Mar 19, 2:57 PM
DUBAI (AFP) - Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden called on radical Islamists in Somalia to overthrow new President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, according to an audiotape posted on the Internet on Thursday.
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Ahmed, a moderate Islamist, was elected president of the war-ravaged African state only in January following UN-brokered reconciliation talks but faces a tough task to bring peace to a country wracked by civil war since 1991.
"This Sheikh Sharif... must be fought and toppled," bin Laden said in a message addressed to the "champions of Somalia,"
"He is like the presidents who are in the pay of our enemies," he said in the tape, whose authenticity could not be immediately confirmed.
Somalia has had no effective central authority since the 1991 ouster of former president Mohamed Siad Barre touched off a bloody cycle of clashes between rival factions.
Bin Laden said Ahmed has "changed and turned on his heels" as a result of American "enticements", and agreed to mix Islamic sharia law with civic laws in the troubled Horn of Africa country.
The Somali cabinet agreed on Tuesday to introduce Islamic law, a move Ahmed said was "to ensure that he who claims that he is fighting to have sharia no longer has a reason to fight."
Bin Laden warned Islamist militants against heeding calls to be patient and give Ahmed time to implement sharia.
"My Muslim brothers in Somalia: you must beware of the initiatives which wear the dress of Islam ... like the initiative attributed to some of the ulama (scholars) of Somalia which gives Sheikh Sharif six months to implement Islamic Sharia.
"They are asking him (to build) something he was in fact installed to demolish," he added. "It is a duty to fight the apostate government and not stop the battle."
Islamist fighters including the hardline Shebab militia have waged battles against the government and its allies since and before Ahmed came to power, vowing to fight until all foreign forces withdraw and sharia law is imposed.
The Shebab is a hardline Islamist organisation opposed to Ahmed's national unity government and which controls large swathes of Somalia.
It re-took several towns in southern and central Somalia in battles against the Ethiopia-backed Somali troops who ousted their movement in early 2007. Ethiopian forces pulled out of Somalia in January, ending an ill-fated two-year intervention.
Somalia's information minister Farahan Ali Mohamoud dismissed bin Laden's call and said the Al-Qaeda supremo should focus on surviving in his Afghan hide-out.
"We know that bin Laden has his own problems in the mountainous area of Tora Bora where he is hiding, so he has no place making such statements at a time when Somalia is keen to emerge from 21 years violence," he told reporters in
Mogadishu.
"His statements will not affect our efforts to bring peace to this country and we will work hard," he added.
Muslims "must" unite all over the World
and pray for the appearance of al Mahdi (r.a.) the Saviour of mankind
the descendent of Prophet Muhammed s.a.w.
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