There is presently a hearty debate in Britain on the timetable for a referendum on Scottish independence or, more correctly, the restoration of Scottish independence. Prime Minister David Cameron prefers an early vote, presumably in the next 18 months, with two ‘straightforward’ questions on whether the Scots want independence or wish to continue to be part of Britain as it has been in the past 300 years. Cameron also wishes that the outcome of the referendum is ‘legally binding’, quite an unprecedented position to take as referendums in Britain in the past have had an ‘advisory’ or ‘consultative’ status. Finally, he wants the minimum age of 18 for participants. In contrast, Alex Salmond, the leader of the pro-independence Scottish Nationalist Party and Scotland’s first minister, insists that, thanks to SNP’s majority victory in last May’s elections to the Edinburgh Holyrood assembly, his party has the ‘mandate for the Scottish parliament to organise the referendum [on its own]… It must be a referendum built in Scotland and decided by Scottish people…’ Salmond adds that he will schedule the poll in the autumn of 2014 and besides the ‘yes’/‘no’ choices favoured by Cameron, he wouldn’t rule out a third, more nuanced proto-independence choice for voters (the so-called dev-max or ‘devolution-maximum’) which calls for enhanced financial powers for Scotland, derived from existing devolved provisions – that is, just short of total sovereignty as these new powers won’t affect defence and foreign affairs! For poll participation, Salmond prefers an age limit of 16 rather than Cameron’s 18.
Quite clearly, the differences between both leaders on this important subject are merely procedural and not on the substantive issue of the rights of Scots, as a people, to decide their future. Despite the oft-quoted, if irreverent lines from Robert Burns, the Scottish national poet, alluding to the deteriorating Scottish economic situation at the time (caused by the so-called Darién scheme) which contributed to its parliamentarians voting for union with England, formally inaugurated in 1707 (‘We are bought and sold for English gold. Such a parcel of rogues in a nation’), Scotland has not been ‘worse off’ in the United Kingdom enterprise. On the contrary, Scots and their country were enriched exponentially by this union. Some scholars have dubbed the vast lands of the world that Britain conquered during its 350 years march across the globe the ‘Scottish empire’, rather than ‘British empire’, to underscore this Scottish unprecedented triumph.
And they are not so far off the mark in that characterisation! Scottish financiers and merchants, enslavers, enslaved-plantation owners, tobacco, sugar and cotton growers and the like (in the Americas), along with their English counterparts, were already immersed in reaping the gargantuan fortune wreaked from the hegemonic control of African enslavement they now shared with England. This was occasioned by the two states’ previous century’s dramatic displacement of the central role played hitherto in this holocaust by Portugal and Spain. Huge profits from African enslavement were ploughed back into Scottish sociocultural and financial institutions and cities to power the gestating industrial revolution (especially in the Glasgow conurbation) and the Scottish age of enlightenment, that very much revered heritage in the country’s national narrative. Such was the staggering outcome of this Scottish (and English) transformation that Christopher Hill, the distinguished specialist on this epoch of British history, has observed that, prior to the mid-17th century, these states were still ‘cultural and scientific backwater’ but soon, into the following century, they had become ‘centre of world science’.
POUNCING ON OPPORTUNITIES
Buoyed by these phenomenal strides in societal fortunes and outlook, the one million Scots, a sixth of the population of the new merger-state relation, pounced on the opportunities thrown up by union with England with much aplomb: Scottish military forces with their specialised fighting units, who in the past fought for English global expansionism, henceforth had a greater stake to defend and conquer ever new seas and lands in continent after continent for the union; Scottish emigration, especially to north America, soared; Scottish conquest administrators prominently policed the union’s empire – from the east’s Asian frontiers through Africa to the west’s outstretches of the Americas and, lastly, its leading intellectuals (philosophers, scientists, political-economists, writers) simultaneously valorised the thrust and goals of union and conquest. Not a few of the latter would join counterparts in England and elsewhere to particularly offer the ‘requisite’ cultural/scientific/literary rationalisation for African enslavement/holocaust and map out the presumed hermeneutical canvass of the cardinal codifiers of European world racism as an ideology.
When pro-independence ‘colonists’ in north America in the later part of the 18th century revolted against the union crown, significant sectors of Scottish émigrés (including their Ulster-Scot cousins) and institutions strongly supported freedom for the United States – a position that would obviously have appeared paradoxical for obvious reasons. One-third of delegates who signed the US independence document were of Scottish descent and 75 per cent of all US presidents since the founding of the republic are of Scottish ancestry.
STATE IS TRANSIENT; PEOPLE ENDURE
Given the trajectory of what many would feel is an illustrious history sketched above, it could appear that Scots are perhaps the most unlikely people to wish to break from Britain. Interestingly, most opinion polls conducted in Scotland show that majority of Scots do not currently want a restoration of their country’s independence. Ironically, a most recent of these polls shows that more English and Welsh respondents (from two of the four constituent nations in the union) than the Scots themselves want the Scots to ‘go’! So, a principal reason that Alex Salmond is working towards a ‘delayed’ referendum date (last quarter of 2014) is to have more time to campaign to garner a majority vote outcome from across a Scottish population still sceptical of the restoration-of-independence for their country. Salmond wants to appeal to younger Scots (hence his intention to lower the minimum deciding voting age to 16), where disposition for independence is much greater than the older population. 2014 also presents Salmond with three ‘opportunity chords’ to play for in the independence drive: commemorating the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn in which the Scots defeated England, Scottish hosting of the Commonwealth games, and Scottish hosting of the Ryder Cup (golf).
Prime Minister Cameron is very much aware of the Scottish success story in the UK-union and also that a majority of Scots would vote for continuing stay in the union if a referendum on the subject were held presently. The latter particularly explains Cameron’s desire for an early poll. Yet despite being first minister of the union who undoubtedly wishes to preserve the union, Cameron accepts the rights of Scots to decide freely on this subject. It is their right. But this right is not only restricted to the Scots or to the English or to the Welsh or to only peoples in Europe… It is, in fact, a universal right that every people enjoy. Every people.
This right to self-determination for every people is inalienable and is guaranteed by the United Nations. No people is exempt from exercising this right. As everyone expects, Cameron has not come out demonising Scots for ‘daring’ to wish to leave the union; no, Cameron wouldn’t do this because he respects the rights of Scots to exercise their right to self-determination. As everyone expects, surely, Cameron has not come out with the dreadful thoughts of wishing any harm to Scots for wanting to exercise their inalienable rights to self-determination as one James Harold Wilson, who once lived and worked from the same London address that Cameron inhabits today, declared when the Igbo of south-west-central Africa exercised this right between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970.
The Igbo had exercised their right to independence from the Nigeria-union (created by UK-union in 1914!) when this Nigeria-union unleashed the genocide against them with the active participation of key constituent nations (in the union) such as the Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba and Kanuri. 3.1 million Igbo or a quarter of their population were murdered. UK-union supported the genocide politically, diplomatically and militarily – London’s calculated ‘punishment’ for the Igbo-lead role (in the 1940s-1960) to terminate the UK-union-occupation of its Nigeria-union lucre. As the slaughtering of the Igbo intensified especially in those catastrophic months of 1968/1969, James Harold Wilson was totally unfazed when he informed Clyde Ferguson (United States State Department special coordinator for relief to Biafra) that he, James Harold Wilson, ‘would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took’ the Nigeria-union to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide. Such is the grotesquely expressed diminution of African life made by a supposedly leading politician of the world of the 1960s – barely 20 years after the deplorable perpetration of the Jewish genocide.
As the final tally of the murder of the Igbo demonstrates, James Harold Wilson probably had the perverted satisfaction of having his Nigeria-union genocidists perform far in excess of his grim target. Unlike the Igbo, the Scots, pointedly, never faced any pogrom or genocide by the UK-union or organised by any of the other constituent nations of the union (English, Welsh, Irish) during these past 300 years. Finally, as everyone expects, unfailingly, Cameron has not dabbled into some nonsense of the assumed ‘inviolability’ or ‘indivisibility’ of the UK-union in respect to the rights of Scots to self-determination, two oft-repeated vulgarities with reference to the Nigeria-union that the same James Harold Wilson trumpeted with much relish as the Nigeria-union genocidists slaughtered and slaughtered the Igbo during those 44 months of certain death.
What the debate on the 5 million Scots and Scotland has clearly demonstrated is that the people, the nation, is deemed superior to the state. This is the case of any people in the world vis-à-vis the state. This position is correct for all peoples and nations irrespective of race, continent, region, religion/belief system, etc. The people, the nation is enduring; the state is transient. The state is therefore not some ‘gift’ from someone else; definitely not from any conquerors, nor even from gods, but relationships painstakingly formulated and constructed by a discernible group of human beings that inhabit an ascertainable geo-historical territorial expanse on Earth to pursue worldviews and interests envisioned and formulated by these same human beings.
In Africa, where the contemporary state was created and imposed by the European conquest over decades/centuries as instruments to expropriate and despoil Africa in perpetuity, the goal of organically articulated African-created and owned states to radically transform depressing African fortunes is imperative. In the aggressively genocidist-states such as the Nigeria-union, the Sudan-union and Democratic Republic of the Congo-union, this task is even more pressing.
EVEN 1000 STATES…
The Igbo, with a population of 50 million and whose homeland has been under occupation by the Nigeria-union since 13 January 1970, are arguably the world’s most brutally targeted and most viciously murdered of peoples presently. Nigeria is now firmly the obligatory haematophagous monster in Africa whose raison d’être appears to be to murder the Igbo most routinely and ritualistically. Since losing 3.1 million during the genocide, tens of thousands of Igbo have been murdered by this monster during the course of the following years, signposted here by the eerie columns that chart the contours of the killing fields: 1980 … 1982 … 1985 … 1991 … 1993 … 1994 … 1999 … 2000 … 2001 … 2002 … 2004 … 2005 … 2006 … 2007 … 2008 … 2009 … 2010 … 2011 … 2012.
According to the recently published research (December 2011) by the International Society for Civil Liberties & the Rule Of Law, a human rights organisation based in Onicha, 90 per cent of the 54,000 people murdered in Nigeria-union by the state/quasi-state operatives and agents since 1999 are Igbo. Since last Christmas Day, the Boko Haram islamist insurgent group spearheads these murders. At least 90 per cent of people murdered by the Boko Haram across swathes of lands in north/northcentral Nigeria in the past 23 days are Igbo.
The Boko Haram now issues its threats to murder Igbo people almost habitually, on a daily basis, and, true to its words, executes its mission most ruthlessly, most remorselessly. After each of its outrages, Boko Haram acknowledges responsibility and does this most dispassionately… The regime in Abuja appears cruelly powerless to protect Igbo people emplaced within the jurisdiction of the supposedly sovereign state it controls with the well-known consequences in international law that this shocking relegation of responsibility entails. Regime-head Goodluck Jonathan says as much in a recent astonishing radio and television broadcast to his country and the world: ‘Boko Haram is everywhere in the executive arm of [my] government, in the legislative arm of [my] government and even in the judiciary. Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security and in the judiciary. Some continue to dip their hands and eat with you and you won’t even know the person who will point a gun at you or plant a bomb behind your house’.
The Nigeria-union has, since 1945, gained considerable notoriety for consistently evolving new levers and institutions and processes within itself to murder the Igbo. Following from Jonathan’s proclamation, it is conceivable that right there closeted in his regime, there are operatives deeply complicit in the ongoing murder of the Igbo. No doubt, Jonathan cannot but elaborate further on this broadcast to a restless, eagerly awaiting world. Not since 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 (Phase-I and Phase-II of the Igbo genocide) has Igbo life in the Nigeria-union Malebogle acquired such a gripping existential emergency…
The right of Africans to form their own state, away from the extant, murderous European-created state, is the corpus of my ‘The Biafra War, Nigeria and the Aftermath’, the second of the two books on the Igbo genocide I published in 1990. In the concluding pages of this book I note the following:
‘Either in peace, or war, the existence of the European post-colonial state is inimical to the interests of African peoples. It is a state that cannot provide the fundamental needs of Africans … The African humanity is presently gripped in a grave crisis for survival. It is now time that it abandoned the contrived post-colonial state in order to survive … African nations, [namely] Igbo, Wolof, Yoruba, Asante, Baganda, Bakongo, Bambara, etc., etc … remain the basis for the regeneration of Africa’s development … [and] the sites of the continent’s intellectual and other cultural creativity … What is being stressed here is that African peoples, themselves, must decide on the … issue of sovereignty … even if the outcome were to lead to 1000 states … For the future survival of the African humanity, let no more Africans have to die for the defence of, or for upholding the territorial frontier of any post-colonial state. No precious life should be wasted for its preservation.’
Twenty-two years on, these words remain crucially pivotal in focusing our minds on the very survival of the Igbo and all other African peoples. The Igbo and all others who have lived through the terror of the post-(European)conquest state must abandon it at once to survive and advance towards the construction of higher levels of civilisation. They have no other choice. Each and every constituent African people or nation can build this civilisation outside the existing genocide state of enthralled and degenerative union. Let Africa’s constituent peoples or nations unleash a dazzling contest of creativity and progress, a continuing mutual bombardment and sharing of ideas and streams of possibilities, akin to what the world has seen in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere in the past 40 years – not mass murdering … mass murdering … mass murdering … pillaging … pillaging … pillaging … nihilism … nihilism … nihilism … Most surely, now is the time to embark on this beginning.
Read more on Rights for Scots, rights for Igbos By Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe…
WELT-SICHTEN: You wrote that the aid effectiveness journey since the Paris Declaration in 2005 was misguided right from the beginning. Why that?
YASH TANDON: Because it was conceptualized by the donors, and not by the people that were supposed to be assisted. It was not a participatory project. When it became clear that aid had failed, instead of looking at the issue in a fundamental manner, the donor countries put the blame of ineffectiveness on the recipient countries.
WELT-SICHTEN: But the Paris Declaration also calls on the donors to harmonize their aid policies, to align them to recipient-country systems, among other things.
YASH TANDON: Those words are deceptive. The five principles of the Paris Declaration are ideological, one-sided and not enforceable on the donors. They looked good in a conceptual sense, but the implementation was enforced only on the recipient countries.
WELT-SICHTEN: You have said that after the High Level Forum in Busan, the aid industry in itself is finally dead. Why?
YASH TANDON: Well, this industry was nurtured by countries that have used aid to serve their own political and economic agendas in the south. In fact, the so-called development aid never did promote development. Since 2005, the OECD countries and the World Bank have tried very hard to sell the idea of “aid effectiveness”. But the Outcome Document of the Busan Forum does not mention the word "aid effectiveness". It’s gone. Finally, the architects of the aid industry, namely the OECD countries and the World Bank, have recognized that they cannot use that word anymore. Aid has become a dirty word, like colonialism. The result is that the aid industry has no longer any legitimacy.
WELT-SICHTEN: By contrast, the Minister of Development in Germany sees a new beginning: He said that Busan was a basis to “bundle” old and new actors in development cooperation and to steer them in the same direction.
YASH TANDON: Well, the minister better read the Outcome Document again. It calls on the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness to dissolve by June 2012. The words are clear. There is no “rebundling” of aid.
WELT-SICHTEN: But the Outcome Document says that a new Global Partnership for Development should be established.
YASH TANDON: This new development partnership will not take off the ground because the ruling classes of Europe and the West have a distorted, an upside-down, understanding of “development”. Let Europe first show that their “partnership“ with the people of Greece takes off the ground before they offer the same failed strategies to the poor indebted countries of Africa and the third world.
WELT-SICHTEN: NGOs have said Busan was a compromise: the Outcome Document left much to be desired, but it was a success that civil society was recognized as a development partner.
YASH TANDON: The NGOs that came to Busan were not representative of the global civil society. The overwhelming bulk of them were financed by the OECD. For the last six years, these guys have been saying the same thing, namely, that the OECD has compromised but there is a still a lot to be desired. This is an admission that they have failed to change the “aid effectiveness” agenda. The NGOs have a self-serving delusion about themselves: they live in a fool’s paradise.
WELT-SICHTEN: So in your view the only purpose of the aid effectiveness process was to legitimate the apparently ineffective and self-serving aid industry of the West?
YASH TANDON: That is correct. Of course this industry will not disappear overnight. There are at least a million people in the Western countries that live off the aid industry. They have a vested interest in perpetuating it. It will disintegrate over time and die slowly. When the aid industry started 50 years ago with multilateral and governmental agencies that were providing financial support to countries that were emerging out of the colonial period, it was already corrupted. For example, when the World Bank came to provide the so-called assistance to my country Uganda at its independence in 1962, it came with its own strategy of development. It was not people-oriented, it was top-down, it was aimed at continuing to serve essentially the interests of the former colonial powers – namely to export our primary commodities to them. The whole economic agenda was flawed right from the beginning. And that agenda was bought into later on by the charity organisations and the NGOs.
WELT-SICHTEN: But many development NGOs have been strongly criticising the official aid agenda and the World Bank policy for many years.
YASH TANDON: Yes, but many of them got corrupted over time. For example, Oxfam started out as a well meaning, well intentioned organisation by people who wanted to give money as charity to people who were less fortunate than them. But look at how Oxfam has evolved: it has become a party of the development strategies pushed by the Western countries. Gradually charity organisations like Oxfam got sucked into that strategy. They criticised the effects of it, but at the same time continued pouring money into the same strategy. And when the OECD worked out this thing about “effective aid”, the NGOs jumped on this agenda as well. Instead of examining this question in its fundamentals and looking at the root causes of aid ineffectiveness, the NGOs simply called for even more aid and “better aid”.
WELT-SICHTEN: You say that aid has failed. But what’s wrong with, for example, the German development bank KfW financing water supply systems in Kampala?
WELT-SICHTEN: Why do you call it aid? Just call it business, like the Chinese and the Indians do in Africa. The Chinese go to Kampala to do business. They go to the government or the private sector and talk about investments. Aid, by contrast, is humiliating.
WELT-SICHTEN: So it’s better to do it like China?
YASH TANDON: Absolutely. Why hide your commercial and political interests? Be transparent, just call it what it is. Call it business.
WELT-SICHTEN: Another example: What’s wrong with a German Church-based development organisation working with grassroots partner organisations in rural Uganda to empower women or poor farmers? That’s aid, isn’t it?
WELT-SICHTEN: There is a particular kind of relationship I accept: that is a relationship based on solidarity. But solidarity is a very difficult concept. If the goal is to help the Ugandan women to empower themselves, by their own projects, then I would call this solidarity. But the people from Germany must not impose their values on the Ugandan women. In other words, if the communities of these women have certain cultural practices, then solidarity organisations from the West should respect that.
WELT-SICHTEN: Even if such practices conflict with universal human rights? Should we not encourage women who raise their voices against practices that violate their human rights?
YASH TANDON: No, this is not your business. The women don’t require outside agencies to “encourage” them, as you put it. My experience from 20 years of grassroots work in Africa is that the initiatives of rural women in Africa against oppression are very strong and very strategic. They know what will work and what will not. If in such a situation a foreign organisation comes to provide assistance based on the women’s own initiatives, then it will work. By contrast, if an outside agency comes to solve the problem, then you might create conflicts which the outside organisations cannot manage. All development is self-development.
Read more on ‘Aid is a dirty word, like colonialism’ Interview by Welt-Sichten (World-Views)…
]]>Is the Nigerian ‘revolution’ over? Was it just a brief moment in our history when everyone came together believing that this time things would be different? Or has there been a permanent shift in consciousness? Emmanuel Iduma likens Nigeria’s 14-day revolt to a dream from which we awoke and returned to normalcy.
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The League of Arab States Observer Mission to Syria is in an administratively critical time with the Observer Mission members from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council States of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates leaving the Mission on Tuesday 24, January. This represents 52 persons of an estimated 160, already badly understaffed.
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There are times when something outrageous happens, such as the illegal arrest of 150-200 Congolese in Yeoville (Johannesburg january 21-22), that persons of conscience are not sure that they got the information correctly. In the land that invented apartheid, could it be that something more pernicious than apartheid is being born? This is being written with many questions in mind, but also fully conscious that, given the whole history of Africa, over the past 500 years, knowing what happened during that history requires something that challenges one’s conscience to rise to the level of the outrages that have been inflicted collectively, systematically, with greater and greater impunity to humanity on the continent of its birth. Enough is enough says this conscience.
Read more on Could South Africa Become the Israel of Africa?…
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It is tough now to believe: Chidi Nwosu was murdered just a little over one year ago. He was hardly the first prominent Nigerian human rights leader to be assassinated, nor was he the last before the Occupy Nigeria movement of 2012 began taking to the streets, forming a new, nationwide emphasis on the need for sweeping economic and political change in one of the most populated and resource-rich corners of the planet. Nwosu, founder and president of the Human Rights, Justice and Peace Foundation (HRJPF), was a friend and colleague of the secular pacifist War Resisters International—but his death was anything but nonviolent. Tortured in his home while his wife and young daughter were locked in an adjacent room, he was shot in the head and dragged around the house as a symbol of what happens to those who dare take on questions of police misconduct, government corruption, and an end to rule by multinational corporations. It is no coincidence that this killing took place a short time after a major conference had been held (with Nwosu as central organizer), linking the issues and calling for a “total cleansing” of the Nigerian scene.
Read more on Nonviolent Nigeria: the roots and routes of resistance…
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Elections galore and more revolutions pending, 2012 will be an exhilarating year.
Governments may fall and leaders may change in China, France, Russia, the United States, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria.
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South Sudan was born as an independent nation on July 9, 2011, with good will and a bounty. Three hundred and fifty thousand barrels of oil per day provided the government with $1,000 per year for each of its 8 million citizens.
Read more on South Sudan’s Doomsday Machine By ALEX DE WAAL…
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Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling girls!”
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ON DECEMBER 7, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to consider the Philadelphia district attorney’s final avenue of appeal, current DA Seth Williams announced that he would no longer be seeking a death sentence for the world-renowned death row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal–on death row following his conviction at a 1982 trial deemed unfair by Amnesty International, the European parliament, the Japanese diet, Nelson Mandela and many others.
Read more on The torture of Mumia Abu-Jamal By Hans Bennett…
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South Africa is home to African political refugees and migrants seeking work from all over the African continent and, as in Europe and North America, immigrants are targets of xenophobia, harassment, intimidation, immigrant police sweeps and even geopolitically motivated attacks. On Friday, Dec. 20, members of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s immigrant community in Johannesburg contacted KPFA Radio to say that South Africa’s African National Congress government had instructed their police to arrest Congolese immigrants in Yeoville and other Johannesburg suburbs.
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The Internet used to be a fun place. I grew up with it through the late 1990s when static websites were still exciting and computer teachers believed that their students should learn some programming skills.
Read more on Resist US attempts to police Internet globally By Elsie Eyakuze…
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We are heading for a new load of advice from the self-appointed “World Economic Forum”, still having fresh in mind their utter inability to come to grips with the September 2008 manifestation of the world economic crisis when they met three years ago. So, what are they going to talk about now?
It is with great disappointment that I receive the news from foreign media publications and Libyan sources that our President now has 12,000 US troops stationed in Malta and they are about to make their descent into Libya. For those of you who have not followed closely the situation in Libya, the resistance to the rule of the National Transitional Council is strong. The National Transitional Council (NTC) cast of characters has about as much support on the ground as did Mahmoud Abbas before the United Nations request for Palestinian statehood or Afghanistan’s regal-looking but politically impotent Hamid Karzai or for that matter, George W Bush after eight years.
The NTC not only has to contend with a vibrant, well-financed, grassroots-supported resistance, but the various militias of the NTC are now also fighting each other. I believe this ‘sociocide’ of Libyan society, as we previously witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan before it, is part of a carefully crafted plan of destabilization that ultimately serves US imperial interests and those of a Zionist state and its US agents who are bent on Greater Israel’s suzerainty over huge swaths of Arabic-speaking populations. Pakistan is also on the list for neutering in Muslim and world affairs, saddled with its own unpopular civilian leadership that finds itself in the hip pocket of the United States for survival, often getting sat upon by its fiscal guarantor.
The ‘Arab Spring’ has sprung and the indelible fingerprints of malignant foreign financed operations must be erased if the people are to have a chance to truly govern themselves. Unfortunately, these foreign-inspired organizations are present and operating in just about every country in the world. The threat is ever-present like sleeping cells – all that is needed is that the right word to ‘activate’ be given. Both Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez can write tomes on the impact of the National Endowment for Democracy in the political life of their countries.
In other words, those who create the chaos have a plan and in the midst of chaos, they usually are the ones who will win. Those who wrote the plan of this chaos were affiliated with the Project for a New American Century – read ‘A Clean Break’ if you already haven’t. General Wesley Clark told us of the plan to invade and destroy the governments of seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. ‘These people took control of the policy in the United States,’ Clark continues. He concludes, ‘This country was taken over by a group of people with a policy coup: Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and…collaborators from the Project for a New American Century: they wanted us to destabilize the Middle East.’ Clark concludes: ‘The root of the problem is the strategy of the United States in this region. Why are Americans dying in this region? That is the issue,’ he finishes.
Now, from Libya, reports are that even while the Misrata rebels (NATO allies responsible for the murder of hundreds of Libyans, including Moatessem Qaddafi) attempted to scale the petroleum platforms in Brega (an important oil town in Libya), they were annihilated by the Apache helicopters of their own NATO allies. A resistance Libyan doctor-become-journalist reported that all of the petroleum platforms are occupied by NATO and that warships occupy Libya’s ports. Photographs show Italian encampments in the desert with an announcement that the French are to follow.
Another news outlet reports that Qataris and Emiratees are the engineers now at the oil plants, turning away desperate Libyan workers. While long lines exist for Libyan drivers to get their gas, foreign troops ensure the black gold’s export. Libyans lack enough food and the basics, the country has been turned upside down, and contaminated with uranium while the true number of dead and unaccounted for remains high and unknown. Thousands of young Libyans, supporters of the Jahamiriya, languish under torture and assassination in a Misrata prison where a humanitarian disaster is about to unfold because Misrata rebels want to kill them all and have already attacked the prison once to do so.
An urgent appeal to contact the International Red Cross was issued to help save the lives of the prisoners. And finally, Black Libyans continue to be targeted for harassment and murder in Libya by US/NATO allies on the ground. Teaching hate, given the images of US soldiers in Afghanistan urinating on Afghani dead bodies, is not a difficult thing to do, it would seem. Videos are posted of Black Libyans being beaten, whipped, threatened, harassed, and humiliated. These videos remind me of the antebellum South – reminiscent of the days of slavery and The Confederacy. So, when I use the word ‘descend’ to describe US anticipated actions, I mean just that: US troops are about to descend into the hell on Earth created by their President and the leaders of other countries who approved of, aided, or participated in the death of Libyan-owned society. A report from last night indicates that one militia, fearing other militias, even invited foreigners in to protect them.
I hope the report that I’m reading from 12 January 2012 is not true. I hope our President has not sent 12,000 troops of occupation to Malta destined for Libya. Lucy Grider-Bradley (of our DIGNITY Delegation) reminded me of the words of a high-ranking Libyan Jahamiriya Foreign Ministry representative who just happened to be at the Tunisia/Libya border office at the same time we were waiting there. He said, ‘Let the Americans come. We want them to taste our sandwiches. We will give them the same serving they got in Vietnam.’
Please write to our President (at www.whitehouse.gov) and ask him not to send troops of occupation (or whatever ‘euphemism de jour’ this Administration chooses to use) to Libya.
To save the lives of the young men in prison, please e-mail the International Red Cross at any or all of the e-mail addresses given below:
in Tripoli 218213409262 / Croix rouge
218919418066 / 218925236582
والبريد اللاكتروني : tri_tripoli@icrc.org
هذا اراقام المكتب الرئيسي للصليب الاحمرLe président de la croix rouge
في جنيفا 41227346001/ فاكس 41227332057
webmaster@icrc.org
منظمة حقوق الانسان: Organisation de protection des droits de l’homme
في مقره لندن : à London
David Mepham
UK Director
Eleanor Blatchley
Associate
Tel: +44 (0) 20-7713-2788
blatche@hrw.org
او مقره في سويسرا : En Suisse
Geneva
Switzerland
Tel: +41-22-738-0481
fax: +41-22-738-1791
الهلال الاحمر الليبي: http://www.lrc.org.ly/contactus.html
And then, please view the most recent addition to the extremely valuable work of a young documentarian, Julien Teil, who caught Amnesty International red-handed in proselytizing the lies in the lead-up to this Libya debacle that they tried to take back. In short, Amnesty admits that the ‘African mercenaries’ was just a rumor from the start. How many Black Libyans are suffering and have died because this woman and others like her safely ensconced in their seats of authority used them to proffer lies instead of protect the truth? The video is in both French and English and can be viewed here.
Lastly, there is one thing you can do: refuse to vote for war. Your vote is your most precious political asset. When you vote for Congressional representatives who, in turn, vote for war, you allow the people who made the coup – the people that General Wesley Clark talked about – you allow them to win. Overturn the coup by voting for peace. Cast your vote for peace. Ignore the pundits on the Sunday morning talk shows and vote for peace. Turn off the crap TV and vote for peace. Don’t even listen to your friends who think you’ve gone crazy, just vote for peace.
Cindy Piester, a documentarian who hosted the last event that I attended with my aunt in Ventura, California, just finished a film, ‘On the Dark Side in Al Doura – A Soldier in the Shadows’ in which Dick Cheney says that the United States has to ‘work toward the dark side, spend time in the shadows, in the intelligence world.’ He goes on to say, ‘A lot of what needs to be done will have to be done quietly without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.’ View her extremely well-done and sad film here and please, don’t let this gang of coup plotters take you and this country into the shadows where we don’t need or want to be.
Vote peace.
Read more on Libya and the NTC: 12,000 US troops to Libya By Cynthia McKinney…
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Two very significant and interconnected events happened this week in Liberia – President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was inaugurated for a second term with a subdued opposition attending the ceremonies, and former Liberian President Charles Taylor was implicated in a Boston Globe article for serving as a CIA informant beginning in the early 1980s and spanning many decades.
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Sources in the UDF and RDF reported to this reporter that the four generals in Rwanda that have been arrested was falsely reported as being arrested for questionable dealings in the DRC but in reality they were arrested due to the fleeing of 600-800 soldiers in December 2011
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Winston Churchill once said: “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” So, with keen interest, I listened to the message that President Thabo Mbeki came to deliver to us hoping that many of us would be listening in and that through listening we would learn something from one of Africa’s finest.
Read more on Mbeki’s message: To every action there is a reaction…
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Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was assassinated 50 years ago this month, on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed.
Read more on Patrice Lumumba: The Most Heinous Assassination of the 20th Century…
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