The Dominion - Georgia

Forced Off-Air

dawn — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 06:58:05 +0000

ECHR rebukes Georgia for Soviet-style repression of independent TV station

TBILISI, GEORGIA–In the wake of a January 27 judgment by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which strongly rebuked the Georgian government for its wrongful arrest, sham trial and inhumane imprisonment of media personalities Shalva Ramishvili and Davit Kokhreidze, controversy is spreading about the wider implications of their case, and the circumstances surrounding their arrest.

Georgia, a former Soviet republic, burst onto North American newscasts in August 2008 when Russian tanks came to the defence of two pro-Moscow breakaway regions in Georgia and rolled to within spitting distance of the capital, Tbilisi. The short war quickly entered the rhetoric of the US presidential campaign, with both Barack Obama and John McCain calling for a tough stance on Russia and staunch support for US allies in the Georgian government.

The story of Ramishvili and Kokhreidze echoes numerous stories of media crackdowns in Putin’s Russia. The comparison is uncomfortable for a government desperate to clean up its image, and achieve NATO membership and general Western support.

Critics allege that the 2005 arrest and imprisonment of Ramishvili and Kokhreidze was part of a successful plot—whose aim was to close a politically neutral television station and turn it into a propaganda arm of the Georgian military—engineered and executed by the Georgian Ministry of Defence, a policy group known as the “Freedom Institute,” and an elusive German businessman.

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Georgian television station TV 202, and its co-founders and shareholders Ramishvili and Kokhreidze were looking forward to a good year in 2005. They had aired the first part of a documentary alleging foul play in the death of former Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania; they were hosting “Debates,” a popular talk show in which government politicians were often publicly challenged; and “Dardubala – 2”&mdashan animated comedy program satirizing Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili—was planned for the following season. The TV station's optimistic future reflected the hopes of many Georgians, who looked forward to life in a stable and democratic Western-leaning nation and a fulfillment of the promises of 2003’s Rose Revolution, which brought President Saakashvili to power.

In 2005, the two close friends and respected public figures drove to meet with a member of parliament, Koba Bekauri, who was the subject of an upcoming TV 202 report on corruption. Bekauri had tried to block the report’s screening and Ramishvili and Kokhreidze agreed on a price of US$100,000 to keep the program off the air. Although bribery is not an uncommon phenomenon in Georgia, Bekauri and the government declared this an act of blackmail and Ramishvili and Kokhreidze were arrested in their cars as they left the meeting.

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Goga Kokhreidze is a former Member of Parliament and an activist for the rights of the disabled in Georgia. He hadn't seen his brother Davit for over two months when he finally visited him in prison. He found Davit pale, malnourished and surrounded by desperate and miserable convicts.

“If you are not a strong man, you are broken in this place, you go down. In Georgia it is bad, but this, in jail, this is too much.”

Davit Kokhreidze was kept in a 12-bed cell with 29 occupants, where the prisoners had to take turns lying down to sleep. After protesting his treatment by announcing a hunger strike, Kokhreidze was ignored and six more prisoners were added to his cell.

Ramishvili was allegedly held in a cell that had been used for solitary confinement for death row prisoners in the Soviet era. He shared the unventilated 5.65-metre cell and its tiny, vermin-infested bed with another prisoner. Their “toilet” was a thin pipe directly next to their bed that was “so narrow that it was difficult for the inmates to pass urine and excrement through the hole.”

The Georgian Penitentiary Department announced after an investigation that the conditions of Ramishvili and Kokhreidze's imprisonment fully complied with international standards.

The ECHR disagreed, ruling that their incarceration was a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, citing “inhuman and degrading” prison conditions and a trial of dubious integrity. (The European Court of Human Rights was created by the European Commission to award damages to individuals who suffered at the hands of a state. The Georgian government is not required to follow the ruling under international law.)

During their appeal hearing, the two men were kept in metal cages and surrounded by masked men with machine guns. Dozens of plain-clothes government agents filled the courtroom, arguing with families and supporters of the defendants and visiting the judge in the deliberation room. After viewing a video of the hearing, the ECHR decided the judge was openly partial—rephrasing difficult questions to the prosecutor in a leading manner and sometimes answering them himself. Of this hearing, the ECHR cited violations of Article 1, Article 3, Article 4 and Article 5 of the Convention.

Following the ECHR judgment, the government announced structural and policy changes based on the ECHR’s criticisms and paid total damages of EUR 6,000 to each defendant, as well as a joint sum of EUR 14,694 for “costs and expenses.”

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“The [trial] was against TV 202,” said Lia Mukhashavria, Ramishvili and Kokhreidze's lawyer during the ECHR case. “They wanted to close it down. Once they were imprisoned, it collapsed, and by doing that the government has now another TV station on that channel, Sakartvelo, purely a Ministry of Defence channel. They made a clear message to all journalists in Georgia: these guys got in trouble; so could you.”

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Following their arrests, Ramishvili and Kokhreidze were approached by German businessman Hans von Sachsen-Altenburg, who offered to purchase TV 202.

But Altenburg soon sold the station to Beka Paatashvili, a small-town Georgian pig farmer who became the station’s official owner. How Paatashvili acquired the money to purchase the station has never been publicly explained, but the sale also involved Georgian businessman Kakha Ninua, whom Georgian media has alleged is the brother of the Deputy Minster of Defence. The station was given a new, pro-government management team, and, supported by the Georgian Ministry of Defence and a political advocacy organization called the Liberty Institute, was launched in September 2007 as SakarTVelo. Altenburg became the station’s manager and part of its legal team.

Little information can be found about the current shareholders and managers of SakarTVelo. Their website is under maintenance and the Ministry of Defense declined to comment on the station's ownership.

The Liberty Institute, officially a Georgian research and advocacy organization, is seen by most Georgians as representing and enforcing American foreign policy interests. As with the station itself, very little information is publicly available about the funding and management of the Liberty Institute. Liberty did not respond to repeated telephone calls and e-mails.

“I saw the contract of sale that was signed by Hans von Sachsen-Altenburg,” said former owner of TV 202 David Mapley about the sale of TV 202 to Altenburg, detailing a $500,000 payment to his account at Merrill Lynch in Dallas, Texas, and $60,000 to Nana Andronikashvili in Georgia. “This was obviously a set-up."

Mapley has given all relevant files to the FBI for an investigation. He adds that he contacted Merrill Lynch to freeze Altenburg’s assets and they did not respond.

“The whole [Georgian] government is in on the take! It is significant that I wrote to Prime Minister Noghaideli for help, and he orchestrates stealing the station!”

Altenburg refuses to comment on questions related to his background or his involvement with SakarTVelo, but he says he strongly supports the ECHR position, claiming the judgment is “a gift to the people of Georgia,” and adding, “Those with honour should resign in shame and those without honour should be fired.”

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While Kokhreidze was released in 2007 after the transfer of TV 202 to government control, Ramishvili remains behind bars. In an interview conducted with Ramishvili through his lawyer, who wrote down his responses while visiting him in prison, the message relayed was: "The president personally is interested in keeping [him] in prison to serve full time"; that he was a "very close person to the president"; and that he wants "to publicize private materials on the president, what [he] personally knows about him. But [he] will do this after [his] release.”

Meanwhile, international aid pours into Georgia and its progress toward democracy is celebrated in the Western World.

Jay Heisler is a Canadian-born journalist who has worked in Sudan, the West Bank, Georgia, Northern Iraq and Lebanon. His writing has been published in Georgia Today, the Beirut Daily Star and The Dominion.

Georgian TV

Mark Mackinnon's New Cold War

dru — Thu, 31 May 2007 18:48:21 +0000

Canada, the US and democracy promotion in the former Soviet republics

Mark Mackinnon's new book opens with a tale of two large buildings blown up by terrorists. The president, until then an unremarkable leader with deep ties to the country's secretive intelligence agency, seizes on the tragedy by launching a war against the terrorists. Suddenly popular for his decisive strikes, the president sends troops to a small Muslim country that had been occupied, then abandoned by previous administrations. He uses the urgency of war as a pretext for consolidating power, naming his lackeys to key positions. The "oligarchs" of the country, Mackinnon writes, proceeded to set up a system of "managed democracy," where the illusion of choice and a popular longing for stability cover up the fact that fundamental decisions are made in an undemocratic fashion and power remains concentrated in the hands of the few.

Mackinnon, who is currently the Middle East bureau chief for the Globe and Mail, is of course talking about Russia, and its president, ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin--though if Mackinnon notices parallels with another country, he doesn't say so. The Muslim country is Chechnya and the terrorist attacks were against two apartment buildings in the town of Ryazan, 200km southeast of Moscow. Questions were raised about KGB involvement.

Mackinnon's book is The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet Union.

Almost without exception, Canadian reporters find it a lot easier to cut through PR spin and official lies when they're covering foreign governments--especially when those governments are seen as rivals of Canada or its close partner, the US. But when the subject is closer to home, their critical acumen suddenly wilts.

Mackinnon suffers from this common affliction less than most reporters. One gets the sense that it's a conscious choice, but still a tentative one.

Over the last seven years, the US State Department, the Soros Foundation and several partner organizations have orchestrated a series of "democratic revolutions" in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. And, during those years, each "revolution," whether attempted or successful, has been portrayed by journalists as a spontaneous uprising of freedom-loving citizens receiving inspiration and moral support from their brothers and sisters in the West.

Evidence that this support also involved hundreds of millions of dollars, meddling with choices of candidates and changes to foreign and domestic policies has been widely available. And yet, for the last seven years, this information has been almost entirely suppressed.

Perhaps the most glaring evidence of suppression came when the Associated Press (AP) ran a story on December 11, 2004--at the height of the "Orange Revolution"--noting that the Bush Administration had given $65 million to political groups in Ukraine, though none of it went "directly" to political parties. It was "funneled," the report said, through other groups. Many media outlets in Canada--notably the Globe and Mail and the CBC--rely on the AP, but none ran the story. On the same day, CBC.ca published four other stories from the AP about Ukraine's political upheaval, but did not see fit to include the one that tepidly investigated US funding.

Similarly, books by William Robinson, Eva Golinger and others have exposed US funding of political parties abroad, but have not been discussed by the corporate press.

Canada's role went unreported until two and a half years later, when--coinciding with the release of The New Cold War--the Globe and Mail finally saw fit to publish an account, written by Mackinnon. The Canadian embassy, Mackinnon reported, "spent a half-million dollars promoting 'fair elections' in a country that shares no border with Canada and is a negligible trading partner." Canadian funding of election observers had been reported before, but the fact that the money had been only a part of an orchestrated attempt to influence elections had not.

For reasons that remain obscure, the editors of the Globe decided, after seven years of silence, to allow Mackinnon to tell the public about what Western money has been up to in the former Soviet Union. Perhaps they were influenced by Mackinnon's choice to write a book about the topic; perhaps it was decided that it was time to let the cat out of the bag.

It's a fascinating account. Mackinnon starts in Serbia in 2000, where the West, after funding opposition groups and "independent media" that provided a constant stream of coverage critical of the government--as well as dropping 20,000 tonnes of bombs on the country--finally succeeded in toppling the last stubborn holdout against neoliberalism in Europe.

Mackinnon describes in detail how Western funding--an effort spearheaded by billionaire George Soros--flowed to four principle areas: Otpor (Serbian for 'resistance'), a student-heavy youth movement that used grafitti, street theatre and non-violent demonstrations to channel negative political sentiments against the Milosevic government; CeSID, a group of election monitors that existed to "catch Milosevic in the act if he ever again tried to manipulate the results of an election"; B92, a radio station that provided a steady supply of anti-regime news and the edgy rock stylings of Nirvana and the Clash; and assorted NGOs were given funding to raise "issues"--which Mackinnon calls "the problems with the power-that-is, as defined by the groups' Western sponsors." The Canadian embassy in Belgrade, he notes, was a venue for many donor meetings.

Finally, disparate opposition parties had to be united. This was facilitated by then-US Secretary of State Madeline Albright and German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who told opposition leaders not to run, but to join a "democratic coalition" with the relatively unknown lawyer Vojislav Kostunica as the sole opposition candidate for the presidency. The Western-funded opposition leaders, who didn't have a lot of say in the matter, agreed.

It worked. Kostunica won the vote, the election monitors quickly announced their version of the results, which were broadcast via B92 and other Western-sponsored media outlets, and tens of thousands poured into the streets to protest Milosevic's attempted vote-rigging in a demonstration led by the pseudo-anarchist group Otpor. Milosevic, having lost his "pillars of support" in the courts, police and bureaucracy, resigned soon after. "Seven months later," Mackinnon writes, "Slobodan Milosevic would be in The Hague."

The Serbian "revolution" became the model: fund "independent media," NGOs and election observers; force the opposition to unite around one selected candidate; and fund and train a spray-paint-wielding, freedom-loving group of angry students united by no program other than opposition to the regime. The model was used successfully in Georgia ("the Rose Revolution"), Ukraine ("the Orange Revolution") and unsuccessfully in Belarus, where denim was the preferred symbol. The New Cold War has chapters for each of these, and Mackinnon delves deep into the details of the funding arrangements and political coalitions built with Western support.

Mackinnon seems to harbour few illusions about the US exercise of power. His overall thesis is that, in the former Soviet Union, the US has used "democratic revolutions" to further its geopolitical interests; control of oil supply and pipelines, and the isolation of Russia, its main competitor in the region. He notes that in many cases--Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, for example--repressive regimes receive the hearty support of the US, while only Russian-allied governments are singled out for the democracy promotion treatment.

And while Mackinnon may be too polite to mention it, his account significantly contradicts the reporting regularly vetted by his editors and written by his colleagues. Milosevic, for example, is not the "Butcher of the Balkans" of Western media lore. Serbia was "not the outright dictatorship it was often portrayed in the Western media to be," Mackinnon writes. "In fact, it was more like an early version of the 'managed democracy' [of Putin's Russia]." He is frank about the effects of the bombing and sanctions on Serbia, which were devastating.

But in other ways, Mackinnon swallows the propaganda whole. He repeats the official NATO line on Kosovo, for example, neglecting to note that the US and others were funding drug-dealing autocratic militias like the Kosovo Liberation Army, the subject of many misleading, laudatory reports by Mackinnon's colleagues circa 2000.

More fundamentally, Mackinnon ignores the West's central role in the destabilization of Yugoslavia after its government balked at further implementation of IMF reforms that were already causing misery. Mackinnon experiences and discusses the phenomenon of destabilization-by-privatization in most of the countries he covers, but seems unable to trace it back to its common source, or see it as principle of US and European foreign policy.

Former Russian Politburo operative Alexander Yakovlev tells Mackinnon that Russia's politicians had "pushed the economic reforms too far, too fast" creating "a criminalized economy and state where residents came to equate terms like 'liberal' and 'democracy' with corruption, poverty and helplessness."

In one of the more dramatic moments in the book, the 82-year-old Yakovlev takes responsibility, saying: "We must confess that what is now going on is not the fault of those who are doing it... It's us who are guilty. We made some very serious errors."

In Mackinnon's world, the rapid dismantling and privatization of the state-run economy--which left millions in poverty and despair--is an explanation for the Russian and Belarussian peoples' love affair with strongman presidents who curb liberties, marginalize opposition, control the media and maintain stabilnost, stability. But somehow, the ideology behind the IMF-driven devastation doesn't make it into Mackinnon's analysis of the motivations behind "New Cold War."

Mackinnon notices the most literal US interests: oil and the Americans' fight for regional influence with Russia. But what escapes his account is the broader intolerance for governments that assert their independence and maintain the ability to direct their own economic development.

Energy and pipeline politics are a plausible explanation for the US's interest in the southern former Soviet republics. He might have added that the US used Georgia as a staging ground during the Iraq war. When it comes to Serbia, Mackinnon is forced to rely on an implausible account of NATO carrying out a moral mission to prevent genocide. The claim no longer makes any sense, given available evidence, but remains prevalent in the Western press.

Mackinnon mentions Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela in passing. In all of these places, attempts have been made to overthrow the governments. In Venezuela, a US-backed military coup was quickly overturned. In Haiti, a Canadian- and US-led coup resulted in a human rights catastrophe that is ongoing and recent elections confirmed that the party that was deposed remained more popular than the alternative presented by the economic elite. In Cuba, attempts to overthrow the government have been thwarted for half a century.

To explain these additional, more violent attempts at "regime change," it is not enough to cite the literal interests. Venezuela has considerable oil, but Cuba's natural resources do not make it a major strategic asset, and, by this standard, Haiti even less so. To explain why the US government provided millions of dollars to political parties, NGOs and opposition groups in these countries requires an understanding of neoliberal ideology and its origins in the Cold War and beyond.

This much would be evident if Mackinnon added some much-needed historical context to his account of modern-day methods of regime change. In his book Killing Hope, William Blum documents over 50 US interventions in foreign governments since 1945. History has shown these to be overwhelmingly anti-democratic, if not outright catastrophic. Even mild social-democratic reforms of government in tiny countries were overwhelmed by military attacks.

If true democracy involves self-determination--and at least the theoretical ability to refuse the dictates of the "Washington Consensus" or the IMF--then any evaluation of democracy promotion as the tool of US foreign policy has to reckon with this history. Mackinnon's account does not and remains almost resolutely ahistorical.

The last chapter of The New Cold War, entitled "Afterglow," is dedicated to evaluating the ultimate effects of democracy promotion in the former Soviet republics. It is Mackinnon's weakest chapter. Mackinnon limits himself to asking whether things are better now than before. The frame of the question lowers expectations and severely stunts the democratic imagination.

If one sets aside these considerations, then it is still possible for curiosity to get the better of the reader. Is it possible that good things can come even from cynical motivations? Liberal writers like Michael Ignatieff and Christopher Hitchens made similar arguments in support of the Iraq war and Mackinnon flirts with the idea when he wonders whether young activists in Serbia and Ukraine were using the US, or whether the US was using them.

So, did things get better? The information Mackinnon presents in his answer is extremely vague.

In Serbia, he says, life is much better. The revolution hasn't brought too many benefits to the daily lives of Serbs, a cab driver tells Mackinnon. However, he writes, "The era of gasoline shortages and of young men being sent off to fight for a 'Greater Serbia' was long past and the late-night laughter and music that spilled out of Belgrade's packed restaurants spoke to an optimism unheard of under the old regime."

In this and many other cases, Mackinnon buys a well-diffused propaganda line without looking at the facts. Straying from the meticulous detail he brings to his reporting of the ins and outs of democracy promotion, Mackinnon seems to believe that it was a diabolical scheme by Milosevic--and not economic sanctions or bombing and subsequent destruction of the bulk of Serbia's state-owned industrial infrastructure--that led to gasoline shortages. Mackinnon admonishes Serbs to face up to their role in the war, while letting NATO's bombing campaign, which left tonnes of depleted uranium, flooded the Danube with hundreds of tonnes of toxic chemicals, and incinerated 80,000 tonnes of crude oil (thus the gasoline shortages), off the hook.

In Georgia, Mackinnon again relies on nightlife in the capital city as an indicator of the country's democratic well-being. "The city bubbled with a sense that things were starting to move in the right direction...swish Japanese restaurants, Irish pubs and French wine bars were popping up on seemingly every corner." The leisure activities of the economic elite are just that; there are many ways to judge the well-being of a country, but to rely on the sights and sounds of well-heeled city dwellers enjoying themselves to the exclusion of other criteria is peculiar.

Mackinnon remarks in passing that the Western-backed regime of Saakashvili has resulted in "declining freedom of the press," but has "boosted the economy."

In Ukraine, "newspapers and television stations could and did criticize or caricature whomever they wanted," but the Western-backed free market ideologue Yuschenko made a series of blunders and unpopular moves, resulting in major electoral setbacks for his party a few years after the "revolution" that brought them to power.

Strangely, Mackinnon's sources--other than the odd cab driver--seem to consist entirely of the people receiving funding from the West. Independent critics, apart from aging and deposed former politicians, are virtually nonexistent in his reporting.

Still, the question: did the West do good? In the final pages, Mackinnon is equivocal and even indecisive.

Some countries are "freer and thus better," but the Western funding has made it more likely for repressive regimes to crack down on would-be democratizing forces. In Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, he is critical of the lack of funds for democratic promotion, leaving local NGOs and opposition groups hanging. He attributes this inconsistency to arrangements where American needs are better served by repressive regimes. In other parts of the chapter, he finds democracy promotion as a whole to be problematic.

At one point, he comments that "the help that [US agencies] gave to political parties in countries like Ukraine would have been illegal had a Ukrainian NGO been giving such aid to the Democrats or Republicans." One also imagines that Canadians would not be impressed if Venezuela, for example, gave millions of dollars to the NDP. Indeed, the prospect seems as ridiculous as it is unlikely...and illegal.

Mackinnon's information suggests, though he does not say it outright, that associating the idea of "democracy" and its attendant freedoms with Western funding and US-led meddling in the governance of countries is likely to undermine legitimate grassroots efforts at democratization. For example, dissidents in Russia tell Mackinnon that when they gather to demonstrate, people often look at them spitefully and ask who is paying them to stand in the street. In one case, Mackinnon points out that a report from an authoritarian government claiming that dissidents are pawns of the West is dead-on.

Mackinnon's assessment does not follow this evidence to its conclusion; he doesn't stray from the view that alignment with either the US or Russia are the only options for countries in the region.

While alignment with one empire or another may seem to be inevitable, Mackinnon's implicit Russia-or-US manicheanism obviates other ways of promoting democracy. Mackinnon ignores, for example, a decades-long tradition of grassroots solidarity with democratic forces in countries--predominantly in Latin America--where dictators were often financially backed and armed by the US government. Such movements were usually limited to curbing excessive repression rather than sponsoring democratic revolutions, but this lack of power can be attributed, at least in part, to the lack of media coverage from mainstream journalists like Mackinnon.

If one is concerned with democratic decision-making, then surely one is also concerned with the ability of countries to make decisions independently of the meddling of foreign powers. Mackinnon also does not address how such independence might be brought about. One can speculate that it would involve preventing the aforementioned meddling.

The New Cold War is notable for its thorough account of the internal workings of democracy promotion and the point of view of those receiving the funding. Those looking for an analysis that bring such a thorough accounting to its actual aims and effects, however, will have to look elsewhere.

New Cold War

Orange Revolution

US, EU reject self-determination in South Ossetia

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 13:43:09 +0000

Last month in the mountainous Caucasus region, the people of South Ossetia voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Despite the high turnout in which 99 per cent of the population casted their ballot in support of secession, the Georgian government declared the poll illegal, while the international community rejected the referendum as "unnecessary" and "counterproductive."

The United States, which provides military aid, training and weaponry to the Georgian republic, refused to recognize the referendum, as did the European Union. Although the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) refused to monitor the vote, a team of 34 international observers did oversee the polls, including members from Germany, Austria, Sweden, Ukraine and Venezuela.

The day before the election, the South Ossetian State Security Committee uncovered an alleged attempt to assassinate the Ossetian separatist leader Eduard Kokoity and to carry out a coup d'état in the region. Although the Georgian government denies the accusation, Alan Parastayev, the chairman of the Supreme Court, turned himself into the State Security Committee and confessed to being involved in the plot.

With the exception of a handful of villages controlled by the Georgian government in Tbilisi, South Ossetia is a de facto independent state. An autonomous territory of Georgia in the then-Soviet Union, South Ossetia first declared independence in September 1990. Open warfare between Georgia and Ossetian separatists soon followed, ending with a 1992 ceasefire agreement. Most South Ossetians desire reunification with North Ossetia, currently part of Russia, from which they were separated during the Soviet period.

Rob Maguire

Qurban Hussain

Please Remember Music

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:46:20 +0000

Song plays a central role at the School of the Americas Protest

Music has been a key part of the protest's success. photo credit: Carole Ferrari

Please remember that music is a universal language and it comes from the heart, mind and soul to the world. --Llajtasuyo

"Pas, salaam, shalom…"

With thousands of people milling up and down barricaded and police-patrolled Fort Benning Road, a voice sings out the lyrics of the peace song. This voice causes a reaction on the surface of your skin. It has a primordial quality. The song is big and beautiful and travels down Fort Benning Road reaching those that have just arrived in Columbus, Georgia. Pat Humphries continues to sing and is joined by Sandy O, and then the crowd joins in. Pat and Sandy are Emma's Revolution and they sing a song for peace at the School of the Americas Protest.

The arrival of protestors at the gates of Fort Benning is part of a much bigger week-long teach in and non-violent event coordinated by the School of the Americas Watch. 2005 marked the 15th anniversary of the School of the Americas Protest, held annually at the gates of Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, where the School of the Americas (SOA), or the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security and Cooperation (WHINSEC) - as it was renamed in 2001 - resides. The purpose of the Protest is simple: to shut down the School, under whatever name it adopts.

The SOA/WHINSEC's mandate is to train soldiers from the Americas. Graduates have been linked to some of the worst atrocities and most repressive regimes across Latin America, including the assassination of Archbishop Romero of El Salvador, the massacre of the community of El Mozote, also in El Salvador, as well as Chile's General Augusto Pinochet's inner circle. Pinochet's sword is encased in glass and is displayed in a hallway of the SOA/WHINSEC. But it is not only Latin America's history that has been affected by the SOA/WHINSEC. A massacre of eight people in February of 2005, including three young children, in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, in Urabá, Colombia was linked to the Colombian military's 17th Brigade, which is led by an SOA graduate. It was for reasons like these that 20,000 people from across the Americas came to Georgia for the SOA Protest. The annual call to shutdown the infamous School is relevant, strong, and popular. It is also musical.

Folk singer Pete Seeger has called the SOA Watch movement the "singin'est movement since the Civil Rights movement." Music is omnipresent at the SOA protest. It is structurally imbedded in everything that goes on over the weekend. There are singers and musicians that inflect and punctuate the message of the speakers throughout the day. There are concerts, puppetry with music, and a solemn procession with a mournful melody. Protesters come to Fort Benning with their instruments, and they play everywhere.

"Music is cathartic," says Indigo Girl Emily Saliers, who played at the protest. "Sometimes it's just fun, sometimes you need your spirits lifted or you need to kick up your heels. It actually plays a lot of roles. Music takes us out of our pain, or brings us closer to our pain, reminds us of it, makes us live through it."

Harnessing music's ability to affect us emotionally and move us through emotional levels is why many believe this movement has lasted for 15 years and has been so successful, "Not all movements understand the importance of music the way the SOA Watch does," notes Sandy O, who has played at demonstrations across North America. "SOA Watch uses liturgical sounds for the funeral procession for the folks that have been murdered by students of the school. But it also uses upbeat music and sing along music and dance music and puppetry to keep peoples' energy up." She adds, "This is a very heavy subject and a very intense time in the world, and music and the arts and puppetry and dance and poetry are the kinds of things that keep your spirits up while your mind is saying this is pissing me off and I want to do something about it. The arts get the rest of your body involved so you can do something about it."

Pinochet's sword is displayed in the hallway of the SOA. photo credit: Carole Ferrari

Keeping people positive in the face of torture and atrocity and formidable opposition to change has also been crucial to the success of the Protest. Medea Benjamin, founder of GlobalExchange and CodePink, was a speaker at the protest and is a long time supporter of the SOAWatch movement. Medea believes in humour, positive energy and emotional engagement to bring about positive change in the world. "I believe that we should make the movement fun. I don't want to go to something where you're just brought down and feel like, oh no, isn't it awful and you don't have any inspiration to keep doing it." Medea believes that a movement based on guilt will not last long. "If [the protest] is based on feeling communal bonds with people who think like you and who really believe that life is the most sacred of all concerns and they are able to show that concern in a way that's fun and loving and spirited, I think that's great, and that's important to me."

Music has come to play a central role at the Protest because the SOA Watch movement is inspired by and deeply connected to Latin America where music is also central. Colleen Kattau, a long time musician for the SOA Watch, sings many Latin American songs. For Colleen, Latin America is a source of inspiration for change for a better world, and for the music involved in bringing about that change. "For Latin Americans the music was so much a part of the revolution; the artists were so much a part of the revolution." She explains. At the protest Colleen sang a song by Victor Harra. "He was killed because he was too dangerous because of his 'armed guitar', that's what they called it, the 'gitarra armada.' Music and revolution are really inextricable."

In light of this influence the Protest's main focus is a solemn procession conducted in the Latin American tradition. Throughout the procession the names of the victims are sung out in the Catholic tradition of the litany of the saints, and for each name sung everyone together calls out "presente." "It's part of the Latin American tradition that when people have died they may be gone in body but that their spirits are still here," explains Chris Inserra, music coordinator for SOA Watch, who has been singing out the names of the murdered and disappeared during the solemn procession for the past six years. " We need to call forth their spirits to remind us, not only who they were, but why they are no longer with us, to give name to the horror and the torture that caused their death. Singing out their names calls them forward."

During the procession protesters hold crosses marked with the names of those who have been murdered or disappeared at the hands of SOA/WHINSEC graduates. They slowly make their way towards the gates of Fort Benning. The gates are barricaded with lines of fences that are erected for the protest and the protesters place their crosses on the fence. It is a powerful moment and it is usually during this time that those who choose to commit to non-violent acts of civil disobedience do so by crossing over or crawling under the fence and onto the base. For this they are arrested and fined $5,000 and face six months in a federal prison.

Because the penalties for crossing the fence are so harsh few people are able to commit to this action. "But crossing the line is not the only way [to have an impact]," points out Sandy O. "There's a bill in congress that has more bi-partisan sponsors than it's ever had and that's why Pam Bowman [SOA Watch legal coordinator] can say we have confidence that we're going to win that vote in the spring. So the sheer number of people that are here who are going to take the message back home and call their senators and representatives and get the School shut down, [that] has a lot of impact."

"It's difficult in this political situation when it's been so partisan and there are conservative factions that seem to have taken over America," admits Emily Saliers. "But then you come here and there are 20,000 people and you realize that – I mean, this is my America. And you've heard witnesses, people who have been tortured in Latin America who brought generals to justice. So victories are being won. I believe in social activism, I believe that it makes change. It's not like music is solely saving the world, it's just something that adds to the spirit of good change."

Thousands sing for revolution at the School of The Americas Protest in Fort Benning, Georgia. Carole Ferrari joins the chorus.

Record Crowd Demands Closure of "School of Assassins"

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 04:46:20 +0000

For me, November 20th began with an early morning plenary at a business convention centre in Columbus, Georgia. By 9 AM, the ballroom of the Centre was filled with about a thousand people. As the organizers of that day's protest explained what was planned, there was a hum of activity and noise as people came and went from the room, met with their affinity groups, lazed about on the floor and generally prepared themselves for the coming day of action. At one point, the mike on the stage was turned over to a young woman, Linda Aguilar, who was a student at the University of San Francisco.

"I've been coming to these protests for the past three years," she explained above the din of conversation, "but I have known about these atrocities even before I could understand them... my parents are from Guatemala and most of my family still lives there today.

"For the past two years I have been carrying crosses with the names of my two family members who were kidnapped and tortured in Guatemala. My uncle, Carlos Sandoval and my cousin, Michelle Sandoval were both kidnapped, shot in the head..."

She stopped for a moment, and began to cry.

"Both got their arms or legs broken before their bodies were thrown in the river..."

All activity inside the room had stopped. All heads were turned toward Linda Aguilar as she attempted to control her emotions while explaining how her uncle and cousin had been murdered by a US-financed military regime. She then explained her experience illegally crossing onto the base during a demonstration in November of 2002. This act would result in a $500 fine and a sentence of 12 months probation.

"Even as the cops pulled us away, I felt at peace."

So began the first morning of this year's protests and actions against the School of the Americas, a US military training camp located within Fort Benning, Georgia. These demonstrations have been taking place at the gates of Fort Benning for fourteen years. The SOA, recently re-named the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), has trained soldiers from Latin America (and Canada) in counterinsurgency techniques, psychological warfare, urban warfare, and related topics for more than fifty years. Often, graduates of the school have gone on to commit massive human rights violations against the population of their own country. For example, Generals Efrain Rios Montt and Romeo Lucas Garcia, whose presidential terms of Guatemala extended from 1979-1983, were both graduates of the School of the Americas. It was during the presidencies of these two men that the atrocities, political killings, and massacres of Guatemala's brutal civil war reached a peak, and even rose to genocidal proportions, according to a 1998 report by the UN Truth Commission

The "school of coups" has also been implicated in military overthrows of governments throughout the hemisphere. In April of 2002 two SOA graduates, Efrain Vasquez and Ramirez Poveda, helped lead a failed coup in Venezuela against the democratically elected leader Hugo Chavez. Leading members within the cabinet of the Haitian dictator Raoul Cedras, who came to power in a coup in 1991 and remained president until 1994, received training at the School of the Americas. The majority of the members of the paramilitary force which overthrew democratically elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide last February also received US military training within the last ten years, though outside of the SOA.

These are a few examples among thousands. The School has trained over 64,000 soldiers during its history, and most have gone on to commit massive human rights abuses in El Salvador, Honduras, Chile, Argentina, Panama, Mexico, and elsewhere. Colombia, whose government and military have the worst human rights record in the hemisphere, continues to send more troops to this military facility than any other country in Latin America.

US military officials have insisted in previous years that the training camp is simply an institution which promotes hemispheric defence. They point to the human rights courses offered to trainees as evidence of the positive values the facility instils in military personnel throughout the hemisphere.

* * *

At the heart of the yearly demonstrations against the SOA, organized by the School of the Americas Watch, has been an emphasis on non-violent civil disobedience. A total of 170 people, according to the SOA Watch, have served time for illegally entering into the base. Since 9/11, the penalties for such actions have become more severe. Crossing into the fort now carries a maximum prison sentence of six months.

Some have crossed onto the fort on multiple occasions. Cynthia Brinkman, a 68-year old woman from South Missouri, crossed the line in 2000 and was also arrested at last year's demonstration. She had just finished serving a six month sentence prior to attending this year's demonstrations.

"When our country says we have a war against terrorism... and then with the other hand we invite people up from Latin America to be trained as terrorists to go back and wage war on their own people, we cannot let that happen," she explained.

Another woman, 48-year old Alice Gerard, crossed onto the base this year for a second time. She had just finished serving a three-month sentence for "illegal entry onto a United States military reservation" for crossing onto the base at last year's protest.

She explained her reason for going through the prison system once again: "I was in language school in Guatemala in 1987... and one of my friends was a fellow student... and her name was Sister Diana Ortiz. Two years after I met her, she was brutally tortured. And some of the people who tortured her were graduates of the SOA."

The organizers have largely been rooted within Catholic, Jesuit, and other religious traditions. Most of those who have been arrested for crossing onto the base seem to have been over the age of 40.

This year, however, acts of civil disobedience were deterred by the presence of a new "security fence" surrounding the outer wall and running up both sides of the road leading to the fort. The sign in front of the gates, which would normally declare "Welcome to Fort Benning" had also been enclosed by the fence and was newly covered over with a tarp, presumably to avoid the negative press which would result from photos of this iconic sign surrounded by protestors. In addition, the mayor of Columbus, a small town nearby, whose landmass is actually smaller than that of the Fort, had organized a "God Bless Fort Benning Festival" to coincide with the protests. The economy of Columbus is totally dependent upon Fort Benning, which is one of the biggest military bases in the United States.

* * *

Saturday's rally outside of the base was attended by more than 10,000. It featured speeches by actress Susan Sarandon, author Helen Prejean, members of the Guatemalan youth activist groups H.I.J.O.S. (Sons and Daughters of the Disappeared), and Elizabeth Corrie, sister of Rachel Corrie and a member of the group Atlanta Palestine Solidarity. Organizers also played a recorded message of solidarity from jailed US political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

The main day of action occurred on Sunday, November 21st. Outside of the gates of Fort Benning, 16,000 pairs of vocal chords read out the names of thousands of men, women, and children who had been killed by SOA graduates in countries throughout Latin America. Each name was followed by the Spanish (and very catholic) chant of "presente!" by the crowd. Everyone carried a cross bearing the name of a victim of US-sponsored repression in Latin America. The whole assembly formed a massive funeral procession up and down the road leading into the base. By the time my end of the procession arrived at the gate, every available surface of the fence had been covered, jammed with crosses bearing the names of dead men, women, and children. Palestinian flags were also everywhere, as a show of solidarity for other victims of US militarism. A number of people dressed in black robes with white masks staged a die-in in front of the fence. Their faces and hands were splattered with fake blood, and most lay beside black coffins adorned with names, slogans, and roses.

The crowd cheered as people climbed over the two layers of barbed wire fence, and entered the military base. My friend Sarah witnessed a 65-70 year-old man, who had been blind since birth, make the climb. He was arrested and escorted away by several officers. He would later demand that he be charged after accusing a county judge of discriminating against him due to the fact that he was blind. The judge eventually released him without charge.

The whole event existed somewhere between a mildly disobedient vigil, a human rights conference, and a counterculture festival. There were speeches on Sunday from Martin Sheen, SOA Watch founder Roy Bourgeois, and torture survivor Neris Gonazalez. There were a number of musical performers, such as Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls. There was also a performance by the 200-member Puppetista troupe, which culminated in the raising of a massive head in front of the stage. Throughout all of this, people kept kneeling, praying, crying, and staging theatrical die-ins in front of the fort.

The SOA watch is now reporting that 15 people were arrested for entering the base, although 3 others were detained for other reasons. One man was arrested as a result of a Georgian law which prohibited the wearing of masks.

Although this year's event was the biggest to date, it likely did not rattle too many feathers among the military leadership of the base. The Columbus chief of police would describe the whole thing as being "nice and quiet" in the local newspaper the next morning.

A congressional vote on whether to close the school is expected to occur early in 2005. At present, there are 131 congressional signatories to the bill. To coincide with their lobbying effort, SOA Watch organizers are calling for two days of action against the SOA/WHINSEC on Feb. 21-22 in Washington DC.

Stuart Neatby reports from the 15th annual School of Americas protest in Columbus, Georgia.

Manufacturing Democracy

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 04:34:13 +0000

The politics of media coverage: Haiti, Ukraine, Georgia

Canadian media have focused on protests, but ignored essential facts about US and Canadian involvement in Ukraine.

Two months ago, many Canadians would have been hard-pressed to name Ukraine's capital, but recent weeks have seen a barrage of breathless headlines tracking the political situation in the eastern European nation.

"Ukraine moves to control official investigations into Yushchenko's illness"; "Doubts arise: can poisoning of Ukrainian opposition candidate be proven?"; "Ukrainian opposition leader Yushchenko poisoned with dioxin: Austrian doctors"; "Doctors 'closing in' on cause of Ukrainian candidate's face disfigurement"; "Ukraine's opposition takes campaign to hostile east".

All of these headlines appeared on the CBC's Web site within a 24-hour period, a saturation of coverage more reminiscent of a typical Canadian election rather than one that took place weeks ago, thousands of miles away. Why the sudden flood of coverage? What is its meaning, and more importantly, what has been excluded?

Perhaps, as the cliché has it, the "Orange Revolution" has "captured the imaginations" of Canadians. But why this one in particular? It's not as though there are a shortage of potentially inspiring mobilizations of thousands of citizens in defense of democracy to pay attention to. The tenacious popular revolt against the three-day coup in Venezuela comes to mind; it received minimal coverage.

In terms of explaining the enthusiasm of the Canadian media in covering the situation in Ukraine and our government's glorious role in cultivating democracy there, the most useful counterexample is the comparatively stark situation with respect to media coverage of events occurring in Haiti.

Just under a year ago, hundreds of thousands of Haitians filled the streets of Port-au-Prince in opposition to ongoing attempts to unseat their democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. The anti-Aristide demonstrations topped out at a few thousand participants, their numbers occasionally bolstered by sweatshop workers forced to protest under threat of losing their jobs. It would not be an exaggeration to say that mainstream Canadian media failed to report these basic facts, deciding instead to take every opportunity to demonize Aristide, depicting him as corrupt and unpopular.

That the massive demonstrations were in support of the Haitian leader does not seem to concern the reporter

Just this week, a reporter for CTV news revisited this apotheosis of disinformation, writing that Aristide "left for exile in late February after massive demonstrations." That the massive demonstrations were in support of the Haitian leader does not seem to concern the reporter, or any other Canadian reporters who regularly report this assertion as fact. This practice continues, despite former Canadian ambassador Kenneth Cook's acknowledgement that if elections were held today in Haiti, the Aristide's Lavalas party would win. Nonetheless, under the Canadian-supported post-coup government, the members of the legal government are in jail, in exile, or in hiding.

In contrast, it would be an understatement to say that the Canadian media is friendly to Viktor Yushchenko, the "pro-western" presidential candidate in the 2004 Ukraine election. For example, footage appearing on the CBC's news program The National featured positive images of hundreds of young protesters in Kiev, which were immediately followed by images of a mere handful of Viktor Yanukovych's (the Putin-backed presidential candidate) supporters. The small group was shown milling around a bus at night, with one individual dressed in military uniform. Similarly, The Globe and Mail recently featured a cover photo of two pro-Yushchenko protesters "sharing a tender moment". The binary symbolism is more worthy of an issue of the Soviet-era Pravda than of a free press: west vs. east, young vs. old, democracy vs. autocracy, day vs. night.

There are, of course, legitimate reasons for Canadians and Canadian media to be sympathetic to the Ukrainian-speaking westerners. In the years following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia continued to intervene in the economic and political lives of its former colonial charges, often using Russian-speaking minorities as pawns. Russian President Putin's backing of Yanukovych is as real as his autocratic tendencies and his murderous policies in Chechnya.

But Putin is not alone in his meddling.

In the last two years, the Bush Administration spent more than $65 million helping political organizations in the Ukraine.

In the last two years, the Bush Administration spent more than $65 million helping political organizations in the Ukraine. Additional funds have come from George Soros, Great Britain, Canada, Norway and the Netherlands, according to the Associated Press (AP). The money was key to funding the exit polls that cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election results, which showed Yanukovych as the winner. That the story came from the AP is significant; while the CBC saw fit to run four AP stories on the details of Ukrainian politics in one night, it omitted the story regarding the funding arrangements for the exit polls. Other Canadian media have also ignored US and Canadian funding of Yuschenko and affiliated political organizations. As the Canadian and American press would have it, Russia is meddling in Ukrainian affairs, but our own countries have only a high-minded concern for democracy. If Stephen Harper and the Fraser Institute received $65 million from the Ukrainian government, would we hear about it?

Yuschenko's ties to anti-semitic groups -- Ukrainian neo-Nazis and holocaust deniers -- and far-right partisans have gone similarly unreported. Some have speculated that antisemitic activity, which was strictly curbed by Yanukovych's government, could run amok under Yuschenko.

Is there a debate to be had about US and Canadian intervention in the internal affairs of other countries, or Yuschenko's shady political associations? With these facts suppressed, a rational debate is impossible.

While the press provides plenty of arguments to depict Yuschenko as one of the good guys, Ukraine is not the first place that a "democratic revolution" has been enthusiastically embraced by the Canadian and American press, only to go awry after the media spotlight fades. The combined effects of privatization and inequality have had devastating effects throughout the post-Soviet world, but there is little or no criticism--much less awareness--of Yuschenko's advocacy of massive privatization of the Ukrainian economy.

Similar replacements by "democratic" oppositions occurred in Serbia, Georgia, and may soon occur in Romania. In Georgia, the initial enthusiastic press coverage of US- and Soros-backed Mikhail Saakashvili has abated, yet subsequent findings show that the new President has consolidated power, put further constraints on the press, and has used violence on demonstrators--not what most Canadians would call democratic reforms.

However, Saakashvili has fulfilled the European and American requests to privatize the economy, impose fiscal discipline, and "modernize the military and police force". Yet these changes have not been deemed newsworthy. Will the public be informed if Yuschenko follows in Saakashvili's footsteps? To whom does Yuschenko owe more loyalty: his voters, or his foreign investors?

While nominal democracy makes for good public relations, it is never the primary motivation for investing millions of dollars into a political outcome in a foreign country.

While nominal democracy makes for good public relations, it is never the primary motivation for investing millions of dollars into a political outcome in a foreign country. In Haiti, Georgia and Ukraine, the foreign policy of the US (with Canada in tow) is oriented toward increasing US power, spreading "free trade" and privatization as dominant economic policies, gaining valuable trade deals, and minimizing Russia's regional influence. The press supports the official line with startling regularity, while frequently neglecting to report the true motivations fuelling these policies.

In the absence of meaningful and consistent criticism, the media will support the official policy, as it is the journalistic path of least resistance.

Will the press continue to pay such close attention to Ukrainian politics if Yuschenko assumes power? If the precedents of Haiti and Georgia serve as indicators, the answer is no. In any case, serious considerations of the interests of the people of the Ukraine, Georgia, or Haiti have yet to make an appearance in the Canadian media, that's as worthy of concern as any election fraud.

» WSWS: What US-backed "democracy movements" have produced in Serbia and Georgia

» AnarchoGeek: Guess who funded the right wing 'orange revolution' in Ukraine

» Jakarta Post: Dividing the Ukraine, Putin's imperial dream

» Associated Press: U.S. money has helped opposition in Ukraine

Ukrainian politics have been the subject of relentless media attention in recent weeks. Dru Oja Jay wonders what is missing.