Atrocities against women in Congo

Turning Pain to Power

Women's Media Center: Disturbing stories out of the Congo: women and young girls raped by militia men in front of their families; rape victims ranging from as young as six months to as old as 83 years; women and girls faced with unwanted pregnancies and raped intentionally by men known to have AIDS... To date an estimated 400,000 women and girls have been raped.

There is also a devastating epidemic of women and girls whose vaginas and reproductive organs have been completely destroyed from being violated with guns, bottles and sticks, often resulting in a condition called fistula, a rupture that results in the uncontrollable leakage of urine and feces. The traumatized rape victims are then further stigmatized and ostracized by their families and communities... 

Says [Dr. Denis] Mukwege, awarded the UN Human Rights Prize in December 2008 for his humanitarian work, 'attacking women, the bearer of life, with this level of terror, I believe it has nothing to do with sexual desire. I think it's about destabilizing society, trying to destroy society.'... [Playwright Eve] Ensler says 'We still live in a world where femicide is taken for granted, where the raping of women, the destruction of women, is a given. Not extraordinary.'

The 'Turning Pain to Power Tour' supports a joint V-Day and UNICEF campaign... The organizers call for specific measures to end impunity for perpetrators and to economically and socially empower women and girls so they can lead in the prevention of sexual violence and in the rebuilding of a country devastated by conflict. The tour will also raise needed funds for the Panzi Hospital and build and open the City of Joy, a center where survivors will be provided with support to heal and training to develop their leadership and life skills.

Image source here.

Where empires go to die

Whistling Past the Afghan Graveyard

Tom Dispatch: For all their differences with Bush's first-term neocons, here's what the Obama team still has in common with them -- and it's no small thing: they still think the US won the Cold War. They still haven't accepted that they can't, even if in a subtler fashion than the Busheviks, control how this world spins; they still can't imagine that the United States of America, as an imperial power, could possibly be heading for the exits... 

The US continues to expand its armed forces and to garrison the globe, even as it attempts to bail out an economy and banking system evidently at the edge of collapse. This is a sure-fire formula for further disaster -- unless the new administration took the unlikely decision to downsize the US global mission in a major way. Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the question is no longer whether the US is in command, but whether it can get out in time.

Secret report recommends military shift in Afghanistan

MSNBC: According to military officials during last week's meeting with Defense Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon's 'tank,' the president specifically asked, 'What is the end game?' in the US military's strategy for Afghanistan. When asked what the answer was, one military official told NBC News, 'Frankly, we don't have one.' But they're working on it.

Fearing Another Quagmire in Afghanistan

New York Times: 'It seems there's a rush to send in more reinforcements absent the careful analysis that's most needed here,' said [Andrew] Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. 'There's clearly a consensus that things are heading in the wrong direction. What's not clear to me is why sending 30,000 more troops is the essential step to changing that. My understanding of the larger objective of the allied enterprise in Afghanistan is to bring into existence something that looks like a modern cohesive Afghan state. Well, it could be that that's an unrealistic objective. It could be that sending 30,000 more troops is throwing money and lives down a rat hole.'

Image source here.

Criminal delusion

Delusional in Davos

Foreign Policy: To achieve this state of mind, any human being probably needs to construct a formidable mental shield... Psychological self-defense, a Darwinian instinct, is part of human nature, and 'Davos Man' is no exception. Feelings of personal responsibility after a collective catastrophe are a matter for psychologists rather than World Economic Forum conversations... 

The audience seemed to enjoy the idea that the current crisis is a 'Black Swan,' a very unlikely, though possible, event. The alternative view is that of a train driven full speed into a wall. Thinking that way requires one to ask who was in the driver's seat, and just maybe recognizing one's own fingerprints on the wheel.

America Faces the Music in Davos

Truthdig: The immediate disaster, evident at Davos, is that the American economic model of deregulated market capitalism, dominant today in the US and the rest of the industrial world, cited as a vehicle of human progress, proves under examination to have been in significant part an affair of swindle, personal enrichment, looted Third World nations, international and national crime conspiracies, bank robbery and Ponzi schemes, criminal real estate, environmental and institutional rip-offs, and official corruption.

Image source here.

Map of Israeli land theft

Google map of Israeli Settlements from leaked database

View Larger Map

Mondoweiss: The 'Spiegel settlement database' is already creating waves in Israel. Israel NGO Yesh Din has announced that they will use the database to help Palestinians sue Israel for reparations and the removal of settlements from privately owned land.

To help get the word out, Mondo reader Jamie Dyer has used the information in the translated excerpts of the database (.pdf) to create this Google map. 'Making the map helped me to see the strategic placement of these settlements. The hilltops are being systematically taken in a sort of inversion of the topography of justice.'...

Click on the blue donkeytails for a report on each landgrab. Israel separates out the settlements into 'legal' and 'illegal' categories, and creates 'legal' processes for zoning and rebuilding settlements in the West Bank, but under international law all Israeli settlement in the occupied territories is illegal. Period.

Image source here.

For a world without nukes

Global Zero

We, the undersigned, believe 

that to protect our children, our grandchildren and our civilization from the threat of nuclear catastrophe, we must eliminate all nuclear weapons globally. We therefore commit to working for a legally binding verifiable agreement, including all nations, to eliminate nuclear weapons by a date certain.

Plantation Canada?

The farms race

Wealthy countries short of fertile land are gazing hungrily at Canada's prairies

Globe and Mail: 'Offshore farms' are a quiet, though burgeoning, form of neo-colonialism. And they have the potential to unleash a new food crisis. The Saudis are not alone in the global land grab. Any country that worries about long-term food security because of a shortage of fertile land, and has the wealth to do something about it, is on the hunt: United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Libya, India, China, Japan, plus a number of investment and private-equity funds... 

At first, the UN and the World Bank either ignored or cautiously supported the trend. Food prices were rising and foreign investment in raising crop productivity in poor countries seemed like a fine idea. They changed their minds when they realized offshore farms were all about locking up food supplies, not boosting them for the markets...

Watchdog groups such as Grain and the International Land Coalition also fear that poor farmers are being forced off productive land as the men with the cheques arrive. The authors of a recent Grain report said that some offshore farm deals amount to 'the siphoning of fertile and probably contested agricultural lands to rich foreigners.'... Imagine how suddenly hungry people would reach if they knew a good portion of their country's crops were being funnelled to rich countries. Rioters might seize foreign-owned farms. To prevent chaos, the government would probably nationalize the operations.

Which brings us to Canada. This country has far more farmland than it needs to keep us fed. The land is in a politically stable jurisdiction and is incredibly cheap by developed-country standards...

Agcapita partner Stephen Johnston says he's approached all the time by foreign interests seeking Canadian agricultural land. Foreign ownership restrictions on prairie farmland have blocked them so far, but that doesn't mean they're out of the picture. Foreigners might be able to lease farms or use loans or local partnerships to gain interests in the land. It's hard to imagine that Canada will not play a role as the global farmland rush gains momentum. Johnston is convinced it's just a matter of time.

Would it be in Canada's interest to turn big chunks of Saskatchewan or Manitoba into offshore farms for the UAE or China? In a country that believes in free trade, probably not. Farmers, food processors and politicians need to devise a policy before Canada becomes a target.

Image: CBC

'Inhumane' to block basic medical care

US doctors face challenges in crippled Gaza

Washington Post: Doctors from the United States who rushed to the Gaza Strip to help the war wounded quickly learned that their challenge went beyond treating shrapnel injuries. The eight American specialists found themselves operating on patients who had fallen victim to the 20-month border closure that had crippled Gaza's health care system even before Israel's offensive against Hamas... It's been difficult for Gaza patients to get out, ever since Israel and Egypt closed the borders... 

On the eve of the war, Gaza's hospitals had run out of 250 of the basic 1,000 health care items, and were short on 105 of 480 essential drugs, including some cancer medications and anesthetics, said Mahmoud Daher, a representative of the World Health Organization. In this vulnerable condition, disaster struck... The American doctors were careful to stay away from politics -- the lifting of the closure is linked to complex negotiations between Israel, Hamas, Egypt and others. But Dr. Ahmed Colwell, an emergency room physician from Sioux City, Iowa, said at least the sick should be given relief. 'It's inhumane... to not allow them to even have basic medical care.'

Doctors Spooked by Israel's Mystery Weapon

Danger Room: The weapon typically amputates or tears apart lower limbs and patients do not survive... The only known focused-lethality munition is a version of the GBU-40 Small Diameter Bomb. The weapon has been sold to Israel; Danger Room reported last month that the Israeli Defense Forces were using it in Gaza. But there are two problems. First, the Israelis seem to have bought the original version, not the FLM. And secondly, as Ares reported, Boeing has stated that it has not made any deliveries of the weapon to Tel Aviv, yet... Ares speculated that the IDF is using weapons supplied by the US Air Force; a spokesman told the site that 'we cannot release sensitive information on foreign military sales.'

Image: El Shafa Hospital, 2006 by Zoriah Miller via BAGnewsNotes

Stealing more land, faster

Peace Recedes as Israeli Settlements Expand

IPS: Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank increased sharply in 2008, despite Israel's pledge at the beginning of the year to freeze all construction, according to a new report by an Israeli non-governmental organization (.pdf)...

Settlement construction in 2008 increased by almost 60 percent, including new construction both inside and outside of the security barrier and within illegal settlement outposts... At least 1,257 new structures were built in West Bank settlements in 2008, up sharply from 800 in 2007. This figure did not include the 261 new structures built in illegal outposts in the West Bank. 

Nearly 40 percent of the new structures were built east of the security barrier, many of them extending deep into the West Bank. And despite the Israeli government's pledge to crack down on the illegal outposts, the study found that 'not a single real outpost was evacuated.' Additionally, the report found evidence that land confiscations were continuing to take place, contradicting the government's stated policy.

Secret Israeli database reveals full extent 

of illegal settlement

Haaretz: Here, for the first time, information the state has been hiding for years is revealed... In the vast majority of the settlements -- about 75 percent -- construction, sometimes on a large scale, has been carried out without the appropriate permits or contrary to the permits that were issued...

In more than 30 settlements, extensive construction of buildings and infrastructure (roads, schools, synagogues, yeshivas and even police stations) has been carried out on private lands belonging to Palestinian West Bank residents... Entire neighborhoods built without permits or on private lands are inseparable parts of the settlements... Municipal offices, police and fire stations were also built upon and currently operate on lands that belong to Palestinians.

Image source here.

'What strikes me is how deliberate this was'

Life in Gaza is not 

'back to normal'

Amira Hass, Haaretz: 'Only aerial photographs of the Gaza Strip will make it possible to show and to comprehend the extent of the destruction,' a number of Western civilians said this week. They added: 'But there isn't a chance that Israel will allow anyone to come with a light plane and to aerial photography.'...

The data, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, as of January 22, are as follows: 1,285 dead, of whom 1,062 were non-combatants (895 civilians and 167 civilian police). Of these, 281 were children (21.8 percent) and 111 women. There are 4,336 wounded, among them 1,133 children. The 6-year-old girl who we saw in the Zeytun neighborhood, who holds her hands up in the air in fear every time the photographer brings his camera near her, is not included in the list of the casualties.

Gaza businesses in tatters, struggle to rebuild

MSNBC: Not long ago, Yaser Alwadeya's factory was the largest food maker in the Gaza Strip... Today, the sprawling 47-acre complex lies in ruins... 'What hadn't been destroyed by the siege (Israeli sanctions) was finished off by bombs and tanks,' Hamad said, adding that 60 percent of Gaza's cement plants are now inoperable and a third of all metal workshops were destroyed. Airstrikes also targeted the territory's largest flour mill, wiping out 10,000 tons of wheat... 

UN humanitarian chief John Holmes said the extent of the wreckage was 'shocking,' especially the 'very systematic' destruction of industry... 'What strikes me is how deliberate this was,' Alwadeya said, pointing at the earth dug up next to one of his assembly plants by an Israeli army bulldozer, apparently to create a ramp so it could then roll onto the factory. Bulldozer or tank tracks were still visible on the collapsed roof...

At Gaza's largest private fish farm, owner Sohail Kehel was in tears as he sifted through some of the 20,000 dead fish now rotting in the six destroyed artificial ponds where he once raised red snapper... Both Alwadeya and Kehel vowed to rebuilt their businesses, despite the difficulty of finding financing or even securing building materials. 

'The only sure thing is that I'll rebuild my ponds,' said Kehel. 'I just don't know how.'

Image: Yaser Alwadeya points to the tracks left by a bulldozer or tank that he says drove onto his food factory's roof, causing it to collapse, in Beit Hanoun, Gaza Strip. Source here.

Gaza zoo animals 'shot at point-blank range'

Israeli troops shot and killed zoo animals

Gulf News: Zookeeper Emad Jameel Qasim doesn't appear to react to the stench as he walks around the animals' enclosures. A month ago, it was attracting families -- he says the zoo drew up to 1,000 visitors each day. He points at the foot-long hole in the camel in one of the enclosures. 'This camel was pregnant, a missile went into her back,' he tells us. 'Look, look at her face. She was in pain when she died.'

Video

Around every corner, inside almost every cage are dead animals, who have been lying in their cages since the Israeli incursion... Most of them have been shot at point blank range...

Inside the main building, soldiers defaced the walls, ripped out one of the toilets and removed all of the hard drives from the office computers. We asked him why they targeted the zoo. He laughs, 'I don't know. You have to go and ask the Israelis. This is a place where people come to relax and enjoy themselves. It's not a place of politics.'...

Israel has accused Hamas of firing rockets from civilian areas. Qasim reacts angrily when we raise the subject. 'Let me answer that with a question. We are under attack. There was not a single person in this zoo. Just the animals. We all fled before they came. What purpose does it serve to walk around shooting animals and destroying the place?'

Inside one cage lie three dead monkeys and another two in the cage beside them. Two more escaped and have yet to return. He points to a clay pot. 'They tried to hide,' he says of a mother and baby half-tucked inside... 

We ask him why it's so important for Gaza to have a zoo. 'Dueing the past four years it was the most popular place for kids. They came from all over the Gaza Strip. There was nowhere else for people to go.'

Image source here.

White flag killings military decision

Israeli troops killed Gaza

children carrying white flag, witnesses say

Mc Clatchy: Israeli tanks and bulldozers took up hilltop positions around Abu Freeh's home, and Khaled Abed Rabbo's five-story house in the valley below was one of those in the line of fire. More than 70 members of his family crowded into one apartment for days. On Jan. 7, Abed Rabbo said, the shelling intensified, and they heard an Israeli soldier calling for people to come out of their homes.

Abed Rabbo said he gathered his wife, their three daughters and his mother, Souad. Souad Abed Rabbo said that she tied a white robe around a mop handle and two of her granddaughters waved white headscarves as they walked outside. When they opened the door, they saw an Israeli tank parked in their garden about 10 yards away.

'We were waiting for them to give us an order,' Khaled said last week as he stood in the ruins of his home. 'Then one came out of the tank and started to shoot.'

Souad Abed Rabbo said she was shot as she pushed her son back inside and her granddaughters fell on the stairs. When the shooting was over, she said 2-year-old Amal and 7-year-old Souad were dead.

The allegation is one of at least five such white flag incidents that human rights investigators are looking into across the Gaza Strip... Along with the white flag incidents, Human Rights Watch is calling for an international investigation into widespread charges that Israel prevented medical teams from helping wounded Palestinians trapped in their homes and needlessly demolished hundreds of houses, including dozens in Ezbt Abed Rabbo.

'This was not a rogue unit,' said [Fred] Abrahams [a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch]. 'The needless civilian deaths resulted from concrete decisions made by the military.'

Image via AFP: 

IDF soldiers leave racist graffiti on Gaza homes

'Destruction of all means of life'

Gaza desperately short of food after Israel destroys farmland

The Guardian: Officials warn of 'destruction of all means of life' after the three-week conflict leaves agriculture in the region in ruins. Gaza's 1.5 million people are facing a food crisis as a result of the destruction of great areas of farmland during the Israeli invasion... Between 35% and 60% of the agriculture industry has been wrecked by the three-week Israeli attack, which followed two years of economic siege...

'Before the blockade and the attack,' said Ahmad Sourani, director of the Agricultural Development Association of Gaza, 'Gaza produced half of its own food. Now that has declined by 25%. In addition, a quarter of the population depends on agriculture for income. What we have seen in large areas of farmland is the destruction of all means of life.

'We have seen a creeping process of farmers being forced out of the buffer zone around Gaza's border. Before 2000 we could approach and farm within 50m of the fence. After Israel's evacuation of the settlements in 2005, the Israeli army imposed a buffer of 300m... Now there are areas, depending on the situation, where farmers cannot reach their farms in safety... It is indirect confiscation by fear... Bear in mind that 30% of Gaza's most productive land is within that buffer zone.'

The wholesale destruction of farms, greenhouses, dairy parlours, livestock, chicken coops and orchards has damaged food production, which was already hit by the blockade. Buildings heavily damaged included much of its agricultural infrastructure... Scores, perhaps hundreds, of wells and water sources have been damaged and several hundred greenhouses have been levelled...

As well as the physical damage done by Israeli bulldozers, bombing and shelling, land has been contaminated by munitions, including white phosphorus, burst sewage pipes, animal carcasses and even asbestos used in roofing. In many places, the damage is extreme... 'We can clear the ground in two weeks. Then what? The well is gone. The pump has been destroyed. And where will the trees come from to replant the land?'

Gaza faces failed harvests after the bombardment 

by Israel

Long term soil devastation in Gaza due to use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium

Image source here.

Demographic problem? Shoot children

Bullets in the brain

The Telegraph [UK]: Doctors at a hospital near Gaza are almost overwhelmed by the number of Palestinian children needing treatment for bullet wounds to their heads. Dr. Yahia, a professor of neurosurgery who has worked in both the United States and Britain, believes that the bullet was shot from close range... 'I can't precisely decide whether these children are being shot at as a target, but in some cases the bullet comes from the front of the head and goes toward the back, so I think the gun has been directly pointed at the child'... 'We've had one child with two bullets in the head and nowhere else,' he said. 'We think that this shows something.'

Child casualties of Israel's war on Gaza

The Guardian:

Mohammad Abu Hallma, 16, was shot dead by Israeli troops as he tried to take his injured relatives from the burning house in Atratra to hospital on 4 January...

Amal Abed Rabbo, two, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers outside her family's five-storey house in the village of Izbit Abed Rabbok in eastern Gaza on 7 January...

Shahed Abu Sultan, eight, was sitting on her father's lap mid-morning on 5 January, just outside the entrance to their small home in the Jabaliya refugee camp. An Israeli helicopter was flying overhead and, according to the family, was shooting down towards their houses. Shaded was hit by a single bullet to the head that killed her instantly...

Adham Mutair, 17, was shot by Israeli troops at his home near Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza, on 9 January. Israeli tanks had taken up positions in the area around the houses and the family had been trapped inside their home for a week. Adham went upstairs to the roof to check on their pigeons, which were housed in a large hut. As he stepped out into the open, he was shot three times... He died the next day...

Lina Hassan, 10, was killed by an Israeli shell as she walked to the shops next to the UN school in Jabaliya on January 6. 'She asked me for a shekel to go to the shops to buy something for her and her brothers and sisters,' said her father, Abdul, 38. 'I heard the shell and ran out. I saw her body lying on the ground -- part of her head was missing.'...

Mohammed Shaqoura, nine, was killed by the Israeli shelling at the UN school in Jabaliya on 6 January... 'I went to help the injured. I didn't realize Mohammed was one of them,' said his father, Basim, 40... 'The injury was in the back of his head.' [Italics added.]

Image: Amal Abed Rabbo; source here.

The wrong side of history

The Wrong Side

Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom: Between Israel and the United States a gap has opened... a narrow gap, almost invisible -- but it may widen into an abyss. The first signs are small. In his inaugural speech, Obama proclaimed that 'We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers.' Since when? Since when do the Muslims precede the Jews? ... The very next morning, Obama phoned a number of Middle East leaders... placing the first call to Mahmoud Abbas, and only the next to Olmert...

Instead of the group of American Jews who had been in charge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during both the Clinton and Bush administrations, Obama, on his very first day in office, appointed an Arab-American, George Mitchell... These are not good tidings for the Israeli leaders. For the last 42 years, they have pursued a policy of expansion, occupation and settlements in close cooperation with Washington. They have relied on unlimited American support, from the massive supply of money and arms to the use of the veto in the Security Council. This support was essential to their policy. This support may now be reaching its limits.

No Happy Ending

Fred Reed: The practical question regarding Israel's recent invasion of Gaza is not 'Who is right?' but 'Can Israel last?' ... Israel today is not the country once dreamed, in which Heidelberg professors escaped from Europe would work the soil with their hands on kibbutzim and play chess and the violin at night. It looks more like what the professors fled. Brutal conflicts breed brutal people. Atrocities engender counter-atrocities, extremists come to the fore, and military solutions seem the only solutions... Say I, either the country finds peace with its neighbors or it goes the way of the Crusader Kingdom...

The Israelis appear to be trapping themselves... They continue their annexation of the West Bank,... which rules out a two-state solution. To control a large hostile population, you need harsh methods, which keep the population hostile... Sooner or later, the question will be: Democratic, or Jewish? America killed its indigenous population, the Spanish married theirs, but Israel can do neither. Now what? ...

Israel depends entirely on a foreign country, namely America, for its survival. The US provides the weaponry, the financial aid, the vetoes in the UN, and the last-resort military support... Without this support, Israel could not last... Methinks a faint smell of doom hangs over Tel Aviv... Nothing Israel is likely to do looks workable in the long run. The demographics are terrible, regional Arab hostility assured, the military balance only able to deteriorate, the whole enterprise hanging by a lobby... Unless something changes, and I don't have any bright ideas, I don't see a happy ending.

Image source here.