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Friday marked not one but two important anniversaries: Human Rights Day and Day of Action against US Military Bases. For more on the former and to find out exactly what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is all about, go here.
Speaking of human rights, last week also saw more revelations from the Wikileaks Datadump – this time to do with the displaced Chagos islanders and their fight for the right to return to their homeland in Diego Garcia. Read my 4-page comic about the case here. As has often been the case with the Wikileaks “revelations”, it’s only cemented what we’d feared all along – that the MPs in charge of the project had treated the entire case with the sort of disabused colonial mentality that the Foreign Office is often parodied for. Here’s the quick summary: [USG=US Gov’t). My highlights in bold. For more detail, read this Guardian article.
The official insisted that the establishment of a marine park — the world’s largest — would in no way impinge on USG use of the BIOT, including Diego Garcia, for military purposes. He agreed that the UK and U.S. should carefully negotiate the details of the marine reserve to assure that U.S. interests were safeguarded and the strategic value of BIOT was upheld. He said that the BIOT’s former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve.
2. And as if there was any doubt about the real purpose of Diego Garcia in either UK or US govts’ minds:
Designating the BIOT as a marine park could, years down the road, create public questioning about the suitability of the BIOT for military purposes. Roberts responded that the terms of reference for the establishment of a marine park would clearly state that the BIOT, including Diego Garcia, was reserved for military uses.
3. But here’s the real, unedited UK gov’t take on the issue:
Roberts acknowledged that “we need to find a way to get through the various Chagossian lobbies.” He admitted that HMG is “under pressure” from the Chagossians and their advocates to permit resettlement of the “outer islands” of the BIOT. He noted, without providing details, that “there are proposals (for a marine park) that could provide the Chagossians warden jobs” within the BIOT. However, Roberts stated that, according to the HGM,s current thinking on a reserve, there would be “no human footprints” or “Man Fridays” on the BIOT’s uninhabited islands. He asserted that establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago’s former residents. Responding to Polcouns’ observation that the advocates of Chagossian resettlement continue to vigorously press their case, Roberts opined that the UK’s “environmental lobby is far more powerful than the Chagossians’ advocates.” (Note: One group of Chagossian litigants is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) the decision of Britain’s highest court to deny “resettlement rights” to the islands’ former inhabitants.
The BIOT “has had a great role in assuring the security of the UK and U.S. — much more than anyone foresaw” in the 1960s, Roberts emphasized. “We do not regret the removal of the population,” since removal was necessary for the BIOT to fulfill its strategic purpose, he said. Removal of the population is the reason that the BIOT’s uninhabited islands and the surrounding waters are in “pristine” condition. Roberts added that Diego Garcia’s excellent condition reflects the responsible stewardship of the U.S. and UK forces using it.
(Because, let’s face it – why would you let the natives steward the land when the UK and US gov’t could do such a better job at it?)
My comic on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is now headlining the newly-relaunched Religion Dispatches website. Above is the third extract of the piece. Click here to read it from the beginning. Sources/substantiating evidence below. New visitors: welcome! More comics are free to read by clicking on the tabs at the top of the page. Be sure to add the Archcomix RSS Feed to never miss an update, or become a fan on facebook here. Click here to support this site by ordering a hard copy of an issue of Archcomix.
Also, please click here to Digg the link to the RD article, or RT/Fwd. Thanks!
panel 7: for a full list of its offices, click here.
panel 8.1: for more information on the differences, click here.
panel 8.2: see below for the 3 page comic, “Lunch on K Street”, on the lobbying process in DC, that first ran in DC’s own Bash magazine a few years ago.
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panel 9: paraphrased from an actual lobbying firm’s website.
panel 10: For more info, click here and here
The Danish paper Dagbladet Arbejderen (Daily Worker) is running a feature on the last three pages of my Honduran comic today, click here for this just-about-intelligible-enough translation courtesy of Google translate.
As you’ll have seen above, the cover to the Honduran Coup: A Graphic History is now finished, and patiently awaiting a journey to the printers. There’s nothing quite like drawing a crowd of riot police to get you thinking about civil disobedience and the concomitant governmental responses, especially in conjunction with an unnerving yet fantastic piece in the March issue of Harper’s Magazine that I came across recently.
The article’s about the development and proliferation of non-lethal weapons for crowd control and ‘peaceful engagement’ of civilian protests, and cites numerous examples of these cuddly alternatives such as the LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) and the neuro-chemical agent that reportedly played a pivotal role in ending the Chechen Hostage Crisis. Killing most, if not all, of the hostages in the process. Readers of this blog will also remember the LRAD’s role in the Honduran coup crisis, one which was actively denied by the de facto regime despite televised images such as this one (see left) being broadcast by Telesur. Its ear-shattering debut on US soil was at the Pittsburgh G20 protests, which you can witness below for yourself.
For the long wishlist of other techno-gadgets that every repressive government shouldn’t be without, click here. Granted, it’s from 2003 – from “Nonlethal Weapons: Terms and References,” a report published by the United States Air Force Institute for National Security Studies – and many on the list are still at the ‘proposal’ stage, but it’s good to see security officials really getting creative with their futuristic weaponised fantasies.
My personal favourite is under the ‘Holograms’ section entitled, Prophet: The projection of the image of an ancient god over an enemy capital whose public communications have been seized and used against it in a massive psychological operation. Doctor Manhattan eat your heart out.
Speaking of imaginative flights of fancy when it comes to security, Secretary of State Clinton is currently on a tour of central america and stopped off in Guatemala where she wished Honduran ‘President’ Pepe Lobo well and urged the rest of Latin America to take his government seriously. Or recognize them, for a start. She told those assembled (including Lobo himself) “We support the work that President Lobo is doing to promote national unity and strengthen democracy,” and went on to say that the US is restoring all aid to the country. No matter that the human rights situation in the country continues to worsen by the day, prompting first the Director of Human Rights Watch to write to the Honduran Attorney General and now nine members of congress to write directly to Clinton to investigate the abuses. Here’s their letter.
Brace yourselves, this is going to be a long one to reflect what an ugly week it’s been in US-related politics. First up, here’s the latest part of the School of the Americas piece – skip back 3 steps to get to the beginning and find out more about SOA/WHINSEC and their illustrious graduates’ violent pasts.
As the estimated number of dead in Haiti rises past the 200,000 mark, several news reports (Democracy Now!, The Guardian and Al Jazeera for starters) are describing the US’s apparent takeover of the main airport at Port-au-Prince. Convoys carrying aid, medical supplies and water are being re-directed to make way for a worrying number of US troops, who are being deployed ‘to ensure security’. Yes Magazine had a great quote from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who, after declaring her expectation that the Haitian government would pass an emergency decree – including things like the right to impose curfews – said, “The decree would give the government an enormous amount of authority, which in practice they would delegate to us”. Of course they would.
Naomi Klein leads the charge for transparency to prevent Haiti from succumbing to the free market agenda that New Orleans did in the aftermath of Katrina. Here’s a checklist of suggested actions sent by Rep. Paul Teller on September 13, 2005 – let’s hope they don’t start happening in Port-au-Prince. One other chilling similarity with Katrina is the already conspicuous presence of Blackwater-esque private mercenary forces, operating under the philanthropically-tinged moniker International Peace Operations Association. For an altogether more upfront description of their services in Haiti, checkout this webpage hosted by a similar private outfit called All Pro Legal Investigations – under the ‘Personal Protection’ header they’ll even deal with ‘worker unrest’ and ‘high-threat terminations’. What more could an International Peacekeeping force want? Jeremy Scahill has the whole scoop over at the Nation.
The bad news then came home, not only with the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat for the Democrats, but also yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that curbing corporate donations to electoral campaigns is unconstitutional. Why? Because it infringes on the said corporations’ first amendment rights to free speech. I’m sure that’s exactly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he said, “the end of democracy will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.” See corporate watch for more info.
Lastly, one piece of good news to try and even up the balance. The online human rights and social justice magazine Independent World Report will publish my 4-page piece on Diego Garcia in their next issue.
Next three panels of my piece on the School of the Americas. To start at the beginning, just hit previous for an intro to the SOA and its heinous past.
Remember, this piece and the Honduran coup comics I put together with Nikil Saval are available in hard copy format via the chipin widget on the right hand side bar, shipped directly to your door for $5 plus $2 shipping. Or you could just click here.
Below is a film I highly recommend, viewable free online, about the SOA and the part Father Roy Bourgeois has had in fighting to get it shut down:
Above is the last tier of the Honduran comic. Now that the fake election was pushed through and trumpeted by the media, let’s not let the spotlight drift away from the area – check out the video below for some excellent reporting from behind the scenes of the voting process:
Also, here’s a comic from last year exposing the dangers, greed and environmental destruction inherent to Mountain Top Removal – and good luck to those who are protesting in Copenhagen this week.
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A request to new visitors to the site: (welcome!) on the right hand toolbar is a chipin widget that I’m using to get pre-orders for a hard copy, full-colour 32p comic about US intervention in central america – featuring both parts of the Honduran Coup: A Graphic History as published in Alternet and the Huffington Post. Read more about it on the chipin page I’ve created here.
For $5 (plus $2 shipping in the US and $4 overseas) you’ll get a copy of the comic as well as your name printed in the back, along with all the other donors to the project. We’re already well on the way (see the total) and payment is via paypal so totally safe. Be part of a group project to help raise awareness and produce an educational tool that will have a lasting impact. And please use the buttons below to share this link around – facebook, twitter, digg – any help is appreciated.
