The Dominion - International News

Marketing Consent

taramichelle — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 13:47:48 +0000

A journey into the public relations underside of Canada's mining sector

VANCOUVER—It’s no secret that Canadian mining companies are fanned out around the world. Conflicts linked to large-scale mining projects have come to the fore as some of the most intense social and environmental struggles in this hemisphere and beyond. But well outside of the headlines, another industry, one that purports to link Indigenous people internationally in order to benefit from resource extraction, has slowly taken off.

Whether or not they are upfront about their connections to mining companies, Canadians with labyrinthine corporate, consulting and Indigenous affiliations have been paying unexpected visits to Indigenous communities throughout the Americas. A closer look at an example of this intervention reveals how their promotion of the Canadian mining industry in impoverished communities undermines local struggles to protect territory and exacerbates conflict.

In Panama, Vancouver-based Corriente Resources began promoting the Cerro Colorado copper deposit in recognized Ngabe-Bugle territory three years ago, even though the company never secured permits from the government. In February 2011, Law 8 was passed, revising the 1963 mining code to allow direct foreign investment in mining concessions. Together with a proposed hydro-electric dam, mining interests at play even before the legislation changes were at the heart of intense protests and repression. The government repealed Law 8 in March 2011, but protests demanding a definitive ban on mining in Ngabe-Bugle territory continued.

Two Indigenous protesters were killed on February 5, 2012 when police opened fire on highway blockade actions taken to defend the Comarca’s land and resources. On March 21, after an agreement between the government and the elected Ngabe-Bugle leadership, the National Assembly of Panama passed Special Law 415, prohibiting mining concessions and development in the Ngabe-Bugle territory, and requiring consent for hydro-electric development.

The Ngabe-Bugle Comarca—a State-recognized territory with some degree of political autonomy—was established by the Panamanian government in 1997, in large part due to political pressure from the Ngabe and Bugle peoples seeking political autonomy and control over lands threatened by resource exploitation. With the largest Indigenous population in the country, the level of poverty in the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca is among the highest in the country. Since the Panamanian government did not cede subsoil or water rights as part of the agreement, struggles to protect the territory, subsistence agriculture and traditional culture are ongoing.

While Corriente is only one of many threats, the company's presence has involved much more than mine exploration: Canadian Don Clarke has been active in the Comarca. Clarke is a member of the Black River First Nation, head of a consulting company, Kokopelli, and was previously a community relations representative of Ecuacorriente, a Corriente subsidiary in Ecuador. During his time in Ecuador, Clarke was involved at the inception of a small pro-mining Indigenous Shuar federation led by a man who was expelled from other Indigenous organizations and confederations, according to a report by MiningWatch Canada.

In western Panama, the Jadran Nigwe Nirien Ngwaire Ngobe Association appeared around the same time Clarke was first reported to be promoting mining in the Comarca. Jadran claims to represent the majority of the Ngobe communities. According to the association, communities want a 50 per cent stake in the Cerro Colorado deposit so that, in the event of its sale to a mining corporation, the money can be used to finance community development. At the same time, Jadran insisted that it was not necessarily in favour of mining; the association claimed that its objective of a 50 per cent stake in the deposit’s ownership did not entail support for mining activities in the Comarca.

Jadran has denounced organizations opposing mining as unrepresentative foreign-influenced groups. In a letter to the editor published by the Panama America newspaper last December, Jadran president Adriana Sandoya called on the government to reject the claims and demands of organizations opposing mining in Ngabe-Bugle territory. “Our association rejects the so-called ‘Special Law’ promoted by the so-called ‘Coordinadora,’ [for the Defense of Natural Resources and the Rights of the Ngabe-Bugle and Peasant Farmers] which represents no one, was never elected by anyone, and that only seeks to propagate and increase the existing levels of poverty in our Comarca,” she wrote.

Despite Sandoya and Jadran’s claims that the association speaks for thousands of local residents in the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca, its own membership process is questionable. In early 2011, a post on Jadran’s website explained how to become a member: “If you want to be a member of Jadran and join our struggle, you only have to sign our membership book during our meetings and it’s done!”

This process allows the organization to unilaterally enroll members without their explicit consent, mirroring a practice common among mining companies, which often claim consultation with, and support from, anyone signing an attendance list.

In February of 2011, Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli signed a decree to halt speculation over mining activities in the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca. The Government of Panama subsequently issued a public statement that gave foreigners involved in promoting activities relating to mining in Ngabe-Bugle territory a deadline of two weeks to leave the jurisdiction of the Comarca.

According to widespread reports in the Panamanian press, the primary reason for the measure was the persistence of Kokopelli, Clarke and Chilean associate Loreto Cubillos in promoting mining in the region.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an individual working with Corriente Resources told The Dominion that Clarke held a position with the company five or six years ago in Ecuador, but has not since been employed by Corriente or any of its subsidiaries. He later had a contract with the company to work in Panama, but both the contract and all company activities in Panama were terminated when the company was taken over by a subsidiary of a Chinese consortium in 2010. According to the Corriente source, however, Clarke may well be working with other mining companies in Panama. While none were specified, Canadian corporations Petaquilla Gold and Inmet are both active in the country.

"We're seeing that a lot of these companies don't have the understanding and the experience to understand the local communities and of course you're seeing a lot of conflict," Don Clarke told the CBC in 2007. At the time, Clarke was pitching the idea that First Nations could sell their expertise on managing conflicts over natural resources to the Southern Chiefs Organization and Manitoba Keewatinook Ininew Okimowin. "We see a real business opportunity for our First Nations people to capitalize on the knowledge that we have and the experiences," he told the CBC.

The same CBC article identifies Clarke as “an adviser to the mining committee of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce” in Ecuador. But Clarke's titles were many: adviser of International Affairs, Southern Chiefs Organization; Clarke Educational Services; and Black River First Nation. This chameleonic identification allows for the obfuscation of ties to industry when it is advantageous.

In Panama, it would appear that Clarke's presence instigated activity by a small vocal group advocating for involvement in a mining concession and criticizing opponents, something that was not achieved through his interactions with the Diaguita council in northern Chile.

Sergio Campusano, President of the Diaguita Huascoaltino Indigenous and Agricultural Community in northern Chile, has a clear memory of Clarke.

Campusano’s community council has long been an outspoken opponent of Canadian mining projects in their territory. In 2005, at beginning of organized Diaguita opposition to Barrick Gold’s planned Pascua Lama gold mega-project, the community was approached by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC).

“What happened is that at that time, it was the first time we were faced with a project of that scope,” said Campusano. “They said that in Canada, Indigenous Peoples had good agreements with the companies in their territories—they received up to 50 per cent of the production profits, that they were given university [education], that thanks to the money they had houses, had work,” Campusano told The Dominion this June.

The Diaguita Huascoaltino community was opposed to Barrick Gold’s Pascua Lama project, but open to learning more about the proposal and weighing their options.

After Campusano and the directive council met with AMC representatives—including political advisor Don Clarke—in Vina del Mar, Chile, they researched his claims with the help of a Chilean Indigenous rights group. Campusano said that try as they might, they could not find an example of an Indigenous community in Canada receiving any more than four per cent of the production profits, plus some education and other benefits. Clarke, Campusano and others met again in Santiago to discuss cultural and other exchanges, and an International Agreement of Indigenous Co-operation on January 19, 2006.

Six days later, the AMC assembly passed a resolution to establish an International Relations Committee of Chiefs. The AMC resolution focused on trade and cultural relationships in broad terms, but on the ground it became apparent that they were seeking to intercede in negotiations with Barrick Gold.

“The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, through then [Grand] Chief Ron Evans, said that they could achieve much more than that, but only as long as we gave them the mandate to negotiate for us, because they had experience getting more money, more profits for the benefit of the community,” Campusano told The Dominion, adding that the mandate sought by the AMC for negotiations with Barrick Gold was a sort of power of attorney. “It was as legally authorized representatives.”

The Diaguita Huascoaltino leaders took each proposal back to their own bi-annual community assemblies, which chose to negate the right of the AMC to negotiate or act on their behalf. The communities did request a visit by Ron Evans, which was accepted by the AMC.

“He said he was going to go. We prepared a massive ceremony. We made a tremendous schedule. And only Don Clarke shows up,” said Campusano. The Diaguita Huascoaltino authorities informed the AMC that without a visit by Ron Evans and clarification as to connections to Barrick Gold, the co-operation agreement was null and void.

“I have documents where the famous Don Clarke wrote to me and every time he wrote these emails to the institutional Huascoaltino email, there would be copies sent to three high-ranking Barrick Gold representatives,” said Campusano. According to documents obtained by The Dominion, copies of an update were sent by Clarke to Barrick Gold VP of Operations Kelvin Dushinisky and Barrick South America Director of Community Relations Rod Jimenez.

“So that was when I realized that this mining company was behind it,” said Campusano.

Clarke's involvement in Chile is far from the exception to the rule. Not only is he just one among several similar consultants for hire, but mining companies are also not the only financiers of Indigenous partnerships in the mining sector.

The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has also been involved in the Indigenous promotion of mining activities over the past two decades. One project under CIDA’s ongoing Indigenous Peoples Partnership Program (IPPP) was a “Mining Sector–Indigenous Capacity Building” project in Guyana, Colombia and Suriname from 2007 to 2011, to “[enable] two-way learning between Canadian Indigenous peoples and Indigenous partners in Latin American and the Caribbean regarding interactions with mining companies and governments,” according to CIDA’s project description.

“The initiatives supported by the IPPP were conceived both by indigenous organizations in the Latin American and Caribbean region and their Canadian Aboriginal partners,” wrote CIDA media relations representative Katherine Heath-Eves in an email to The Dominion.

But closer examination shows the initial project documents were not developed by Indigenous organizations in either Latin America or in Canada. They were instead developed by a consultant who frequently works for Canadian mining corporations.

Although not Indigenous himself, the founder and president of Canadian consulting company Wayne Dunn & Associates has often worked in Indigenous communities through contracts in dozens of countries around the world over the past 20 years. His clients include government agencies, extractive industry corporations and other sectors.

“I actually had the contract to develop the initial documents for the Indigenous Peoples Partnership Program for CIDA,” Dunn told The Dominion in a telephone interview from California.

Aware of some of his prior work in Canada regarding Indigenous business partnerships, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) asked him to submit a proposal for a project under the auspices of the UN’s International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People, 1995-2004. “So I made them a proposal and next thing I know I was mission leader on this seven-country mission that started this whole Inter-Indigenous Partnerships thing,” said Dunn.

What began as a 1994 UNDP scoping mission for Indigenous-to-Indigenous business and trade opportunities in Central America soon became a larger project for Apikan Indigenous Network, Dunn’s consulting company at the time, with funding from CIDA, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and several other agencies. In fact, Dunn accompanied Jean Chretien on his first Prime Ministerial Trade Mission to Latin America in January 1995, shortly after the initial scoping mission.

At the same time, the Canadian government began involving Indigenous individuals and particularly First Nations band council Chiefs in its trade, business and investment promotion visits and activities in Latin America.

Proposed mines continue to spring up around the world and governments, corporations and non-governmental organizations are increasingly focusing their attention on Corporate Social Responsibility. The forecast for the niche market of extractive sector consultants seeking "social license" in Indigenous territories has never been brighter.

“Businesses—especially extractive sector businesses—need to be able to work effectively with local people and communities. And I think, you know, participation in the Trade Mission is able to talk about how some Canadian companies have been able to do that,” said Dunn. “We see [a] broader group of Canadian Indigenous Peoples involved internationally than we did, you know, 15 years ago. We see more individual First Nations and Indigenous businesses directly involved than we did then.”

In the context of questions about how Indigenous communities are approached where there is conflict or opposition regarding a proposed mining project, Dunn emphasized the importance of companies focusing getting a return on their “social license investment” just as they would on other things.

“My role is to help [companies] to find ways that they can produce more local benefits for less costs, or that they can get a better return on what they're investing in. I find often when I go into a project that...companies can be investing a lot of money in trying to do it, but they're just not strategic about it,” he told The Dominion. “We've developed some pretty sophisticated and successful frameworks and strategies around that.”

In Panama and throughout the Americas, consulting company strategies and the involvement of Indigenous individuals acting on behalf of Canadian mining interests continues. Whether this will be enough to overcome the increasingly militant opposition to multi-national mining ventures remains to be seen.

Sandra Cuffe is a Vancouver-based freelance journalist who has way too much fun doing research.

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Canada Deepens Ties with Deadly Regime

Tim McSorley — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:58:53 +0000

Honduran journalist visits Montreal, reaffirms strength of resistance movements

MONTREAL—In June 2009, Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped by soldiers and taken to Costa Rica in a military airplane. The Honduran army took control of the streets.

Nearly three years later, a popular resistance movement continues to organize against and oppose the coup. Meanwhile, the Canadian government and Canadian companies continue to deepen their ties with the controversial post-Zelaya regime.

The coup in Honduras was more than the kidnapping of a popular, progressive president. The day of the coup, Zelaya was scheduled to oversee a non-binding, nationwide survey on whether people were in favor of holding a binding referendum on re-writing the Honduran constitution. For the first time in history, the opinion of regular Hondurans would have had the potential to dramatically change the future of their country.

Had the June 2009 survey passed, it would have meant serious momentum toward a long-term goal of the Honduran social movement, the writing of a new constitution by way a people's assembly, inviting representatives from every sector and municipality to join in the re-founding of Honduras.

The coup, a joint operation by the military, supreme court, congress, and business elite, put a stop to all of this. It meant that the current Honduran constitution, written under a US-backed military dictatorship in the early 1980s, would continue to benefit a small elite.

But the coup also gave rise to the creation of the National People's Resistance Front, which now has local chapters in each of Honduras' 298 municipalities. The resistance movement is dedicated to bringing about a new constitution, at whatever cost.

In 2011, Honduras became the deadliest country in the world, for those countries which the UN has been able to gather statistics. "Our country of just 8 million people is suffering more than 20 murders per day," said Felix Molina, a Honduran journalist who recently spoke in Montreal during a Canadian tour. “Among the victims are around 20 journalists and 424 women. On top of murders, there are death threats, forced disappearances, exile for some and a general criminalization of the social resistance movement.”

Molina is the host, producer and founder of the radio show Resistencia. The show airs on the station Radio Globo, which has supported resistance and pro-democracy movements since the coup.

In the November 2009 Honduran general elections, Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo was elected president in a vote took place under what some considered a state of siege.

In the five months between Zelaya's kidnapping and the vote, more than 4,000 anti-coup activists were arbitrarily detained. Anti-coup media outlets were repeatedly shut down by the military. More than 100 community organizers were assassinated. Meanwhile, Zelaya, the president in exile, made his way back to Honduras and hid out in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa surrounded by the military.

As a result of the deteriorating security conditions under the interim coup regime headed by Roberto Micheletti and the military's offensive against the resistance, all international election observation bodies refused to send observers.

Regardless, the United States and Canada applauded Lobo's election, and put pressure on other countries to do the same.

The Harper administration has shown it is especially eager to work with Honduran officials since the coup, and Canada's corporate interests in the country continue to grow. In August 2011, Stephen Harper traveled to Honduras and signed a free trade agreement with Honduras. The announcement was unexpected, and took many by surprise.

”The Honduran population was never informed about this [agreement],” said Molina. “As with many of the most important decisions in Honduras, they learned about it after it was taken.”

Honduran congress is considering a new mining law, which critics say prioritizes corporate interests over human rights. This mining law, they say, is designed to benefit mining companies by, among other things, failing to protect access to water and limiting both access to information about mining activities and the ability to have mines closed.

Canadian mining company Goldcorp has faced criticism of its San Martin gold mine, which operated from 2000 to 2008 in central Honduras.

Goldcorp consistently denied that its operations had anything to do with a variety of health problems among locals, including miscarriages and skin diseases, as well as the death of livestock. In 2011, results of tests conducted in 2007 were finally released, showing heavy metal poisoning among 62 residents of the area near the mine.

The National People's Resistance Front recently voted to form a political party as another way to confront these corporate interests. Some groups within the wider resistance movement believe there are other ways to continue the struggle, such as establishing autonomous popular zones and small-scale municipal powers.

“The discussion is far from being over,” Molina said during his talk in Montreal. “In the meantime, we have to make sure that the popular movement keeps existing and to reinforce the capacities of the National Resistance Front.”

Stéfanie is part of the Montreal Media Co-op and is currently interning at CKUT 90.3FM's community news department.

Jesse Freeston is a media co-op sustainer and maker of the upcoming film Resistencia about the ongoing farmer occupation of Honduras' Aguan Valley, www.resistenciathefilm.com.

This article was produced by the Montreal Media Co-op.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line: info@mediacoop.ca.

Felix Molina

Island Hopping With Emera

Miles — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 09:58:00 +0000

Barbados is the latest Caribbean island to feel the Emera squeeze

HALIFAX—On a small island north of Venezuela, 4,500 kilometres from Halifax, Barbados Light and Power (BLP) recently issued a news release. Energy use on the Caribbean island has hit a low not seen since 1974.

“Some people are now simply just turning off all the electricity in their homes, especially when they're not home,” says Carson Cardogan, a Barbadian ratepayer. “They're pulling out everything. Every plug. Including the fridge. People are living virtually in the dark, in order to not pay Barbados Light and Power the hefty electricity bills.”

While the average Canadian might applaud such a downward shift in power consumption, this is not a question of Barbadians “going green” by choice. It is the work of Nova Scotia’s Emera, BLP's new owner.

Emera, the Nova Scotia-based company, moved fast onto the scene in Barbados, purchasing a 38 per cent share in the largely nationally-owned BLP in May 2010, and another 41 per cent in January 2011. When shares in BLP were trading at $12 on the Barbados stock market, Emera offered BLP shareholders $25 per share—an offer they could not refuse. A few dissenting voices, on call-in programs and social media panels, urged caution against selling off the national power company to a foreign interest, but the deal went through unencumbered.

Later, an investigation by the Fair Trade Commission (FTC), Barbados' regulatory body, suggested that BLP shares were devastatingly undervalued, and should have been priced in the $40 to $50 range.

Writers at “Barbados Underground”, one of the nations' most read independent media sites, suspected something was amiss with the deal. The FTC, as regulator of BLP's power rates prior to the sale to Emera, would have been well-informed of BLP's assets and net worth. To emerge post-sale saying that Emera had purchased a more valuable company than they thought they had is suspicious indeed.

This isn't Emera's first Caribbean purchase. The company already has a controlling interest in the Grand Bahamas Power Company, the monopoly service provider to about 20,000 customers on the island of Grand Bahama. Purchased in 2009, its relationships on the island of Grand Bahamas have been anything but easy. Operation Justice Bahamas (OJB), a grassroots organization, has gathered over 5,000 signatures from disgruntled customers who have cried foul over skyrocketing power bills.

OJB's actions forced the Bahamian government into an ongoing investigation into Emera's business practices, including hundreds of allegations of overpricing, “guess-timation,” and destructive power surges. Sarah MacDonald, Emera's chief officer in the Caribbean, suggested that difficulties in meter-reading were related to the fact that over 8,000 Bahamians did not have a postal address, an allegation that OJB dismisses as a “slap in the face.”

OJB is hoping the governmental investigation is the first step towards a class-action lawsuit against Emera.

“They are, in my words, driving the people into poverty. And they are causing people to lose business,” says Troy Garvey of OJB.

Emera also owns a 19 per cent equity interest in St. Lucia Electricity Services Limited (LUCELEC). While Emera’s involvement in St. Lucia seems to be developing at a slow pace, the situation on Barbados is unraveling quickly.

In Barbados, public allegations of exorbitant power bills, based on incomprehensible calculations, are running rampant, and representatives from industry agree. Sir David Seale, chairman of RL Seale & Company, one of Barbados's largest rum bottlers, has publicly railed against Emera, calling the current situation “unacceptable for industry.” Seale has had to divert company money towards developing new energy infrastructure, and has shifted to diesel generators in an effort to get off the Barbadian grid.

Meanwhile, the government, in an attempt to keep electrical power flowing into some of the more impoverished homes in Barbados, instituted a plan in October 2011, known as Energy Cost Mitigation Assistance (ECMA). The ECMA is a one-off grant of $5 million for welfare-recipient Barbadians, which was created to offset the global increase in fuel costs that are supposedly responsible for BLP's steady rise in power bills.

Before Emera purchased BLP, there was no apparent need for an emergency-style government fund for the nation's poorest to pay their power bills.

Emera’s electricity rate increases, be it in Nova Scotia, on Grand Bahamas or in the Barbados, are all approved by a “third-party” regulatory body, and are thus granted some veneer of legitimacy. In Barbados, that regulatory body is the Free Trade Commission (FTC). In Nova Scotia, the regulatory body is the Utility and Review Board (UARB).

In Barbados, Malcolm Gibbs-Taitt, founder and director general of Barbados Consumer Research Organization, has brought into question the link between the FTC and the Barbados Securities Commission, the body meant to regulate the Barbados Stock Exchange. Both are chaired by Sir Neville Nicholls. The term “regulatory capture,” by which a regulatory agency meant to serve the common good is instead co-opted by private interests, applies here: one individual is overseeing BLP's sale, and also overseeing BLP's requests for rate increases (read: profit).

“My problem with the Fair Trade Commission is that it does not seem to have the ability to get the proper information before it,” says Gibbs-Taitt, “[or] to share that information with those that are involved in the process, to the extent that we can be reasonably assured that what it is doing in the names of the people, the consumers, [is something where] you could say, 'This is a job well done.'”

A similar instance of regulatory capture is at play in Nova Scotia.

Brennan Voegel, former Energy Coordinator for the Ecology Action Centre, notes that Peter Gurnham, largely responsible for the UARB's decisions on NSPI's rate increase requests, was formerly a lawyer in the service of NSPI.

“The major problem is that [NSPI] is guaranteed a rate of return...which allows them to usurp more money out of Nova Scotians,” says Voegel. “They have to make money, but there's very few industries in the world today that still enjoy that enshrined right to profit. And if it were an open market, like it should be, then electricity provided at the lowest cost, with the greatest degree of efficiency, would be the product that people would be choosing.”

The relationship between the UARB, the Nova Scotian government, and NSPI, which Voegel calls “the golden triangle,” has worked well for Emera's top brass. Executive salaries and bonuses have never been higher, with CEO Chris Huskilson taking home over $3 million in 2011. A new corporate head office on the waterfront in Halifax, a structure currently under construction, is slated to cost between $30 million and $40 million.

Executive salaries and bonuses aside, Emera's new-found role as Caribbean power boss begs the question: What exactly is afoot in the islands? Is this a case of classic Canadian snowbird syndrome? Or is a grander scheme in the works?

All of Emera's Caribbean purchases produce the vast majority of their power by burning oil or diesel —the weakest link in Emera's control of the situation. The company is not in the oil refinery or shipping business, and so is beholden to global market trends. Emera, however, is in the gas pipe building business, and already wholly owns Brunswick Pipeline, a 30-inch, 145-kilometre natural gas pipeline in New Brunswick.

Plans for an inter-Caribbean gas pipeline, with gas sourced from Tobago, have been brewing for several years. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez initially encouraged a pan-Caribbean oil pipeline, to run oil from Venezuela, but the Tobago bid for a natural gas pipeline appears to have won out in the minds of investors.

At the time of writing, there was a flurry of activity in the Tobago project: international investors were found after several years of relative dormancy. The company with the lead in the project, Eastern Caribbean Gas Pipeline Company, shares at least one member of its board of directors, Dr. Trevor Byer, with LUCELEC’s board.

If Emera were to involve itself heavily with the construction of an inter-island gas pipeline, it would eliminate one more middleman—the distributor—from its electricity monopoly in at least two Caribbean nations. Whether this gas pipeline materializes and, more importantly, what its impact will be for Emera's Caribbean clients, remain to be seen.

“People are crying out every day” because of the skyrocketing power bills in the Barbados, says Carson Cardogan. “They're writing letters to the newspapers and the call-in programs. And it's having a very deleterious effect on the lives of many Barbadians.”

For the moment, Bahamians and Barbadians, and Nova Scotians, find themselves beholden to Emera's bottom line, a situation that to some—such as the pulp mill owned by Abitibi, and the one formerly owned by NewPage, and their hundreds of out-of-work employees—has already become untenable. Nova Scotians certainly remember that two of NSPI's largest industrial clients, prior to massive downsizing and bailouts in the case of Abitibi, and bankruptcy in the case of Newpage, made very public mention of the fact that escalating power bills were driving them to ruin.

While critics of the two companies suggest mismanagement as the more likely cause of their dire straights, it does beg the question, in Nova Scotia and beyond: Is Emera simply bad for business?

Miles Howe is an editor with The Dominion and a member of the Halifax Media Co-op.

This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

Bridgetown, Barbados

Dangerous Liaisons

Miles — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:13:30 +0000

Canada's shift towards becoming a tax haven

MONTREAL—While it did garner some national attention, it would appear no Canadian dailies have grasped the full measure of the news. It therefore went virtually unnoticed when the TMX Group Inc., which manages the Toronto/Montreal stock exchange and is at the heart of the process turning Canadian legislation into a regulatory and financial haven for the global extraction industry, became one of the principal shareholders of the Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSX), a well-known, and highly controversial, tax shelter.

The announcement revealed the contemporary tendency towards integration between so-called democratic political regimes and “states of convenience,” nations whose banking and fiscal regulations are linked to the process of global money laundering.

By acquiring 16 per cent of shares in the Bermuda exchange on December 21, 2011, “TMX Group is now one of the largest shareholders of the BSX, and Tom Kloet, CEO, TMX Group, will be joining the BSX board of directors,” according to a news release on the TMX website. This highly problematic alliance between Canada, which still prides itself as being governed by the rule of law, and one of the most criminally-appealing states of convenience in the world, is rooted in, according to TMX's own news release, agreement between the two states to share tax information. “The BSX gained recognition as a Designated Stock Exchange under Canada’s Income Tax Act, effective October 31, 2011,” adds the TMX release.

Double-edged Agreements

There are several elements of this agreement that should be unravelled. The Harper government, in 2011, announced several “tax information exchange agreements” (TIEA) with tax haven states. These agreements, signed in the maelstrom of steps taken towards international “cooperation” supported by the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), purport to tame the secret banking practices of these states of convenience, who welcome fraudulent types of every ilk.

But, all pretensions aside, these agreements actually blindly favour the function and development of offshore tax havens. They do so by allowing, among other things, for wealthy Canadians or Canadian corporations to register their assets and activities in any of these offshore signatory countries, and then return their assets to Canada without needing to pay taxes. Funds from Canadian business can now be rerouted to Bermuda, where they can stop-over and tie themselves into tax-evasion and avoidance strategies, like transfer pricing and mis-pricing.

It is now easier, and “legal,” for billions of dollars generated by the Canadian economy to hide behind these laws. The use of tax havens allows the financial class to avoid taxation, taxes which finance the very public institutions and services from which they benefit.

Skirting the Public Regulations

The TMX states that it is the Canadian Income Tax Act itself that recognizes the Bermuda Stock Exchange. Gregoire Duhamel, author and financial consultant, notes in his guide Les paradis fiscaux, “Bermuda's very advantageous fiscal policy allows non-resident investors to trade shares and form investment funds, without needing to pay any tax.” To some this does not appear to be a problem.

In addition, the Bermuda Stock Exchange is not responsible to any public institution, except perhaps the ludicrous Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA) which, on its Internet site, appears more preoccupied with vaunting the merits of the different business entities that can be created within its tax haven than it is with explaining how it prevents possible misuse of its laws.

It is worth noting that it is the kind of liberal creation of investment funds and hedge funds which is allowed by the Bermuda exchange that helped provoke the economic crisis of 2008. So with these new agreements, the Canadian government recognizes an institution that is in fact dedicated to circumventing the very rules that the Canadian government itself put in place.

From Halifax to Bermuda

By considering both aspects from which the Toronto Stock Exchange stands to benefit from this context, we come to understand that the officers of the TSX, read:TMX,the principal centre of Canadian trade, will have every latitude to facilitate Canadian financial activity in the Bermudan tax haven.

There will be no financial framework to hamper investments or stock speculations, only the knowledge that those Canadians financially able to participate in this merry-go-round of investment and speculation will be able to repatriate their funds back to Canada at any time, tax free.

Perhaps the most glaring example of doing business in Canada while benefiting from the lax regulations of Bermuda comes from the government of Nova Scotia.

By handing over management responsibilities of its own agency, Nova Scotia Business Inc., exclusively to the private sector, the government of Nova Scotia has actually allowed for the creation of a satellite accounting agency with a direct link to Bermuda. Hedge funds and insurance companies are managed in Halifax, but are created and based out of Bermuda, and thus are able to circumvent Canadian laws and institutions.

Whitewashed Money

The pseudo “Tax Information Exchange Agreements” (TIEA) were signed in principle to allow Canadian political authorities to collect data from so-called "secret Bermudan banks" in the case where a Canadian is suspected of fraud. In reality, they do not risk upsetting to any degree the massive money laundering operations made possible by the existing opaque financial liaisons.

According to a report submitted to the Dutch Minister of Finance by Brigitte Unger from the Utrecht School of Economics, in 2006 Bermuda was the second most popular money laundering destination for funds coming from illicit or criminal activities. In the fight against money laundering, the Canadian government demonstrated in 2010 that its politics were nothing more than complicit, when it signed, on the sly, a free-trade agreement with Panama. Panama is the most important money laundering destination for drug money in the world.

By radically integrating its own politics and financial institutions with those of tax shelter states, Canada has transformed itself, without ambiguity, into a tax haven. France-Offshore.fr, a website for financial consultants who specialize in “creating offshore corporations,” ranks Canada among its “offshore jurisdictions.” The site also notes that “Canada is not an offshore country, but we know how to turn a corporation created in Canada into an offshore one.”

This is how.

***

Alain Deneault is the author of Offshore, Tax Havens and the Rule of Global Crime (New York : The New Press, 2011) and Faire l'économie de la haine (Écosociété, 2011) and a member of “Québec d'Attac” and the “Réseau international pour la justice fiscale”. Translation from the French by Miles Howe.

Toronto Stock Exchange

Barrick's Bodysnatchers

Tim McSorley — Thu, 26 May 2011 22:00:22 +0000

Wanton killings, criminalization, and degradation continue at the North Mara Mine in Tanzania

NEW YORK, NY—On May 16, over 1,000 people entered a mine in northern Tanzania, desperate to collect whatever gold they could from the modern industrial site that used to be their bread and butter. But instead of providing the displaced artisanal miners with a boost to their meager income, the day ended in horror. Seven men were killed, and at least a dozen wounded when police unleashed a hail of bullets.

The next day, African Barrick Gold, a subsidiary of Toronto-based Barrick Gold, released a statement admitting that seven people were killed and twelve injured at their North Mara mine in Tanzania. The killings came at the hands of Tanzanian police, who Barrick originally claimed were under sustained attack by 800 "criminal intruders" (a number Barrick revised to 1,500), who illegally entered the North Mara mine to steal gold ore. Since this fatal confrontation, tensions have been high in the Tarime District, with an increase in the number of police, the deployment of water cannons, the arrest of journalists and two members of parliament for "instigating violence," and the theft of five of the seven bodies from the mortuary by police.

Confrontations between local people and the mine's security forces are not uncommon near Barrick's North Mara mine in Tanzania. As Bloomberg journalist Cam Simpson reported in a December 2010 feature story about the mine, before this latest massacre "at least seven people have been killed in clashes with security forces at the mine in the past two years." These security forces, according to company documents, include police who Barrick pays to guard its North Mara mine.

“They are not arresting them or taking them to court,” said Machage Bartholomew Machage, a member of the Tarime District Council, the highest local government body, in an interview with Simpson. “They are just shooting them.”

One week after the most recent spate of killings, the police stormed a local mortuary and stole the bodies of four of the dead. This move, according to locals, was to prevent the villagers from holding a planned memorial service at the mine on Tuesday.

Police also arrested and charged two members of Parliament, a legal advisor, and journalists for "instigating people to cause violence." MP Tundu Lissu, who was among those arrested, was in Tarime to assist with post-mortem medical examinations of bodies to identify exactly which parts of the bodies of the deceased were shot by the police.

“Normally if you shoot a person on the head it means you intended to kill them. However, if you shoot them on the leg it means you tried to stop them from doing something… this exercise will help us to know the police’s intention,” he explained to local journalists. Tundu was arrested two days later at the funeral of the local villagers killed by Barrick security.

At this time, Lissu and six others remain in police custody and their bail has been denied. Meanwhile, the four journalists, MP Esther Matiko, and opposition cadre John Heche posted bail and were released after six hours in custody.

According to George Marato of Tazania's Guardian newspaper, these violent confrontations can be blamed in part on corruption amongst the security forces at Barrick's mine. According to his interviews with locals following the latest killings, police and company staff conspire to facilitate illegal entry into the premises to scoop sand with gold concentrates. For example, one group would pay one million shillings (around $650) in exchange for a half-hour of scooping sand from the ground.

The violent confrontations occur, according to Marato, when disagreements arise over the amount of compensation for company insiders, often due to hikes in "gold theft fees." He writes, "Ensuing wars of words turn into confrontations that provoke policemen to fire at the very people who had been co-conspirators not long previously."

This situation, according to Marato, is then compounded by local youngsters who attempt to force their way to the compound to scoop the sand free of charge.

Tensions with the locals can be traced back to the mine's early history of displacement and dispossession. Before the mine opened, an estimated 40,000 people living in the area, a large majority of the population, depended on small-scale mining for their livelihoods, according to a history compiled by the mine’s first proponent, Afrika Mashariki Gold Mines Ltd.

Small scale miners, represented by five villages, had mineral rights to the lands that they mined, but were forced to sell these claims to Afrika Mashariki under illegal and irregular circumstances, according to a legal complaint launched in July 2003 by the Lawyers Environmental Action Team (LEAT) on behalf of 1,273 former small-scale miners. In another lawsuit, 43 landowners alleged to have been paid no compensation, while being forcefully evicted from their lands.

Since then, there have been multiple fatal confrontations at the mine site. In December 2008, one such incident resulted in a civilian uprising where locals set fire to $7 million worth in mine equipment. This number, which was originally estimated at upwards of $15 million, is disputed by locals. As now, Barrick blamed the damage to equipment on "well-organized groups" that raided the mine site. However, signed affidavits [1, 2] from witnesses to the event claim that angry villagers had only set one Caterpillar loader on fire on a road outside the mine, after they had heard of the killing of their compatriot. These affidavits and others [3, 4] describe this incident in detail, as well as documenting the history of violence and impunity at the mine site, and the criminalization of community advocates following the murders.

Sakura Saunders is the co-editor of protestbarrick.net, an all-volunteer network of groups researching and organizing around mining issues, particularly those involving Barrick Gold.

To read this article in Spanish/Para leer este articulo en espanol: No a la mina

North Mara mine

Living in the shadow of the North Mara mine

Into the Fire

Martin Lukacs — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 06:18:32 +0000

Deportation ends Salvadoran family's long wait for asylum in Canada

MONTREAL—Ever since Canada deported her family to El Salvador in December 2010, Jessica Vides says she fears for her life—and the lives of her young children.

“I am afraid to leave the house. The children can't go to school,” said the mother of three, two of whom are Canadian citizens, in a telephone interview from San Salvador, El Salvador's capital.

She and her husband, Eduardo Vides, fled their native country of El Salvador five years ago, she said, due to death threats from one of the country's notorious street gangs. Now that the family is back in San Salvador, she says the death threats have returned with a vengeance.

Two weeks after they were deported, Jessica Vides said the family received a menacing visit from men they suspect are gang members, who threatened to kill them if they failed to pay thousands of dollars.

“We all hid in a room at the back of the house,” she told The Dominion.

Such threats are exactly why she says the family left their home in San Salvador in the first place, and sought refuge in Canada.

But the peaceful refuge they’d dreamed of turned into a nightmare five years after they settled in Montreal. The family’s plight in the hands of Canadian immigration authorities raises serious concerns about Canada’s refugee policy. The Vides family accuses authorities of injuring their child while she clung to her dad as he was being carted off to an immigrant detention centre.

Eduardo Vides’s difficulties began when, as a passerby, he randomly witnessed the assassination of a woman on the street in San Salvador five years ago. Men he suspected were gang members soon started following him, he said in an interview with The Dominion.

Then the death threats started. He was warned that if he did not pay thousands of dollars, his whole family would be killed.

“I didn’t have the money,” he said. And so the family fled, escaping to Guatemala, and from there, to several US cities. In Buffalo, New York, with the help of a nonprofit group called Vive el Casa, they came to Canada as refugee claimants, according to Jessica Vides.

When they arrived in Canada, their first-born child, Eduarda, was just one year old. While awaiting a final decision on their asylum claim and subsequent judicial review of the decision, years passed. While they waited, Jessica and her husband established a home on Crevier Street in Montreal's Ville St. Laurent neighbourhood, where they had two more children: Andrea, now aged five, and Gustavo, now aged two. Originally trained as a pilot, Eduardo Vides found industrial maintenance work through an agency.

But their asylum claim was eventually rejected. Canada has in the past accepted Salvadoran refugees fleeing gang violence. However, given that asylum claims are heard before a single member of the Immigration and Refugee Board, it is, to some extent, the “luck of the draw,” according to Janet Dench, the executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR).

The Vides family went to Federal Court for a judicial review, but after a long wait, they learned that the verdict on that too was negative.

At a November 23, 2010, meeting at Citizenship and Immigration Canada's offices in downtown Montreal, Eduardo Vides was informed that the family was slated to be deported three weeks later. Vides said he pleaded at the meeting for the government to allow the family to stay until his daughter had completed her school year. Eduarda Vides, who is now seven years old, was enrolled as a first-grade student at Ville St. Laurent's Bois Franc-Aquarelle elementary school, and her dad had been working for more than a year at job repairing boilers, when the government ordered the family's deportation.

According to Vides, they responded by arresting him on the spot.

Three weeks later, in an interview with The Dominion, it was still difficult for Eduardo Vides to speak about the events of that fateful day. The slim man with gentle mannerisms spoke with a shaky voice about how his seven-year-old daughter, who was present at the meeting and witnessed the emotional exchange between her father and the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) agents, had thrown her arms around him. He recalled with a pained expression, “She hugged me, [and] I hugged her back.”

According to Vides, two male immigration agents grabbed him—from either side, an officer clamped onto his arms.

A third, female, officer grabbed the frightened first-grader. The girl “held on hard with her arms,” her father recounted.

Vides claims that the female officer injured his daughter as she wrestled the seven-year-old girl off of him. She had “wounds all over her back, stomach, and also scars on her leg,” he said. “She couldn't walk.”

Meanwhile, Canadian immigration agents hauled Eduardo Vides off to the CBSA's Laval detention center.

Reached by telephone for comment, Dominique McNealy, a CBSA agent at the centre, clarified that immigrants are detained primarily because authorities are not sure of the immigrant's identity, or in cases in which the immigrant poses a “flight risk” or a menace to Canada. However, he would not comment on why the authorities decided to incarcerate Vides, who had declared his identity to the authorities, and, as an employed worker concerned with the continuation of his daughter's schooling, seemed to pose little risk of either flight or danger to the public.

Immigration attorney Jared Will observed in a telephone interview that, “Immigration officers have a great amount of power over people's lives. Yet there’s no accountability process that is comparable to even something police officers have.”

While Will noted that it is possible to file complaints against immigration officers, “In terms of holding them accountable, there’s no process that has any teeth.”

Locked up in the immigrant prison in Laval, Eduardo Vides took matters into his own hands. He began a hunger strike in protest of his family’s treatment.

CBSA put him in his own private “room” (like the term “prisoner,” the word “cell” is avoided in the parlance of the immigrant detention system), isolating him from the general population.

Meanwhile, Jessica Vides was desperately seeking medical treatment for her eldest daughter, who she said had still not recovered from the injuries suffered in the hands of the immigration officer three weeks prior. Upon the advice of a local nonprofit, she brought Eduarda to Montreal’s principal francophone children’s hospital, St. Justine. However, staff there refused to examine the girl upon hearing that her injuries had stemmed from a confrontation with immigration authorities, according to Eduarda’s parents.

The St. Justine ombudsperson failed to respond to a request for comment for this article.

In a telephone interview on December 13, Jessica Vides said that the pain in the seven-year-old's stomach had not improved, and she also had a fever.

When The Dominion called Jessica Vides two days later, the mother-of-three’s number had been disconnected.

On December 15, the day the government had ordered that the family be deported, the Vides’s first grader still had a fever and pain in her stomach, according to her mother. Local solidarity activists had urged her to bring the child to a sympathetic Montreal doctor. But the family’s lawyer, Stephane Dulude, told Jessica Vides to go instead to the airport, as ordered by CBSA. Upon this advice, Jessica arrived at the airport with her three children, and presented herself to the immigration authorities. She appealed on her daughter's behalf for medical attention.

Reached by telephone, CBSA spokesperson Stephane Malepart said that, “we make sure that everybody's in good health to travel. If that person has to go to the hospital before travelling, we'll then we take them to the hospital and that's it.”

However, Jessica Vides told The Dominion that the immigration agent she appealed to responded by asking whether the girl was a Canadian citizen. Vides says she was told, “If not, it doesn’t matter. She has to leave.” The seven-year-old was thus refused treatment again. And then she, her little brother and sister (both Canadian citizens), and their mom, were all immediately deported.

The Vides family’s deportation was executed on day 22 of Eduardo's hunger strike.

Two days later, The Dominion, accompanied by Sarita Ahooja, an organizer with No One Is Illegal and Solidarity Across Borders, visited Eduardo in the Laval detention centre.

An activist with long experience working with immigrants in detention, Ahooja expressed surprise when the CBSA guards led us to a private office-style room equipped with office chairs, a desk, and a computer to wait for Eduardo Vides. (She pointed out the usual meeting room as we exited: a sparse common room with plastic chairs.)

Ahooja commented that she had never seen such measures taken in the Laval detention centre. Eduardo was being kept in isolation “to avoid the possibility that his resolve would spread and inspire others to defy an unjust and repressive system,” she later explained in an email to The Dominion, adding that this was not just her analysis but also Eduardo Vides’s.

When asked about CBSA’s response to the hunger strike, Malepart said the agency takes such actions very “seriously.” In fact, they had even put off Vides’s deportation, originally scheduled for December 15.

But upon hearing about his wife and kids’ deportation, the Salvadoran man broke his hunger strike. He wished to be with his family, even despite the threats on his life in El Salvador, he explained.

Late on the afternoon of the following Friday, CBSA informed him that he would be deported very late that Sunday night—a timing Vides found “suspicious,” given that it left very little time for legal recourse.

In the 2008–2009 fiscal year, the last year for which figures are available on the CBSA’s website, 13,249 people were deported from Canada—an increase of well over 50 per cent since 1999. Of those deported, 9,672 were, like the Vides family, asylum seekers whose claims had been turned down by the Canadian government. And, since last summer’s passage of a new refugee reform bill, this trend seems to be on the rise, as the government shifts ever greater resources into what CBSA euphemistically refers to as “removals.”

Bill C-11, which will go into effect over the next year, is, amongst other things, supposed to eliminate the excessively long delays that families like the Videses have faced in waiting for a final decision on their asylum claims. “It was a fact that many people had been waiting for years” for final decisions on their refugee claims, according to Dench. This problem has been made worse in recent years by the federal Conservatives’ failure to fill dozens of vacancies on the Immigration and Refugee Board.

Moreover, the lack of a refugee appeals process in the current system means that asylum seekers whose claims are rejected are forced to go through a lengthy judicial review by the Federal Court. These delays have serious consequences for asylum seekers, making it very likely that families like the Videses will settle in Canada over the course of the excessive waits they are forced to undergo, and then face undue hardships if their refugee claims are turned down and they are forced to leave the country.

Bill C-11 is supposed to address these problems by shortening the timelines for asylum decisions, and creating a new refugee appeals process that will expedite the processing of asylum seekers whose claims are rejected. According to the Canadian government’s backgrounder on the bill, the new system also entails “hiring more officers to expedite removals.”

Groups like the CCR assess the new legislation as a positive development overall, although they express concerns that the new timelines may not allow sufficient time for all asylum seekers to prepare claims, and they are critical of the way the new system creates a discriminatory two-tier system based on asylum seekers’ country of origin. As well, given that many families like the Videses have already built lives for themselves in Canada due to the excessive delays of the old system, the new emphasis on “removals” raises serious concerns.

Already, there seem to be changes in how immigration authorities are dealing with outstanding deportation orders, according to Will. “There are situations where before they would have waited, and now they’re just plowing ahead as quickly as possible,” the Montreal-based immigration lawyer observed. “There’s definitely been a very obvious hardening in carrying out deportations in situations in which there may have been more leeway in the recent past,” he added.

As the country lurches from the old dysfunctional system in which thousands of asylum seekers spent years waiting for a decision, to a renewed emphasis on deportations, one can only guess how many families will suffer the consequences.

Back in San Salvador, Jessica Vides is worried about how her family will survive. If they pay the money to the gangs, “how will we feed the kids?” she asked, adding that with the threats to their lives, “Eduardo can’t go to work.” The family cannot possibly stay in El Salvador, she said.

More than a month after his family’s deportation, the young father who had defied CBSA with his hunger strike sounded tired, and sad.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do here right now. We’re in a very hard situation,” he said.

The family yearns to return home—to Canada.

Brought to Canada when she was just one year old, it is the only country Eduarda Vida has ever known. “She tells me that she misses her country,” Jessica Vides told The Dominion. The seven-year-old girl’s mom says she corrects her daughter’s “mistake.” For as CBSA has made painfully clear to both of Eduarda’s parents, Canada is not their country.

But for the girl who was abruptly yanked out of her first grade year at Montreal’s Bois Franc-Aquarelle elementary school in December, this is no easy lesson.

“I miss my friends,” the seven-year old told The Dominion mournfully, in a telephone from San Salvador more than a month after her family’s deportation. She also misses the snow, and her school, she said.

“I don’t have school here,” she added, explaining, “we can’t leave the house.”

Isabel Macdonald is a Montreal-based journalist and media scholar who has written for The Nation, The Guardian and The Toronto Star, amongst other publications.

Canada cuts refugees loose

Haiti's Void Vote

Moira Peters — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 05:11:00 +0000

No clear winners, many clear losers

"We denounce a massive fraud that is occurring across the country ... We demand the cancellation pure and simple of these skewed elections," the 12 presidential candidates, which included all main opposition groups, said in a statement read to reporters at a Port-au-Prince hotel. They accused the outgoing President Rene Preval's Inite (Unity) coalition of rigging the vote in favour of its candidate, Jules Celestin.
—Rory Carroll, reporting today, November 29, 2010, for The Guardian

This news is an unfortunate but not unexpected outcome of yesterday's presidential and legislative elections in Haiti. Crushed by the January 2010 earthquake and devastated by this month's cholera outbreak, the majority of Haitians couldn't vote for their preferred candidate, as the popular Famni Lavalas party was excluded from elections on a technicality.

Below, a collection of images and analyses of yesterday's election gives a limited view of the election's outcome; this week will be critical as election results will not be released until Sunday, December 5.

Unless otherwise indicated, the photos here were taken yesterday, November 28, 2010, during Haiti's presidential and legislative elections by Jean Ristil Jean Baptiste, a Haitian photojournalist.

Haiti Elections.Empty Polls

Prayers more hopeful

Haiti Elections.Police Van

Haiti Elections.Riot Cop

Haiti Elections.Voting in the Rubble

Haiti Elections.Voting in the Tent

Haiti Elections.Sign

Haitians to Refuse Tomorrow's "Selections"

Martin Lukacs — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 05:36:19 +0000

Living in tents, dying of cholera, the majority can't vote for their candidate anyway

HAITI, NOVEMBER 27—On the eve of presidential and legislative elections in Haiti, skepticism and disenchantment among Haitians is widespread.

"I am not going to vote," said Elause Jacques, a mother of two who runs a cyber cafe with her husband in Port-au-Prince. "I have no candidate."

Jacques' sentiment is shared by many Haitians, who may be turning away from the polls by the millions in an act of silent protest against the exclusion of Haiti’s popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas (FL), and the spending of millions on elections instead of badly needed healthcare and infrastructure.

The backdrop to the elections is grim: more than a million people remain homeless after the January earthquake, and now the country is confronted by a cholera epidemic that has already taken 1,500 lives.

FL has reiterated its position to boycott tomorrow's elections, after being excluded by Haiti’s Interim Election Commission (CEP), which is hand-picked by the government.

“It [FL] is not supporting any candidate, it doesn't have anybody representing it, and it is not sending anybody to represent it,” said the party in a statement. The statement also criticized the United Nations representative in Haiti, Edmund Mulet, for “having no respect for the Haitian people,” and President Rene Preval for running a "ungrateful hypocritical regime which has come to bury the memory of our ancestors.”

The CEP is facing other problems. In the days prior to the vote, many Haitians have still not received their electoral IDs.

“As President Aristide said, the November 28 elections will not be elections, but selections,” said a unidentified Haitian women, while waiting for her flight to Haiti from the Fort Lauderdale International Airport in Florida.

Former president Jean Bertrand Aristide, interviewed in mid-November by film-maker Nicolas Rossier in South Africa, where he is living under forced-exile, criticized the Haitian government and some of its international allies for betraying the Haitian people.

"When we say democracy we have to mean what we say,” said Aristide, who was deposed in 2004 by the United States, France and Canada. “Unfortunately, this is not the case for Haiti. They talk about democracy but they refuse to organize free and fair democratic elections. It is as if in the US they could organize an election without the Democrats."

Criticism of the exclusion of Fanmi Lavalas has been issued from some quarters.

In a letter sent to the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, Congresswoman Maxine Water and 45 congress members urged the US government to ensure that the elections in Haiti are fair, free and democratic.

The letter called on the US government to "state unequivocally that it will not provide funding for elections that do not meet these minimum, basic democratic requirements."

The members of Congress recalled a previous CEP decision to exclude Fanmi Lavalas: "A previous CEP, with many of the same members, also excluded Fanmi Lavalas and other parties from Senatorial elections in April 2009. Haitian voters boycotted, and most observers estimated a three-to-six per cent voter turnout."

In a report to the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Republican Senator Richard G. Lugar called on the Haitian government to reform the CEP.

Meanwhile, President Preval continues to appeal to Haitians to vote while reiterating his support for the CEP.

Eleven months after an earthquake ruined the capital and its surrounding areas, the situation remains dire. Several months after the first cases of cholera were discovered in the Down Central Plateau and Artibonite regions—one of Haiti's few agricultural centres—over 1,500 people have died and over 30,000 have been hospitalized. Haitians' already low trust in the United Nations troops has taken another hit, as mounting evidence indicates Nepalese forces were responsible for spreading the disease.

“Why spend all these millions for these elections while our people are dying from cholera?” said Haitian singer Lord Divers Morsa. “Why don’t we spend the money to buy anti-cholera shots or vaccines?”

Others question the priorities of President Preval and his support for Jude Celestin, the candidate of INITE or UNITY, Preval’s party.

“President Preval is using the state’s resources to back up Jude Celestin, his friend,” said Maude Salomon. “But he doesn’t care for people. Cholera is killing us, but Jude found millions of dollars to campaign.”

The international community has pledged several millions of dollars to organize the presidential and legislative elections. Yet critics point out that the same countries have disbursed only a fraction of the money that was pledged to rebuild the country after the January earthquake.

Another concern cited by critics is that the names of people who died during the earthquake remain as eligible voters on the CEP’s electoral list. This news was disclosed in a meeting in Washington by Chief of the Joint OAS-CARICOM (Organization of American States-Caribbean Community) Electoral Observation Mission in Haiti, Ambassador Colin Granderson. Many are asking the question: to whom will the CEP attribute the votes of dead Haitians?

A day before the elections, the mood seems to indicate that not many will vote tomorrow. And in the face of unfair elections and a growing health disaster, the prospects for the struggle for social justice and a state of law are likely to remain uncertain and fragile.

Wadner Pierre is a Haitian photojournalist who currently resides in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 2007, he won a Project Censored Award for his investigative journalism work on the impact of media and corruption in military policies.

Haiti elections

Haiti Nine Months On

Martin Lukacs — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 05:18:24 +0000

Donor money spent on a road map no-one can read

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI—“Nothing! Nothing! We’ve seen nothing!” chanted the crowd of internally displaced people (IDP) in Port-au-Prince on October 6. They were pursuing former US president Bill Clinton after his photo-op in their squalid camp. Clinton was on his way to the third Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC) meeting in downtown Port-au-Prince. Ironically, the camp is considered one of the capital's best, thanks to the attention brought to it by actor Sean Penn.

Similar chants were echoed at a demonstration of about 200 IDPs on October 12 in front of Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive’s offices, where the IHRC is based. At that action, called exactly nine months after the quake, protesters delivered a letter demanding respect for their Constitutionally guaranteed right to housing, a moratorium on forced expulsions and an end to the “masquerade aid” of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The IHRC, co-chaired by Clinton and Bellerive, is the body that decides how to spend money donated to rebuilding Haiti after the January 12, 2010, earthquake. This month’s meeting took place by teleconference, and journalists were invited to follow it by calling a US-based number. This immediately excluded any Haitian who could not afford the three-hour-long international call.

Some journalists crowded into the PM’s press room to listen to the meeting over a small pod-like speaker that looked like an oversized video game joystick. The teleconference’s sound quality was poor, static-filled and at times unintelligible. I was sitting closest to the speaker and straining to make out what was being said. All seven of the foreign white journalists in the room were seated around the conference table where the mini-speaker sat. Only three of approximately 20 Haitians present were seated around the table; the rest were in chairs along the walls of the room, out of earshot of the muffled voices deciding their country’s fate.

As if to underscore this irony, most of the conference was conducted in English. French statements were translated into English, but not vice versa. Nothing was presented in or translated into Kreyol, the national language, making it even more difficult for Haitians to know where the millions of dollars are going. The whole exercise felt amateurish. The conference call plodded along, casual and faltering. The IHRC board did not seem bothered by frequent interruptions and confusion, as though voting on the investment of millions of dollars was a banal hobby.

Reginald Boulos, an industrialist from one of Haiti's most powerful families and a staunch backer of the 2004 coup d'etat against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, insisted that meetings should begin with a progress update on projects to ensure transparency and accountability, implying that even IHRC board members have little information on the whereabouts of previously approved money. His minor reservations and criticisms were later trumpeted by Clinton as "fierce debate and vigorous participation on the part of the Haitian members of the board."

The session took place during Haiti’s “back-to-school” week, and at the subsequent press conference Clinton claimed that 80 per cent of children who were in school before the earthquake are now back in class. It was unclear how he obtained that figure two days into the new term, and many schools didn’t resume class until the following week.

At its last meeting in August, the IHRC approved $94 million—a much needed investment— to prepare schools for the new academic year. Haiti ranks alongside Somalia and Eritrea as one of the worst places on the planet to be a schoolchild. Only half of Haiti’s children attended (mostly private) schools before January 12; the quake destroyed about 90 per cent of those schools. Only $26 million of the $94 million has been funded. Fewer kids are in class than ever before, and Haiti’s Ministry of Education says it still hasn’t seen any of the money allocated to schools.

The press release given to journalists after the IHRC meeting stated that UNICEF gave $100 million to “support the Haitian government and civil society in the fight against gender-based violence.” But during the meeting, there was no mention of the UNICEF money, only concerns that a $10.6 million UN population fund for women and girls’ “gender equality impact is not yet approved,” according to one of the board members.

It is unclear where UNICEF’s $100 million has gone. Merina Zuluanie of FAVILEK (Women Victims Stand Up), a grassroots organization that has been providing medical, legal, and moral support for women and children victims of sexual abuse and violence for over 15 years, said her group has not received any IHRC or UNICEF funding.

I spoke with Malia Villard Appolon, the coordinator of KOFAVIV (Commission of Women Victims for Victims), a coalition of raped women. KOFAVIV members have taken charge of their own security in camps—organizing escorts to protect women going to the toilets, handing out whistles to women at risk, raising awareness of women's vulnerability and organizing groups of men to take shifts patrolling their areas of residence. Before the earthquake, KOFAVIV had an office with a clinic, doctor, nurse, psychologist, laboratory and everything in place to accommodate rape victims. That was all destroyed on January 12 but since then, Malia says, “we have received nothing from UNICEF.”

None of this might may come as a surprise, nine months on, if you consider that Haiti’s main national hospital in downtown Port-au-Prince looks much like it did in the aftermath of the quake: hallways and pharmacies full of rubble; people waiting outside for treatment; operations being conducted in tents; the pediatrics unit damaged beyond repair. Dr. Claude Surena, the head of the Haitian Medical Association, and regional health director, said he has an 18-month strategy to get the health sector back on its feet, but he can’t move ahead with anything until donor funds arrive. According to the IHRC website, $17 million was approved and funded on August 17. So why is the place still in shambles?

“I think we’re making progress with the road reconstruction and agriculture sectors,” said Clinton, without going into specifics. The IHRC website says $464.8 million in road construction and rehabilitation projects were funded back in August for some 389 kilometres of road. The site's sections on “Job Creation” and “Institutional” assessment of public buildings, indicate $0 funding has been provided. "Housing" has received $13.4 million and "Education," $26 million.

As a recent study by Oxfam (or a visit to any market) shows, Clinton has taken no measures to lobby for a reversal of his administration’s trade policies—policies for which he took personal responsibility back in March—which decimated Haiti’s rice crops by flooding the market with heavily subsidized Arkansas rice.

The Haitian elite on the IHRC has funded itself (thanks to the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank) with $24.5 million of $35 million over five years to “establish a partial credit guarantee fund for enterprise development,” according to the IHRC website. Meanwhile, the same IHRC board has released no funding for the $65 million earmarked over the next 12 months to “create 300,000 temporary jobs across the country, focusing on populations touched by the earthquake.” Neither has the project to “assess public buildings in the 10 departments”—$1 million over five months—been funded. A mere $13.4 million has been provided for housing, Haiti’s most critical need.

At the post-meeting press conference, when asked “what of the IHRC funding is being given to help people in the camps,” Clinton interrupted the journalist, dodged the question, and spoke of the need to implement a mortgage system. This exchange reveals why Clinton heads the IHRC. His priorities are to facilitate banks providing mortgages, the wealthy elite finding credit, and businesses having roads to bus in their workers and ship out their sweatshop assembled garments and electronics. Job-creation and housing for Haiti’s 1.5 million homeless people suffering in squalid camps will just have to wait.

Isabeau Doucet is an independent journalist, story-teller and artist based in Haiti. This article was originally published by Haiti Liberte.

Clinton in Port-au-Prince

Silent Coup in Haiti, Part II

Tim McSorley — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 05:46:57 +0000

Experts, organizers assess the country's democratic crisis

Read Part I of this interview.

Darren Ell: What has been the reaction in Canadian and American political circles to the banning of Fanmi Lavalas from the 2010 elections?

Roger Annis: I'm not aware of a single Canadian political party or representative aware of the undemocratic character of the upcoming election in Haiti or voicing concern about it. Interestingly, the federal government is by all accounts following developments closely. Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon was in Haiti for three days in early May to get a first-hand look at Canada's support for prisons and police training and equipping. He announced new spending in those areas and he was an early voice speaking in support of a sham election.

Haiti Liberte has called the sham election "the first order of business of the Haiti Interim Reconstruction Commission." In other words, while we were treated to words and speeches by the foreign powers following the earthquake in favor of meaningful aid and reconstruction, what we have received is an inadequate or failed relief effort combined with a near-stealth plan to impose a fraudulent election that will, again in the words of Haiti Liberte, "lead the country towards a deepening dependence on the imperialist countries, feet and hands tied as in the olden days of slavery."

Brian Concannon: There has been very little interest in American political circles. Representative Maxine Waters, who regularly stands up for justice in Haiti, has been trying to raise interest in the US House of Representatives, with little result so far. Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, issued a report in June that strongly criticized the political party exclusions, and suggested that the US reconsider its support for the flawed process. That report had little impact.

The US Administration, like much of the official International Community, believes that President Preval’s team has done a good job managing Haiti, including advances in financial accountability and transparency, and would like to see that team continue to run Haiti. This is a short-term expedient that will come back to haunt the US, Canada and other countries because the elections will not produce a government with the political or moral legitimacy to effectively implement a reconstruction plan. The government will have to make very difficult decisions (such as about rural versus urban spending, initiatives supporting the middle class versus the poor, etcetera) and request its citizenry—already tired and angry—to make more sacrifices. This will be very difficult for a government lacking popular support.

To some extent, the Haitian government and MINUSTAH (the UN forces) will be able to keep basic peace by force of arms, but that will not allow effective governance. I also fear that citizens who feel they cannot choose their government through the ballot will engage in more disruptive tactics, which will lead to social unrest and possibly a violent response by the police and MINUSTAH, which will in turn touch off a cycle of violence.

Akinyele Umoja: A minority has called for the inclusion of Lavalas because they know if they don’t, the elections could be easily exposed as unfair. Others hope for some minor Lavalas representative to be included and co-opted into a different platform. The dominant view remains unchanged. The blocking of Lavalas has the blessing of the US and surely the blessing of Bill Clinton.

How about Canadian and American media? We hear a lot about Wyclef Jean but nothing about Fanmi Lavalas.

Roger Annis: Canada's media has failed to inform Canadians about the flawed election in the making, including the formal exclusion of Haiti's only mass representative party, Fanmi Lavalas. This is not simply oversight or ignorance. I have conducted extensive correspondence with programs and senior news editors at CBC Radio about this matter, for several months now. They are either disbelieving or disinterested. The same can be said for the editors of Canada's print media.

This is not a proper response from a serious media outlet, but sadly, Haiti does not seem to merit the same standard of journalism that might apply to similar situations in other countries. Imagine, for a moment, that the government in Venezuela was conducting that country's electoral affairs in a way similar to Rene Preval's discredited regime in Haiti. Canada's editors and news writers would be screaming, and writing, at the top of their lungs. And we wouldn't hear the end of it from the federal government.

All this places major responsibilities before the Haiti solidarity movement and to anyone else in Canada concerned about Haiti's fate. Will we let this sham electoral process pass unchallenged? I am confident that we won't, that we will find the means to assist the people of Haiti who are waging the battle for democracy, social justice and electoral accountability. That's what got the Canada Haiti Action Network started in the first place, in 2004, and it's where we must keep moving.

Nora Rasman: Due to his international notoriety, Wyclef Jean brought the elections issue to the forefront for a short time when he declared his candidacy, was rejected and repealed. It is positive that any attention around elections has been generated, but very little media coverage has addressed the fundamental problems with the upcoming elections. If the immediate concerns of those affected by the quake are not addressed, the reconstruction and long-term rebuilding process will exclude the Haitian majority and increase the possibility of political instability.

Brian Concannon: The mainstream American media has a bias towards covering personalities over policies in all elections, including our own. Reporters and editors claim that it’s what Americans like to read. The Wyclef Jean coverage carries that bias to an extreme. It has devoted extensive space to a clearly ineligible candidate with no political experience running with a party that has never won any elected office. At the same time, it ignores the disqualification of the party that has won every free election held in Haiti for 20 years, always by a landslide.

The US equivalent to what’s happening in Haiti would be President Obama forming a new party before our 2012 elections, and announcing that the Democrats and Republicans were disqualified, then California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger—who was born in Austria and thus constitutionally barred from the Presidency—announcing his candidacy, then the press foaming at the mouth about how his entry into the race has energized action hero movie fans, while ignoring the disqualification of the parties that win every election.

Kim Ives: Wyclef Jean made it clear that he would head a pro-US administration and work with the UN and USAID. Meanwhile, Washington and its media are trying to “turn the page” on the Lavalas movement. The first stage is always to ignore and minimize it. If FL continues to stymie Washington’s agenda in Haiti, the mainstream media will set about demonizing the FL and its leaders, just as it did six years ago.

Is it fair to say that the international community does not want to see democracy in Haiti? And if so, why, especially considering Haiti’s great need and the sums of money promised for reconstruction by the international community?

Brian Concannon: The international community wants to see a “democracy” in Haiti that betrays the desires of Haitian voters in favor of the dictates of the international community and Haitian elites. This is obviously problematic from a moral and ethical perspective, but it is equally problematic from the perspective of a North American taxpayer. President John F. Kennedy famously remarked that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” The International Community seems intent on proving this maxim over and over. As long as Haitian voters are not allowed to choose their leaders, there will be violence in Haiti (mostly coming from anti-democratic forces, but some from democratic forces as well), which will imperil any money provided for Haiti’s reconstruction, and provoke continued expensive military intervention in Haiti.

Akinyele Umoja: I resent the term “international community” because it doesn’t refer to the people in these countries. It refers to very specific interests in the US, France and Canada. In the US, the Monroe Doctrine states clearly that the US will control the Caribbean and the Americas to suit its needs. The US doesn’t like any country that seeks a political or economic course independent of its own. Ordinary people would support democracy in Haiti, but they get so much disinformation that they don’t know what’s really going on.

Kim Ives: The US, France and Canada cannot tolerate any sovereign and nationalist state in Latin America, least of all Haiti. Their subversion and coups d’etat of the past show that clearly. In particular, the US won’t stand for it because of Haiti’s geopolitical position across the strategic Windward Passage from socialist Cuba and its sharing of the island with the Dominican Republic (DR), an important US ally and business partner. Any radical progressive social change in Haiti would have a huge impact on the DR, where many Haitian migrants and Haitian ancestry Dominicans live, many travelling back and forth between the two countries.

Haiti is also, after Cuba, the most populous nation in the Caribbean, and in many ways, Latin America's most African country. Racism has played a major role in Haiti's subjugation, denigration, and constant political crises—stoked by North America and Europe since Haiti's ground-breaking 1804 revolution.

The great sums of money promised to Haiti after the quake are primarily earmarked to go to US contractors like Halliburton, DynCorp, and Kellogg Brown & Root [now KBR]. The “reconstruction” is a golden opportunity to channel billions to the Pentagon’s principal contractors and rebuild Haiti as Washington sees fit (ie; more like Puerto Rico, a US colony whose national economic independence has been almost completely repressed, subjugated or consumed by US multinationals, which have polluted the environment, doctored the legal and political system and corrupted the Indigenous culture). This is why the US has essentially taken over the Haitian government through the Interim Commission to Reconstruct Haiti (CIRH).

How important is this election to Haitians, especially given the struggle for survival since the earthquake?

Nora Rasman: The exclusion of FL has added skepticism to people’s views on the usefulness of these elections. For many of the camp leaders and those living in camps, elections are not a priority because there are so many other outstanding immediate issues on the table, including securing basic goods and services on a daily basis. People affected by the earthquake—particularly those who have been internally displaced—are challenged to obtain consistent access to food, water, health, sanitation and washing services, education or job opportunities.

Akinyele Umoja: In the camps, the main issue is survival: safety, health and food. But people are tying it to politics. They see themselves as Lavalas, so they feel that if their party was allowed to participate, they would be interested in the elections, but with the current group of candidates, they just see it as a sham that will not help them at all.

What can concerned citizens in Canada and the US do about this issue?

Brian Concannon: Concerned citizens outside of Haiti need to protect our ideals, our tax dollars and Haitian voters against our own governments’ polices, by 1) staying informed about Haiti, and 2) staying involved. The IJDH has a program called "Half-Hour for Haiti," which helps people do both. Anyone can sign up on our website.

Nora Rasman: Concerned citizens abroad can argue for free, fair and transparent elections to move forward. Holding your government, as well as national and international non-governmental organizations, accountable for their activities is of the utmost importance. To this end, we suggest that people become engaged by contacting their elected officials to tell them the crisis on the ground has not ended while emphasizing the need for Haitian civil society organizations to be part of the long-term planning for reconstruction, including the electoral process. Or building concrete relationships with solidarity organizations in Haiti, the US and Canada, organizations that support a fair and representative electoral processes.

Akinyele Umoja: We need to challenge our own governments. In the US, we need to ask ourselves the question of how Aristide can be returned to the country because we took him away. We need to understand our own government’s involvement in the impoverishment of Haiti. If people hadn’t stood up around the world against apartheid in South Africa, it wouldn’t have fallen, and we need to do the same work around the issue of Haiti.

Kim Ives: People should provide material and financial support to the resistance being carried out by coalitions like PLONBAVIL, groups like the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and Bureau des avocats internationaux (BAI), and media like Haiti Liberte.

Originally from Saskatchewan, Darren Ell is a teacher, photographer and freelance journalist residing in Montreal. Between 2006 and 2008, he documented the legacy of the 2004 coup d’etat in online publications with the Citizenshift, The Dominion and Haiti Action. His photographic installation on this subject, Haiti Holdup, was exhibited at Concordia University in Montreal.

Fanmi Lavalas Haiti

Frustration, Suffocation and Crisis

Moira Peters — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:03:08 +0000

Strife, siege on Gaza continue one year after Israeli bombardment

GAZA—The Gaza Strip was already spiraling under years of siege long before the F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tanks, warships, unmanned aerial vehicles and armed soldiers waged a 23-day war on the Strip in winter 2008-2009.

The agricultural sector, which used to provide 50 per cent of Gaza’s food needs, had been steadily failing as a result of the siege and Israel’s policy of aggression in border regions. The Israeli-led, internationally-complicit siege bans all but roughly 40 items from entering Gaza.

In 2008 the Agricultural Development Association (PARC) reported a desperate need for nylon used in hothouses, irrigation piping, fertilizers, seeds, seedlings and pesticides. In March 2009, the United Nations’ Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reiterated the call, adding animal feed, livestock, olive and fruit tree saplings, saying the need was "urgent" and "very urgent."

The Israeli war on Gaza destroyed between 35 and 60 per cent of agricultural sector, tearing up irrigation networks, destroying hundreds of wells, water pumps, and cisterns, farm buildings and machinery, and killing over 35,000 cattle and sheep, and over 1 million chickens and birds.

The most fertile areas of the impossibly small Strip lie in Gaza’s border regions—inhabited but largely undeveloped. Of the 175,000 dunams of cultivable land, 60-75,000 dunams have been destroyed by Israeli invasions and operations.

The Israeli-imposed “buffer zone” in theory renders 300 metres flanking the borders off-limits. Israeli authorities say anyone within that zone risks being shot by Israeli soldiers. In reality, Israeli soldiers shoot and shell up to two kilometres from the border, rendering more than one-third of Gaza’s farmland inaccessible.

Since the end of Israel’s war on Gaza on January 18, 2009, at least 13 Palestinian civilians have been killed and 39 injured in and outside of the “buffer zone” by Israeli soldiers’ shooting and shelling. Children are among the casualites.

Despite the danger, farmers continue planting and farming. The inability to regularly access their land has meant many farmers sow low-maintenance crops instead of the diverse array of vegetables, grains and fruits that once flourished in Gaza.

Before Israeli bulldozers razed the fruit and olive trees that abounded along Gaza’s borders, bee-keepers were able to produce high-quality honey two or three times per year. Many bees have died out from Israeli bulldozing and during the last Israeli war on Gaza. In the absence of trees, most of the remaining bee-keepers substitute sugar-water for flowers.

The Palestinian fishing industry, employing more than 3,500, has been devastated by Israeli attacks on fishing boats, confiscation of boats and equipment, and the abduction of Palestinian fishermen.

Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, Palestinian fishermen have the right to fish 20 nautical miles off Gaza’s coast. Israeli authorities have steadily down-sized fishing zone limits. In 2008, fishermen were warned not to go beyond six miles. Currently, Israeli gunboats prevent fishermen from passing three miles.

Fishermen report being attacked by machine gun shooting, water cannons and shelling from Israeli gunboats within three miles of the coast. Israeli naval soldiers routinely force Palestinian fishermen in large vessels, or small hassakas just 2-300 metres off the coast, to motor or row out beyond the Israeli-imposed limit, whereupon the fishermen are abducted and arrested.

Abducted fishermen report being forced at gunpoint to strip, jump into the water (frigid in winter) and swim tens of metres to a retreating Israeli gunboat where they are hauled aboard, blindfolded and handcuffed, sometimes beaten, interrogated and taken to Israeli detention for one or more days.

The interrogations often include coercion, via threat and financial enticement, to work with Israeli intelligence.

Their fishing boats are frequently confiscated for months, often returned damaged or with equipment and parts missing.

Fishermen say the bounty of fish lie beyond the six mile limit. Reduced to fishing along the coast, the sparse catch comes from waters contaminated by 80 million litres of raw or partially-treated sewage pumped daily into the sea for want of proper sewage maintenance plants.

While Egypt is building a steel wall intended to cut off the hundreds of tunnels running between Gaza and Egypt, tunnelers say they will dig deeper. Palestinians in Gaza say they need the tunnels: they are a lifeline, bringing the imaginable—chocolates, cigarettes, medicines, appliances—to the unimaginable—livestock, cars, people.

Unemployment remains rife at near 50 per cent, with food aid dependence and poverty at over 80 per cent. Educated youths with university degrees languish without work, or take jobs driving taxis for a paltry salary. Students craving higher education, and with scholarships abroad, remain imprisoned by Gaza’s siege-closed borders, losing study and scholarship opportunities.

One year later, virtually nothing has changed, except the frustration, suffocation, and manufactured crises have worsened.

A complete schedule of Israeli Apartheid Week with speaker biographies is available on the website.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer living in Gaza.

Trauma

Fishing Group

Beit Hanoun

Gravel & Sand Dad & Kid

Buffer Zone

Fishing Steam

Sheep

Chicago Thwarts the Bid

dawn — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:06:05 +0000

How one American city dodged the Olympic bullet

WASHINGTON, DC—"This is a devastating blow for the people of Chicago." So said ESPN's Chicago-born Michael Wilbon.

But the decision to send the 2016 Summer Olympics to Rio was in fact a victory for the people of Chicago. Pushing back against immense pressure from Mayor Daley's political machine, organizations like No Games Chicago went grassroots, corner to corner, and spoke out against the Olympic storm of gentrification, tax hikes, and police misconduct. They are a model of resistance in the Obama era. Certainly one reason the United States got the high hat was the lingering bad taste of George W. Bush. The global community, after eight years of sneering contempt from Washington, DC, isn't ready to rinse with the Obama mouthwash.

But it's the community activists of Chicago who should feel tremendously gratified. In the Windy City, the hastily formed group No Games Chicago took to the streets, shadowing Olympic organizers at every stop. They turned almost every public relations gambit into challenged, contested, space. They—along with the millions of Chicagoans who expressed their trepidation in polls—saved their city. They have every right to say with pride, "That's the Chicago way!"

As for Barack Obama, he may not be feeling it, but he is the luckiest man alive. Yes, he traveled all the way to Copenhagen and didn't even get a lousy t-shirt, but he is very fortunate his bid went down like it did.

Obama is the first US president to ever appear before the International Olympic Committee and plead for the Games. The Games coming to the Windy City would have been an eight-year distraction and political gold for his opponents. Every time an Olympic project came in late and over budget, every time a scandal hit the tabloids, every time a crime was captured on a cell phone camera it would have been "Obama's Olympic Folly."

The person who really has egg on his face is Mayor Richard Daley. He wanted to show everyone he was a bigger man—and mayor—than his Daddy, with an Olympic-sized stadia to boot. Now expect all the Daley arm-twisting and all the dirty skullduggery in the lead up to both come to light and come home to roost. Mayor Daley, rocking a 35 per cent approval rating, said that the Games would be "a huge boost to our economy, raising it to a new level. The Games will help us recover sooner from the recession that still grips our nation and enable us to better compete in the global economy."

There was only one problem with this argument: the history of the Olympic Games almost without exception brands it as a lie. As Sports Illustrated's Michael Fish—an Olympic supporter—has written, "You stage a two-week athletic carnival and, if things go well, pray the local municipality isn't sent into financial ruin."

In fact, the very idea that Chicago could have been an appropriate setting for the Olympics might have been hatched by Jon Stewart for a four-year supply of comedic fodder. To greater or lesser degrees, the Olympics bring gentrification, graft and police violence wherever they nest. Even without the Olympic Games, Chicago has been ground zero in the past decade for the destruction of public housing, political corruption raised to an art form, and police violence.

It was also difficult for Chicago residents to see how this would help their pocketbooks, given that Daley pledged to the International Olympic Committee that any cost overruns would be covered by taxpayers.

This is why a staggering 84 per cent of the city opposed bringing the Games to Chicago if it cost residents a solitary dime. Even if the Games were to go off without a hitch—which would happen only if the setting was lovely Shangri-La—not even half the residents would support hosting the Games.

The Obamas, former Chicago residents, should have stood with their city. Instead, we had the sight of Barack, Michelle, and Oprah trying to out-muscle Pele and Brazil for a place at the Olympic trough.

Michelle Obama said in her speech to the IOC, "My father was disabled, and I think what it would have meant for him to see someone in his shoes compete. Kids need to see that and that needs to be celebrated just as much, if not more."

This seems more like an argument to support the Paralympics (a tremendous event) but that's beside the point. Michelle Obama should have realized that if the Olympics had come to Chicago when she was a young girl on Chicago's working class southside, her home may have been torn down to make way for an Olympic facility. No word on how being out of house and home would have helped her disabled father.

The question is, why did Obama risk this humiliation?

Maybe Obama wants the Olympic fairy dust enjoyed by Ronald Reagan at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles or Bill Clinton at the 1996 games in Atlanta. Or perhaps he is returning favor to the developers and other sundry connected people in the Windy City who will make out like bandits once the smoke has cleared. But his intentions are clear: he wants the glitz, glamour, and prestige of the Games and he wants it for the Daley machine. What the people of Chicago want doesn't seem to compute.

But we shouldn't be surprised at this point that Obama is tin-eared to the concerns of Chicago residents. As Paul Krugman wrote September 20 on the banker bonuses, "The administration has suffered more than it seems to realize from the perception that it's giving taxpayers' hard-earned money away to Wall Street." Shoveling taxpayers' money into the Olympic maw is no better, especially in these tough times.

No Games Chicago organizer Alison McKenna said to me, "I oppose the Olympics coming to Chicago because instead of putting money toward what people really need, money will be funneled to real estate developers who will be tearing down Washington Park and other important community resources. I oppose the Olympics coming to Chicago because the nonprofit child-welfare agency that I work for had to sustain budget cuts and layoffs, while Chicago has spent $48.2 million on the 2016 Olympic bid, as of July 2009."

There is an urgency to building resistance to these kinds of priorities. Right now, the right wing is shamelessly adopting populist rhetoric and the power of protest to sell an agenda of racism and fear wrapped in taxpayer protection. The big public voice against Obama's trip to Copenhagen was the repellent Republican National Committee chief Michael Steele who believes, and this is hilarious, that "at a time of war and recession" Obama needs to stay home. It shouldn't be a scoundrel like Steele who represents a party of privatization and occupation who delivers that message.

Now is the time to build a pole of attraction on the left for people furious at corporate greed amidst a recession. This needs to happen, and not just for the Windy City. In Vancouver, the struggle is now defensive in nature as our anti-Olympic heroes strive to find a way to sand off the worst edges of the Olympic scythe, cutting through one of the world's most beautiful cities. It's about building a vibrant protest movement that believes in social justice not the rank divisiveness of the right. Obama likes to say that change comes from "outside Washington." It's time to take him at his word.

Dave Zirin writes for The Nation magazine, among other publications. His most recent book is A People's History of Sports in the United States.

Chicago.Bid.Protesters

Justice: Transparency or Incarceration?

Moira Peters — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:08:31 +0000

150 years for forced disappearance a precedent, families not satisfied

TORONTO—An historic verdict was reached in Guatemala’s first tried case of forced disappearance, leading to the conviction of ex-military commissioner Felipe Cusanero Coj*, with a sentence of 150 years in prison.

Eleven witness testimonies accompanied evidence including bones from clandestine graves found around the military compound, and historical records and reports of the nature of forced disappearance. On August 31, 2009, President Judge Walter Paulino Jiminez Texaj, representing the Criminal Court of the Department of Chimaltenango ruled that Cusanero’s “innocence was destroyed,” and sentenced him to 25 years in prison for each of the six cases being tried.

Charges were brought against him April, 2003 for crimes he committed between 1982 and 1984 while acting as Military Commissioner in the region. The Centre for Legal Action in Human Rights (CALDH) and the Association for Families of the Detained-Disappeared of Guatemala (FAMDEGUA) began the process as joint plaintiffs to the witnesses.

Several years later, the case made it to court March, 2008. The trial was stalled, however, after Cusanero claimed his constitutional right not to be tried retroactively was being violated, since his crimes were committed before Guatemala recognized forced disappearance as illegal in 1996.

After a lengthy delay in Cusanero's case, the Constitutional Court made an historic ruling when it declared that since the very nature of forced disappearance makes it an ongoing crime, Cusanero should be fully tried for it. (Since no bodies have been recovered, and Cusanero refuses to give further information about what happened and the whereabouts of the bodies, the victims are still considered “disappeared.”) The Court ruled that it did not matter when they were disappeared, but more importantly that the crime was continuing—it was being committed in the present.

Following the verdict's reading at the Constitutional Court, the case returned to the Court in Chimaltenango, where Jiminez Texaj concluded there was sufficient evidence to lead to a conviction of forced disappearance.

The implications in the judge's conclusion are deep. When the 1996 Peace Accords were signed, political amnesty was given to all military members for crimes they had committed during the war. (Without this clause the accords wouldn’t have been signed.) However, crimes against humanity—such as forced disappearance—are outside this amnesty law and can be tried.

Cusanero became the first person in the country to be tried for a crime against humanity. At the same time, he was a low-level military commissioner. Rios Montt, one of the authors of the genocide, enjoys political immunity by being a member of Congress.

Although many human rights organizations are claiming this to be a major step forward in the struggle for social justice in Guatemala, the witnesses' reality is much different.

For many, the hope in bringing the case forward was to find out information about their loved ones. “How is it important to us if he goes to prison?” asked Hilarion Lopez, father of one of the disappeared and a witness in the case. “We have always wanted to know where our loved ones are and what happened to them. But he never told us.”

Lack of information about those disappeared leaves families imagining horrors of rape and torture, and, on the flip-side, leaves room for the (unfounded) hope that their loved ones may still be alive. The nature of the crime creates such a degree of uncertainty that families are incapable of moving past or healing from its trauma. Particularly in cultures where proper burial rites are of extreme importance, the inability to lay individuals to rest leaves families in a perpetual state of paralysis and grief.

In a statement made during the reading of the verdict, Jiminez said, “For all of the cultures and religions present in Guatemala, it is almost inconceivable not to grant dignity to the deceased; it violates the dignity of everyone. For the Mayans, this phenomenon is of particular importance due to the central relevance in their culture of the active link between the living and the dead.”

He continued by describing the findings of a report made by the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), stating that the lack of information about the disappeared continues to be an open sore in the country. “The CEH considers locating and exhuming the clandestine graves where the bodies are buried to be an act of justice and reparation, while being a fundamental step in the road to reconciliation."

Echoing these sentiments in a news conference the day after the verdict, Lopez stated, “[Cusanero] should ask forgiveness of the people of San Martin, of the community of Choatalum. I am really upset because my son is still not returned to me. And I want justice....I want to bury him in the cemetery so that I can bring him flowers and candles.”

Despite the seemingly successful verdict, it doesn’t go without notice by the witnesses that what means most—information—will likely die with Cusanero in prison.

Even so, the verdict and declaration by the Constitutional Court open doors to the possibility of trying other crimes against humanity which took place during the armed conflict.

According to representatives from CALDH, the legal organization representing the witnesses in the Choatalum trial, several other cases that have gone through the courts in Guatemala should have been tried as forced disappearance. Instead they were reduced to charges of kidnapping. Kidnapping is a much less severe crime with a maximum sentence of eight years, compared to 40 for forced disappearance.

Judges often try the accused for kidnapping instead of forced disappearance, says a representative from CALDH, because it won’t implicate the State. “[It is easier to say that] it was just some senseless members of the military who were responsible for each individual crime, and that it doesn’t have anything to do with the subsequent military leader, or the whole chain of command.”

According to CALDH, kidnapping can be an individual crime, whereas to be classified as forced disappearance, proof of a systematic plan, implemented by the state to use forced disappearance as a terror tactic, is required. The fact that the State has been implicated in a Guatemalan Court for its role in creating and facilitating a culture of forced disappearance might have widespread implications for the intellectual authors of the genocide.

Written with files from Amanda Kistler, an international human rights observer with the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA). Amanda currently lives in Guatemala City. Valerie Croft is a freelance journalist living in Toronto. She worked as an International Accompanier in 2008, in the department of Chimaltenango.

For more on precedent-setting court cases in Guatemala, read Guatemalan Court Sets Precedent in the Case of Israel Carias by Amanda Kistler, and Valerie Croft's Disappeared Before the Courts.

****

* Cusanero was the military commissioner in the community of Choatalum, in the municipality of San Martin Jilotepeque in Chimaltenango, during Guatemala’s internal armed conflict that took place between 1960 and 1996. The conflict was characterized by widespread massacres, scorched earth policies, the forming of civil patrol units, and genocide against the Mayan indigenous peoples. In addition, the use of “forced disappearance” was employed as a common terror tactic.

Forced disappearance is the kidnapping of an individual by military or paramilitary forces after which they are often raped or tortured, and eventually murdered. By selecting individuals arbitrarily, it heightens a climate of fear and uncertainty. A UN-sponsored Truth Commission found that 45,000 people were disappeared in Guatemala during the armed conflict.

Justice Photograph

Justice Inhumation

War in Yemen Means Business

dawn — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:14:59 +0000

While 30,000 IDPs remain inaccessible to relief, US Powered scores nuclear reactor

VANCOUVER—Yemen has been rocked by a series of violent clashes between government and rebel forces from the northern tribes since August, and plans to build a new nuclear reactor has sparked fears of increased tensions.

When the internal conflict in Yemen intensified in August from periodic clashes to full-scale military engagement, President Ali Abdullah Saleh was adamant that his forces would crush the rebel tribes.

"We are determined to destroy this sedition," he said in an address to military school graduates. "We will nip this cancer wherever it exists, in [the province of] Sa'ada or elsewhere."

The northern al-Houthi rebels immediately accused the armed forces of using weapons supplied by the US. A series of videos released by the Houthis displayed weapons they had confiscated from the army during skirmishes over the last year.

Yemen's government has since denounced the northern rebels for wanting to set up an independent Shia state in the country that mimics the pre-1962 theocracy.

In press releases, the government has also accused Iran of backing the Houthis with weapons and training.

On his website, the rebels' leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi has denied both accusations. He countered that his people have been fighting for their rights against a government that has become too cozy with Saudi Arabia, whose fundamentalist Wahhabi Sunni rulers see the 10 million Zaydi Yemeni Shi'ites as heretics. He also stressed the difference between Zaydi and Iranian Shi'ism.

Saudi Arabia has a noted interest in the conflict, and has been accused by Houthis of disallowing internally displaced people (IDPs) from entering its borders. Saudi interests in Yemen are like those of the US—primarily related to the threat of terrorism.

US and Pakistani officials are looking at the Arabian peninsula as the new breeding ground for terrorist activities, alleging a movement out of Afghanistan towards countries such as Somalia and Yemen.

Early in the year, deputy chief of Al Qaeda Ayman al-Zawahiri merged the Saudi Arabian and Yemeni wings of the group. This made enough waves for US President Barack Obama to send Yemen's President a letter in September asking for more cooperation in fighting Al Qaeda in the region.

During US Senator John McCain's August visit to Yemen, he mentioned that the US wholly supports efforts to enhance Yemen's security.

Yemen also gained attention in Canada as an alleged training ground for Canadian Islamic extremists.

"There's a great, and I think growing, fear among policy makers in Washington, in London, in Canada and in Europe about what instability in Yemen will mean for the future of a group like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula," Canadian Minister of Public Safety Peter Van Loan told the National Post on September 4.

Canadian firms were among those meeting with the Yemeni government in September over talks to build a nuclear reactor there. The deal eventually went to US-based Powered Corporation. Greenpeace was one of the first groups to note that the plant would likely increase instability in Middle East.

Energy shortfalls in Yemen are becoming worse, with rolling blackouts and water shortages affecting multiple provinces, particularly in the south of the country. Protests in that area are becoming increasingly violent, as more people become angry about marginalization by the federal government.

Reports regarding the war in the north are few and sporadic. By the end of September the Yemeni government was alleging that Operation Scorched Earth had killed hundreds of Houthi fighters and pushed the remainder out of their stronghold in Sa'ada.

In an October 14 address commemorating the Yemeni uprising against the British in 1963, President Saleh said that he expected to completely crush the rebels over the next few days.

The rebels have been reporting the opposite, claiming to have captured further cities and killed several government troops in Sa'ada province in September. Houthi sources said the rebels had even seized an army camp in early October.

Facts are hard to obtain since the Yemeni government has shut out news agencies from the area, forcing the latter to rely on government and rebel press releases. Both parties' claims have largely been unsubstantiated.

President Saleh mentioned in an Eid ul-Fitr address that Houthi rebels were using human shields and killing civilians. Resistance fighters countered that the army closed down a hospital because of its alleged links to Iran, and attacked a refugee camp.

Any potential for talks have been rebuffed by the government; further, Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi stated on September 15 that Yemen would reject all offers of external mediation.

One fact that has not been diluted is the humanitarian impact of the fighting. A combination of aerial bombardment by the government and head-to-head fighting have forced thousands to flee their homes.

Since August, 50,000 people have been uprooted to refugee camps or are stranded in the fighting, according to the Economist. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees notes that around 30,000 of these IDPs are inaccessible to relief workers. A total of about 150,000 people have been displaced since the first round of fighting between the government and rebels in 2004.

Coupled with the unrest in the south, the war in the north is quickly earning Yemen its spot as possibly the most increasingly troubled and poorest region in the Middle East.

Isaac K Oommen is a freelance journalist and commmunications coordinator from Dubai, now residing in Vancouver. Born a nomad, Isaac traveled extensively through the Middle East, south-east Asia and Pacific Asia before settling in Vancouver.

Yemen Business

Chief Executive Officer, Afghanistan

dawn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:16:37 +0000

Internationally sponsored elections reflect warlords’ power over Afghanistan

KABUL—Shahla Ata is a strong woman on shaky foundations.

“I think that Afghanistan needs a tough president. I don’t see that toughness and seriousness in the men but I see it in myself,” Doctor Ata said at her office in south Kabul before the August 20 ballot. “In America Obama brought a big change. I want to bring such a revolution.”

Ata, whose support lay mainly in urbanized Kabul, “knew she did not have any chance of winning” Afghanistan’s second presidential election, said Kabul based analyst Walliullah Rahmani. Her dream of bringing a revolution to Afghanistan was beset on all sides with problems, as was the election, which was marred by widespread fraud, low voter turnout and violence.

Many believe the democratic experiment, seen as a yardstick for international progress in the country, was oxymoronic given that most power still lies in the hands of warlords and military commanders. As the challenges of incorporating a democratic system into an archaic feudal society become increasingly obvious, plans are emerging for a chief executive position that could allow a civil administration more control.

Most of the presidential candidates were not taking part to win: out of 41, only three were serious contenders: incumbent Hamid Karzai, renowned World Bank economist Ashraf Ghani, and former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.

“Apart from the main contenders, all the candidates have other motives. They are either trying to gain reputations or gain votes in constituencies that will help them bargain for concessions and positions of power later on,” said Sulaiman Aeyamat from Afghanistan’s Centre for Research and Policy Studies, during the run up to the election.

The large number of candidates reflects a country divided along tribal, ethnic, and religious lines. Many villages and communities voted in blocks under the direction of village elders, local power brokers, and religious leaders. The latter focused their support on those with the most clout. In a failing state such as Afghanistan, those who control arms and men direct the votes.

This is why Karzai recruited warlords such as Muhammed Fahim, who wields considerable influence over the Tajiks in Afghanistan. Fahim was going to run against Karzai but switched sides when he was offered the vice-presidential ticket. Aeyamat expected a number of the candidates to drop out and direct their supporters to vote for one of the main contenders, in return for political favors. Ten candidates stood down before the end of the election.

It looks as if Karzai benefited most from such deals. He also benefited from maintaining good relations with influential powerbrokers not involved in the political race, such as the infamous Uzbek warlord Abdul Dostum. Karzai’s main presidential rivals and international observers are currently lambasting him, alleging corruption. Thousands of votes are being recounted or thrown out.

Politician and women’s activist Massouda Jalal made an historic attempt to become Afghanistan’s first female president in 2005. She said the only good thing about the elections is the opportunity to show people how democracy is supposed to work.

“It is has been eight years [since the fall of the Taliban], and we don’t have rule of law in the country,” Jalal said at her home in Kabul in July. “The strong candidates belong to the previous commandership system. They will flush that system with money and they will be successful. It will all continue for another five years.”

Opinions differ as to whether a country looking for peace and development is helped by military figures, left over from Afghanistan’s myriad wars, dominating civil government.

“Military commanders are usually multi-talented. A military person can work as a police commander; he can be a teacher or a governor. I don’t see any problem with that. But a civilian person cannot be a military commander,” said former presidential candidate Abdul Salem Rocketi.

A former high-level Taliban commander turned M.P., Rocketi gained the moniker for his prowess with RPGs during the Soviet occupation. He was one of many candidates with a military background expected to gain from the election.

Gholam Guord Jailani, former president of the Afghan Olympic committee, doesn’t share Rocketi’s view. He said that since the appointment of General Mohammed Zaher Aghbar to head of the committee decisions have been made differently.

“Instead of someone with a sporting background, we have a person with a military background. He is making decisions independently and ideas are not being shared. The committee is losing its reputation,” said Jailani.

At the Tourism Ministry, a clerk, who did not wish to be named, was also critical of military figures owing their roles to patronage.

“During the wartime they had the guns, now they have the money. I spent five years at university, for what?” he said with tears in his eyes. “[My superior] comes in when he wants and does not do his job properly. I can do the job better than him, but I cannot argue because of his position.”

There is growing concern both in Afghanistan and abroad about the efficacy of an “elected” Kabul administration influenced by military commanders. This has led to increasing reports of a chief executive position being created within the government. The position would be similar to that of a corporate CEO.

The unelected seat would allow the US and Afghanistan to bypass the web of allegiances and power sharing that causes so many of the problems faced by the US and Afghan governments.

A draft report obtained by Kabul’s 8am paper in mid-June said the holder would have the power to “monitor the activities of ministers” involved with defense, foreign policy, counter terrorism, finance, and security. He would also have the power to propose “dismissing, or firing or changing of any official.”

In May, the New York Times reported that senior unnamed US and Afghan officials had revealed that previous US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, was in talks with Hamid Karzai about taking up the role. Both Khalilzad and the Karzai administration have denied discussing the controversial position, which would increase US control over the government in the long term.

Former World Bank executive Ashraf Ghani has been offered the position repeatedly. He has refused saying it was “not workable” in a democratic system, and decided instead to run against Karzai. The offer, however, is still being discussed between Karzai and Ghani, with the Americans’ encouragement.

For Massouda Jalal, the ethical implications of creating an independent political position, are outweighed by the potential to affect the pervasive alliances of the still strong military government.

“The chief executive position is a good idea”, she said. “There have been many military men given support in the government [since the fall of the Taliban], why not let someone else have a chance? We are in the primary stage of government building and it will allow experts to strengthen the leadership.”

Ryan Fletcher is a freelance journalist based in England. He recently traveled to Afghanistan.

Canada's Ambassador to Afghanistan

Election worker in Kandahar