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28 September 2009
Source: The Dominion
At least the PM isn’t a history teacher
“We also have no history of colonialism…”
—Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
VANCOUVER—On the heels of a massive exercise of US police repression against G20 protestors, including use of a wartime sonic acoustic weapon also being used in Iraq, Stephen Harper made the above declaration. The comment came during a press conference in Pittsburgh where it was announced that Canada would be hosting the next G20 meeting in 2010.
Perhaps Harper and I are not on the same page—is colonialism not defined as the practice and processes of domination, control, and forced subjugation of one people to another? As most bluntly stated by Duncan Campbell Scott, Head of the Department of Indian Affairs in the 1920s: “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question.”
I expect Harper has read the federal government’s own report on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which explicitly lays out Canada’s imposition of a colonial relationship (indeed, that is the heading of one of the chapters) on (more…)
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- a statement by No One Is Illegal – Toronto -
Some believe that the Canadian immigration system is fair and generous. It isn’t. And Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney are swiftly making it even worse.
They are underhandedly taking apart the so-called ‘objective’ points-based system. They are moving quickly to get rid of its ‘humanitarian’ part, the refugee process. In its place, they are setting up temporary work programs that are designed to push most migrants in to vulnerable, precarious and temporary jobs without access to services or the ability to unionize.
In 2008, for the first time, more people arrived on exploitative temporary work programs than people with some access to permanent residency!
Major changes have been sneaked through a budget bill and other seemingly disconnected regulation announcements. Bill C-50 and Bill C-45 gave powers to immigration minister and officers to (more…)
Filed under: Indian Subcontinent
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25 September 2009
Source: World Socialist Website
The Sri Lankan government has underscored its determination to keep 280,000 Tamil civilians in internment camps indefinitely, in blatant violation of their basic democratic rights.
UN Under-Secretary, Lynn Pascoe arrived in Sri Lanka last week for further talks on resettling detainees. Sri Lanka President Mahinda Rajapakse told him his government had a target of resettling 70 percent of the people within 180 days. But he added that this target would depend on the de-mining of the former war zone in the island’s north.
As if to show that this time frame was not serious, Rajapakse said Croatia had been carrying out de-mining for 16 years and was still not finished. His message was unmistakable: the government has no plans to resettle detained civilians for the foreseeable future.
Four months have now passed since the last Tamil civilians were detained (more…)
Filed under: Middle East
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28 July 2009
Source: ZNet
Whenever the possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state is mentioned by Israeli politicians, they take for granted that their interlocutors understand that the future state would have to be demilitarized and disarmed, if an Israeli consent for its existence is to be gained. Recently, this precondition was mentioned by the current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in response to President Barrack Obama’s two states vision, presented to the world at large in his Cairo Speech this June. Netanyahu made this precondition first and foremost for domestic consumption: whoever has referred in the past to the creation of an independent state alongside Israel, and whoever does so today in Israel envisages a fully armed Israel next to a totally disarmed Palestine. But there was another reason why Netanyahu stressed the demilitarization of Palestine as a sine qua non: he knew perfectly well that there was no danger that even the most moderate Palestinian leader would accept such a caveat from the strongest military power in the Middle East.
In Israel, as in the West, the vision of a demilitarized Palestine is accepted as a feasible scenario, whereas a peace based on the demilitarization of Israel as well would be regarded as totally insane and unhelpful, indeed unimaginable. This disparity in the attributes of statehood is part of a (more…)
Filed under: Indian Subcontinent
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29 August 2009
Source: Times of India
Human beings have lived with states for millennia. There were even republican states in ancient times. Nation states are new; they came into their own in 17th-century Europe. Today, all states are not nation states, but most states are. European ideas take strange forms outside Europe. In Asia and Africa, colonialism conflated the ideas of the state and the nation state. Thus, when the western-educated, middle-class leaders of India’s freedom movement fought for independence, they did not want only a state, but a European-style, centralised, modern nation state. Such a state, they thought, would be a magical cure for India’s backwardness. When the Muslim League demanded a separate homeland for Indian Muslims, its leaders too thought of a standard nation state.
However, a nation state requires a nation and an ideology of nationalism. Simple, old-fashioned, non-ideological patriotism is not enough for it. More so if it is a republican state, led by new, insecure, nervous political leaders worried about its diverse, ‘ungovernable’ citizens and psychologically not yet closely linked to the state.
That is why V D Savarkar, despite being an avowed atheist and dismissive towards Hinduism as a religion, had moved towards the idea of Hindutva, which redefined the Hindus as a nation and Hindutva as their national ideology. This was years before Muhammad Ali Jinnah spoke of (more…)
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25 August 2009
Source: Outlook India
To the Editor
The Economist
Dear Sir,
This is with regard to the review of my book Listening to Grasshoppers that appeared in The Economist. If this letter is long, ironically it is because the factual errors in the review are so many. In an attempt to highlight my “flawed reporting and incorrect analysis” the reviewer makes some extraordinary errors and leaps of logic:
1. “Ms Roy cites a massacre of perhaps 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, in which the state’s Hindu-nationalist government was allegedly complicit. Almost no senior official or Hinduist agitator has been prosecuted over the atrocity. And Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister then and now, is currently vying to take over the leadership of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, and one day India. Many of the country’s industrialists would approve of that; even Ratan Tata, the gentlemanly head of the vast Tata Group which prides itself on its ethical dealings, has praised Mr Modi’s business-friendly policies. Nothing annoys Ms Roy more.”
Mr Tata did not merely praise Modi’s business policies, he (more…)
Filed under: Indian Subcontinent
Local residents gathered near a warehouse of the World Food Program in Kanju near Pakistan's troubled valley of Swat, Pakistan on Tuesday, Oct 21, 2008. According to local police, suspected 'insurgents' set alight a warehouse containing cooking oil belonging to the World Food Program. (AP Photo/Sherin Zada)
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( Dated Piece | 23 July 2009 )
Source: London Review of Books
June is never a good month on the plains. It was 46ºC in Fortress Islamabad a fortnight ago. The hundreds of security guards manning roadblocks and barriers were wilting, sweat pouring down their faces as they waved cars and motorbikes through. The evening breeze brought no respite. It, too, was unpleasantly warm, and it was difficult not to sympathise with those who, defying the law, jumped into the Rawal Lake, the city’s main reservoir, in an attempt to cool down. Further south in Lahore it was even hotter, and there were demonstrations when the generator at Mangla that sporadically supplies the city with electricity collapsed completely.
As far as the political temperature goes there is never a good month in Pakistan. This is a country whose fate is no longer in its own hands. I have never known things so bad. The chief problems are the (more…)
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23 August 2009
Source: ZNet
On the eve of the 62nd anniversary of India and Pakistan’s independence from British rule, Obama justified the war on Afghanistan and Pakistan (AfPak) by evoking Bush’s mantra: “This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again.” The invocation of the colonial “us versus them” is strategically vital for a war-crusading Obama to invisibilize the daily violence of Western state and corporate policies, to firmly entrench a civilizational (read: racial) divide, and to dismiss critics as “unpatriotic” or the all-purpose “terrorism supporters”.
In light of growing criticism of the Iraq war but not wanting to be an Empire lightweight, Obama has enlarged the U.S army by 22,000 troops, inaugurated the Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell, and pledged nearly $8 billion in military aid to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
U.S, Canada, and NATO involvement in Pakistan has (more…)
Filed under: South America
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6 August 2009
Source: Venzuelanalysis
On Wednesday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez presented evidence that Colombia’s accusations that his government provided grenade launchers to the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Colombian guerrilla organization, are false.
In a press conference dedicated largely to the issue, Chavez said the three grenade launchers that Colombian soldiers said they found in possession of the FARC recently might be those that were stolen when the guerrillas raided a Venezuelan military post on the Colombian border in 1995.
Chavez, a former military officer trained in the use of grenade launchers, handed reporters a series of official documents and photos that Colombia sent to Venezuela in June. He pointed out a discrepancy between the documents, which said the weapons still contained grenades when they were found, and the photos of the weapons, which showed they had been fired and were no longer loaded with grenades.
Last week, Colombia said it had confirmed that the weapons seized from the FARC had been sold to the (more…)
Supporters of Honduras' ousted President Manuel Zelaya protest outside the National Congress in Tegucigalpa, Wednesday, July 15, 2009.
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10 August 2009
Source: Socialist Voice
The people of Honduras have now suffered more than 40 days of military rule. The generals’ June 28 coup, crudely packaged in constitutional guise, ousted the country’s elected government and unleashed severe, targeted, and relentless repression.
The grassroots protests have matched the regime in endurance and outmatched it in political support within the country and internationally. Its scope and duration is unprecedented in Honduras history. Popular resistance is the main factor affecting the international forces attempting to shape the outcome of the governmental crisis. It weighs heavy on the minds of the coup’s authors and their international backers.
As Eva Golinger has convincingly documented1, the United States took part in conceiving, planning, and staging the coup. The U.S. ambassador in Tegucigalpa, Hugo Llorens, coordinates a team of high-ranking U.S. and Honduran military officials, and creatures from the old Bush administration, using the Soto Cano (Palmerola) U.S. air force base.
But when the army, machine guns blazing, assaulted President Zelaya’s house, kidnapped him, and dumped him in Costa Rica – still in pajamas – their actions forged unprecedented unity in Latin America and the Caribbean against the coup regime, and enraged hundreds of thousands within the country.
Latin American unity
In the first days after the coup, it appeared that the whole world denounced the Honduran generals and their civilian front men. ALBA – the nine-nation Bolivarian alliance initiated by Venezuela and Cuba – took the initiative in uniting Latin American governments around a common stand. Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, became the temporary capital of Our America. Many Latin American presidents knew only too-well that they could soon suffer Zelaya’s fate.
Argentina’s Cristina Fermandez devoted her (more…)
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14 August 2009
Source: Centre for Research on Globalization
-After the U.S. military withdrawal from Panama in 1999, the Pentagon has been expanding the “cooperative security locations” in the region. The U.S. Southern Command also operates some 17 radar sites, mostly in Peru and Colombia. All of the above is in addition to existing U.S. bases in Latin America, including a missile tracking station on Ascension Island in the Caribbean, and Soto Cano in Palmerola, Honduras. Furthermore, the United States has (more…)
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3 August 2009
Source: World Socialist Website
The Obama administration has been sending weapons to Somalia since early May to support the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) against a rebel insurgency that threatens to overwhelm the government.
State Department spokesman Ian Kelly confirmed the shipments in late June, following an urgent plea by the TFG for international aid, including troops, as heavy fighting engulfed the capital Mogadishu.
Somali Parliamentary Speaker Sheikh Aden Mohamed Nur announced June 22, “The government is weakened by the rebel forces. We ask neighbouring countries—including Kenya, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Yemen—to send troops to Somalia within 24 hours.”
African Union (AU) President Jean Ping backed calls for armed intervention, saying that the Somali (more…)
Filed under: Africa
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6 August 2009
Source: World Socialist Website
The July 18 presidential election in Mauritania was won by ex-General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz.
Aziz has run the country since leading a coup in August last year, when he deposed President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi.
The coup drew condemnation from the international community with the United States, European Union and World Bank suspending billions of dollars in pledged aid, and the African Union (AU) imposing sanctions. However, the US and EU were expected to move quickly to normalise relations following credible elections.
The coup was a response to both the (more…)
Filed under: Middle East
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17 August 2009
Source: Open Democracy
One of the main “lessons learned” from the war of July-August 2006 is that the modern concept of asymmetric warfare, which emerged in the late 1990s in the United States, is already in dire need of revision. Hizbollah’s military performance during the war demonstrates that asymmetric warfare can no longer be identified exclusively with political actors who adopt “non-traditional” methods “that differ significantly from the opponent’s usual mode of operations” (as per the US military’s definition).
The thirty-three-day war illustrated that Hizbollah had not merely perfected the art of guerrilla warfare, but had surpassed it altogether with a new paradigm of warfare which fuses “non-traditional” methods with the “usual mode of operations” conducted by conventional armies (see Frank G Hoffman, Hybrid Threats: Reconceptualizing the Evolving Character of Modern Conflict [Strategic Forum, Institute for National Strategic Studies, April 2009]).
At the forefront of those dissecting this new model of combat are American military strategists who fear it will set off a “hybrid warfare” contagion among both non-state and state actors opposed to the US, for whom the Hizbollah resistance template will function as a (more…)
