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29 April 2009
Source: globalresearch.ca
The US is still the world’s largest arm exporter, followed by Russia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. This was according to the new data released by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (www.sipri.org ) on Monday.
SIPRI also revealed that Continue reading
Filed under: Indian Subcontinent
Protest signs shed light on the crisis in Sri Lanka during a rally in front of the U.S. consulate in Toronto.
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( Dated Piece – 4 March 2009 )
Source: Excalibur
The New York-based Genocide Prevention Project recently added Sri Lanka to its list of the top eight red-alert countries in the midst of a possible genocide. Over the past month, the Tamil community in the Greater Toronto Area has staged a series of protests regarding the killings of Tamils in Sri Lanka. The recent resurgence of Sri Lankan state violence against the minority Tamil population has triggered mass Tamil protests around the world. And while the general Canadian public may have only recently become aware of the conflict, Tamils in Sri Lanka have endured state violence and oppression since the country achieved independence in 1948.
But why am I discussing the Sri Lankan conflict in a women’s supplement of the newspaper? While women within the Tamil community in Toronto are working to organize rallies, non-Tamil women and/or feminists have failed to take notice of the Tamils’ plight. This blind sight is a symptom of the limitations of mainstream feminism in Western Europe and North America. War, in general, and the conflict in Sri Lanka in particular, affects women in very specific ways. The killings of Tamils in Sri Lanka are the product of a Buddhist Sinhalese nationalism that emerged out of anti-colonial struggles for an independent state.
As many post-colonial writers have illustrated, nationalism is inherently gendered. Women are upheld as the “mothers of the nation” and the bearers of the national culture and identity. We can see the ways in which culture and national identity are gendered if we look at terms such as “mother tongue” or “mother land.” This is why women of minority groups bear the burden of nationalist violence – they are threats to the desired nation because of their reproductive abilities and their capacity to pass on culture. The desire for a purely Sinhalese state has resulted in the direct and indirect targeting of Tamil women in the form of rape and attacks on female-headed households.
But before I continue, it is important to note that this article is not meant to target individuals; rather, my discussion is directed toward the Sri Lankan government and those mainstream feminists who have ignored the voices of Tamil women. Rape is a major issue for Tamil women in Sri Lanka as it is used as a weapon of war and as a means of dehumanizing and demoralizing the Tamil people. In her report on violence against women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, Continue reading
Filed under: Middle East
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10 April 2009
Source: Foreign Policy In Focus
“[W]hat lengths men will go in order to carry out, to their extreme limit, the rites of a collective self-worship which fills them with a sense of righteousness and complacent satisfaction in the midst of the most shocking injustices and crimes.”
-Love and Living, by Thomas Merton
On Wednesday, March 25, Major General David Perkins of the U.S. military, referring to how often the U.S. military was being attacked in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad, “Attacks are at their lowest since August 2003.” Perkins added, “There were 1,250 attacks a week at the height of the violence; now sometimes there are less than 100 a week.”
While his rhetoric made headlines in some U.S. mainstream media outlets, it was little consolation for the families of 28 Iraqis killed in attacks across Iraq the following day. Nor did it bring solace to the relatives of the 27 Iraqis slain in a March 23 suicide attack, or those who survived a bomb attack at a bus terminal in Baghdad on the same day that killed nine Iraqis.
Having recently returned from Iraq, I experienced Continue reading
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16 April 2009
Source: globalresearch.ca
Few people anywhere have suffered more for so long, yet endure and keep struggling for change. For brief periods under Jean-Bertand Aristide, they got it until a US-led February 29, 2004 coup d’etat forced him into exile where he remains Haiti’s symbolic leader – for his supporters, still head of the Fanmi Lavalas (FL) party he founded in 1996 to reestablish links between local Lavalas branches and its parliamentary representatives.
From then to now, nothing has been the same. UN paramilitaries occupy the country. Washington effectively Continue reading
Filed under: South America
Peruvian mining workers protest in the streets of downtown Lima July 3, 2008.
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13 April 2009
Source: Upside Down World
(IPS)The Peruvian government refused to bail out the U.S. mining and metallurgical company Doe Run, which has caused severe pollution in the highlands city of La Oroya, from its severe financial troubles.But it did grant the company a second extension of the deadline for environmental cleanup projects. And local banks as well as mining companies that depend on the Doe Run Peru smelter took care of the bail-out.
An economic solution thus prevailed over the urgent need to protect the health of residents of La Oroya, who have no choice but to continue breathing the toxic fumes of the company’s large multi-metal smelter, several sources told IPS.
“Protection of the living space of the local population is a permanent state obligation that arises from the fundamental right of people to Continue reading
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11 April 2009
Source: Intercontinental Cry
The Attawapiskat First Nation in northern Ontario is preparing to evacuate 700 children out of fears that continued exposure to toxic fumes is making them sick.
In 1979, 30,000 gallons of hydrocarbon oil was found to have accumulated underneath the community’s school grounds as a result of a broken oil distribution line to the school. INAC installed, operated, and maintained the line.
Nine years ago, staff and children attending the school started getting sick, eventually leading to the closure of the school. INAC also built a series of portable shacks immediately beside the contamination site as a temporary fix until a new school was built.
Attawapiskat is still Continue reading
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5 April 2009
Source: No One Is Illegal -Toronto
Nearly 200 outraged community and labour activists rattled the fences of Rexdale Immigration Detention Centre demanding the release of over 100 undocumented workers arrested during unprecedented immigration raids across Continue reading
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10 April 2009
Source: World Socialist Website
As the hostage drama off the coast of Somalia continued into its second day Thursday, there were indications that the Obama administration may be preparing yet another military intervention, this time in the Horn of Africa.
The ongoing standoff between a small band of Somali pirates in a lifeboat and a US destroyer, which is being joined by other warships and planes, followed an unsuccessful attempt to hijack the 17,000-ton Maersk Alabama freighter, a US flag ship.
After four armed Somalis managed to Continue reading
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (R) meets with Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in Cairo (25 March 2008)
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(Dated Piece | 4 March 2009 )
Source: All Things Pass
I recently received a phone call from an Australian man who identified himself as an investigator for the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague, Netherlands. The investigator and his colleague had read my story, “Merchant’s of Death: Exposing Corporate Financed Holocaust in Africa,” and they wanted my cooperation to provide more detailed evidence about the warlords behind the massacres at Bogoro, Congo, described briefly in my story.
After some weeks of back and forth discussions and me revisiting notes and photos to see what I had, I sent them an email at the definitive moment, when they were hoping to receive a brief “dossier” about the specific case—which they said “had generated a lot of interest” at the ICC—and I shared my uncertainty about the ethics of collaborating with an “International Criminal Court” that was only indicting black Africans. I indicated my concern for the witness ‘Sandrine’, a young girl discussed in my story who named names of commanders, dates of executions, and who herself used a machete in an ethnic massacre and was raped by militiamen. I noted that witnesses identified for the Rwandan Tribunal (ICTR) had been murdered or mysteriously disappeared, and noted my awareness of the injustice of the Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the disconcerting trajectory of the ICC.
I told them I couldn’t in good conscience help them, it seemed, until the ICC arrested some of the white-collar war criminals running loose around the world. It was the right decision, in light of the recent ICC indictments against another black man, and an Arab at that. It was a very stupid career move, some one else remarked.
On 4 March 2009 the ICC prosecutors announced that they were at last issuing the long threatened but first ever indictments against a sitting head of state, Omar al-Bashir, the Arab President of Sudan. Meanwhile, Somali ‘pirates’ off Continue reading
RACISM & NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS | NEWS/COMMENTARY 