Kazakh military firing range an ecological disaster area

Madi Asanov

ASTANA, Kazakhstan — On Nov. 16, Kazakh Environmental Defence Minister Nurlani Ashimov announced before the deputies of the lower house of parliament that the former Daryal-U firing range (used by Russia until 2003) would be declared an ecological disaster area. He said there was a risk that poisonous substances left at the firing range could spread over a wider area.

According to the minister, persistent organic pollutants (POPs) seeped into the walls of the warehouse, where the toxic condensers were kept. He declared that an emergency would allow Interior Ministry forces to be deployed to the firing range, both to protect local residents and carry out an investigation into the causes of the seepage.

The inquiry may be connected with a sentence handed down on Oct. 16 to former Environmental Defence Minister Nurlan Iskakov, who was found guilty of abuse of office in connection with the spending of approximately US$6.7 million that had been earmarked for demolishing Daryal-U. Iskakov’s appeal of his four-year sentence will be heard on Dec. 9.

Ashimov added that after his department received the necessary financing, the warehouses would be dismantled, transferred to a remote location and completely buried.

The condensers are to be dismantled by a German firm that earlier removed some of them from Daryal-U. The minister said he understood the remaining condensers would be transported to Germany for dismantling by the end of the year, at the expense of German investors.

[KazTAG.kz, Azattyq.org, NewsKaz.ru] Source

Churches call for 'resistance' against Israel

Press TV - November 20, 2009 01:14:00 GMT

The logo of the World Council of Churches (WCC)

The World Council of Churches (WCC) has called for "resistance" against Israel's decision to expand its settlements in east Jerusalem Al-Quds.

WCC declared that the expansion of the Israeli settlements "may destroy any chance for peace", AFP reported.

Secretary General Reverend Samuel Kobia called on organizations related to the Council "to act with resolve, in concert ... to reverse this decision of the Israeli government and the settlement program it represents."

Israel on Wednesday announced that it will build 900 new homes in east Jerusalem Al-Quds, which it occupied in 1967.

Expressing "great disappointment", Kobia said the leading council of Christian and Orthodox churches "strongly condemns the decision ... to expand the illegal Gilo settlement as we believe that this decision will hinder attempts now in process to restart the peace negotiations."

"If settlements continue to expand and proliferate, they will further complicate negotiations and may destroy any chance for peace" Kobia said in a statement.

The WCC brings together 348 Protestant, Orthodox and Anglican churches representing about 560 million Christians in 110 countries.

VIDEO: CIA Secret 'Torture' Prison Found at Fancy Horseback Riding Academy

ABC News Finds the Location of a "Black Site" for Alleged Terrorists in Lithuania

by Matthew Cole and Brian Ross

The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.

Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.

"The activities in that prison were illegal," said human rights researcher John Sifton. "They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions."

Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of what they called a CIA front company, Elite, LLC, which purchased the property and built the "black site" in 2004.

Lithuania agreed to allow the CIA prison after President George W. Bush visited the country in 2002 and pledged support for Lithuania's efforts to join NATO.

"The new members of NATO were so grateful for the U.S. role in getting them into that organization that they would do anything the U.S. asked for during that period," said former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, now an ABC News consultant. "They were eager to please and eager to be cooperative on security and on intelligence matters."

Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite declined ABC's request for an interview.

ABC News first reported that Lithuania was one of three eastern European countries, along with Poland and Romania, where the CIA secretly interrogated suspected high-value al-Qaeda terrorists, but until now the precise site had not been confirmed. Read that report here.

Until March 2004, the site was a riding academy and café owned by a local family. The facility is in the town of Antaviliai, in the forest 20 kilometers northeast of the city center of Vilnius, near an exclusive suburb where many government officials live.

A "Building Within A Building"

In March 2004, the family sold the property to Elite, LLC, a now-defunct company registered in Delaware and Panama and Washington, D.C. That same month, Lithuania marked its formal admission to NATO.

The CIA constructed the prison over the next several months, apparently flying in prefabricated elements from outside Lithuania. The prison opened in Sept. 2004.

According to sources who saw the facility, the riding academy originally consisted of an indoor riding area with a red metallic roof, a stable and a cafe. The CIA built a thick concrete wall inside the riding area. Behind the wall, it built what one Lithuanian source called a "building within a building."

On a series of thick concrete pads, it installed what a source called "prefabricated pods" to house prisoners, each separated from the other by five or six feet. Each pod included a shower, a bed and a toilet. Separate cells were constructed for interrogations. The CIA converted much of the rest of the building into garage space.

Intelligence officers working at the prison were housed next door in the converted stable, raising the roof to add space. Electrical power for both structures was provided by a 2003 Caterpillar autonomous generator. All the electrical outlets in the renovated structure were 110 volts, meaning they were designed for American appliances. European outlets and appliances typically use 220 volts.

The prison pods inside the barn were not visible to locals. They describe seeing large amounts of earth being excavated during the summer of 2004. Locals who saw the activity at the prison and approached to ask for work were turned away by English-speaking guards. The guards were replaced by new guards every 90 days.

Former CIA officials directly involved or briefed on the highly classified secret prison program tell ABC News that as many as eight suspects were held for more than a year in the Vilnius prison. Flight logs viewed by ABC News confirm that CIA planes made repeated flights into Lithuania during that period. In November 2005, after public disclosures about the program, the prison was closed, as was another "black site" in Romania.

Lithuanian Prison One of Many Around Europe, Officials Said

The CIA moved the so-called High Value Detainees (HVD) out of Europe to "war zone" facilities, according to one of the former CIA officials, meaning they were moved to the Middle East. Within nine months, President Bush announced the existence of the program and ordered the transfer of 14 of the detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, Ramzi bin al Shihb and Abu Zubaydah, to Guantanamo.

In August 2009, after ABC News reported the existence of the secret prison outside Vilnius, Lithuanian president Grybauskaite called for an investigation. "If this is true," Grybauskaite said, "Lithuania has to clean up, accept responsibility, apologize, and promise it will never happen again."

At the time, a Lithuanian government official denied that his country had hosted a secret CIA facility. The CIA told ABC News that reporting the existence of the Lithuanian prison was "irresponsible" and declined to discuss the location of the prison.

On Tuesday, the CIA again declined to talk about the prison. "The CIA's terrorist interrogation program is over," said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano. "This agency does not discuss publicly where detention facilities may or may not have been."

Former CIA officials told ABC News that the prison in Lithuania was one of eight facilities the CIA set-up after 9/11 to detain and interrogate top al-Qaeda operatives captured around the world. Thailand, Romania, Poland, Morocco, and Afghanistan have also been identified as countries that housed secret prisons for the CIA. President Barack Obama ordered all the sites closed shortly after taking office in January.

The Lithuanian prison was the last "black" site opened in Europe, after the CIA's secret prison in Poland was closed down in late 2003 or early 2004.

"It obviously took a lot of effort to keep [the prison] secret," said John Sifton, whose firm One World Research investigates human rights abuses. "There's a reason this stuff gets kept secret."

"It's an embarrassment, and a crime."

Bantustans and the unilateral declaration of statehood

Virginia Tilley, The Electronic Intifada, 19 November 2009

The PA leadership in Ramallah is leading the Palestinian movement of independence to a dead end with its proposed unilateral call for Palestinian statehood. (Thaer Ganaim/MaanImages)

From a rumor, to a rising murmur, the proposal floated by the Palestinian Authority's (PA) Ramallah leadership to declare Palestinian statehood unilaterally has suddenly hit center stage. The European Union, the United States and others have rejected it as "premature," but endorsements are coming from all directions: journalists, academics, nongovernmental organization activists, Israeli right-wing leaders (more on that later). The catalyst appears to be a final expression of disgust and simple exhaustion with the fraudulent "peace process" and the argument goes something like this: if we can't get a state through negotiations, we will simply declare statehood and let Israel deal with the consequences.

But it's no exaggeration to propose that this idea, although well-meant by some, raises the clearest danger to the Palestinian national movement in its entire history, threatening to wall Palestinian aspirations into a political cul-de-sac from which it may never emerge. The irony is indeed that, through this maneuver, the PA is seizing -- even declaring as a right -- precisely the same dead-end formula that the African National Congress (ANC) fought so bitterly for decades because the ANC leadership rightly saw it as disastrous. That formula can be summed up in one word: Bantustan.

It has become increasingly dangerous for the Palestinian national movement that the South African Bantustans remain so dimly understood. If Palestinians know about the Bantustans at all, most imagine them as territorial enclaves in which black South Africans were forced to reside yet lacked political rights and lived miserably. This partial vision is suggested by Mustafa Barghouthi's recent comments at the Wattan Media Centre in Ramallah, when he cautioned that Israel wanted to confine the Palestinians into "Bantustans" but then argued for a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood within the 1967 boundaries -- although nominal "states" without genuine sovereignty are precisely what the Bantustans were designed to be.

Apartheid South Africa's Bantustans were not simply sealed territorial enclaves for black people. They were the ultimate "grand" formula by which the apartheid regime hoped to survive: that is, independent states for black South Africans who -- as white apartheid strategists themselves keenly understood and pointed out -- would forever resist the permanent denial of equal rights and political voice in South Africa that white supremacy required. As designed by apartheid architects, the ten Bantustans were designed to correspond roughly to some of the historical territories associated with the various black "peoples" so that they could claim the term "Homelands." This official term indicated their ideological purpose: to manifest as national territories and ultimately independent states for the various black African "peoples" (defined by the regime) and so secure a happy future for white supremacy in the "white" Homeland (the rest of South Africa). So the goal of forcibly transferring millions of black people into these Homelands was glossed over as progressive: 11 states living peacefully side by side (sound familiar?). The idea was first to grant "self-government" to the Homelands as they gained institutional capacity and then reward that process by declaring/granting independent statehood.

The challenge for the apartheid government was then to persuade "self-governing" black elites to accept independent statehood in these territorial fictions and so permanently absolve the white government of any responsibility for black political rights. Toward this end, the apartheid regime hand-picked and seeded "leaders" into the Homelands, where they immediately sprouted into a nice crop of crony elites (the usual political climbers and carpet-baggers) that embedded into lucrative niches of financial privileges and patronage networks that the white government thoughtfully cultivated (this should sound familiar too).

It didn't matter that the actual territories of the Homelands were fragmented into myriad pieces and lacked the essential resources to avoid becoming impoverished labor cesspools. Indeed, the Homelands' territorial fragmentation, although crippling, was irrelevant to Grand Apartheid. Once all these "nations" were living securely in independent states, apartheid ideologists argued to the world, tensions would relax, trade and development would flower, blacks would be enfranchised and happy, and white supremacy would thus become permanent and safe.

The thorn in this plan was to get even thoroughly co-opted black Homeland elites to declare independent statehood within "national" territories that transparently lacked any meaningful sovereignty over borders, natural resources, trade, security, foreign policy, water -- again, sound familiar? Only four Homeland elites did so, through combinations of bribery, threats and other "incentives." Otherwise, black South Africans didn't buy it and the ANC and the world rejected the plot whole cloth. (The only state to recognize the Homelands was fellow-traveler Israel.) But the Homelands did serve one purpose -- they distorted and divided black politics, created terrible internal divisions, and cost thousands of lives as the ANC and other factions fought it out. The last fierce battles of the anti-apartheid struggle were in the Homelands, leaving a legacy of bitterness to this day.

Hence the supreme irony for Palestinians today is that the most urgent mission of apartheid South Africa -- getting the indigenous people to declare statehood in non-sovereign enclaves -- finally collapsed with mass black revolt and took apartheid down with it, yet the Palestinian leadership now is not only walking right into that same trap but actually making a claim on it.

The reasons that the PA-Ramallah leadership and others want to walk into this trap are fuzzy. Maybe it could help the "peace talks" if they are redefined as negotiations between two states instead of preconditions for a state. Declaring statehood could redefine Israel's occupation as invasion and legitimize resistance as well as trigger different and more effective United Nations intervention. Maybe it will give Palestinians greater political leverage on the world stage -- or at least preserve the PA's existence for another (miserable) year.

Why these fuzzy visions are not swiftly defeated by short attention to the South African Bantustan experience may stem partly from two key differences that confuse the comparison, for Israel has indeed sidestepped two infamous fatal errors that helped sink South Africa's Homeland strategy. First, Israel did not make South Africa's initial mistake of appointing "leaders" to run the Palestinian "interim self-governing" Homeland. In South Africa, this founding error made it too obvious that the Homelands were puppet regimes and exposed the illegitimacy of the black "national" territories themselves as contrived racial enclaves. Having watched the South Africans bungle this, and having learned from its own past failures with the Village Leagues and the like, Israel instead worked with the United States to design the Oslo process not only to restore the exiled leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its then Chairman Yasser Arafat to the territories but also to provide for "elections" (under occupation) to grant a thrilling gloss of legitimacy to the Palestinian "interim self-governing authority." It's one of the saddest tragedies of the present scenario that Israel so deftly turned Palestinians' noble commitment to democracy against them in this way -- granting them the illusion of genuinely democratic self-government in what everyone now realizes was always secretly intended to be a Homeland.

Only now has Israel found a way to avoid South Africa's second fatal error, which was to declare black Homelands to be "independent states" in non-sovereign territory. In South Africa, this ploy manifested to the world as transparently racist and was universally disparaged. It must be obvious that, if Israel had stood up in the international stage and said "as you are, you are now a state" that Palestinians and everyone else would have rejected the claim out of hand as a cruel farce. Yet getting the Palestinians to declare statehood themselves allows Israel precisely the outcome that eluded the apartheid South African regime: voluntary native acceptance of "independence" in a non-sovereign territory with no political capacity to alter its territorial boundaries or other essential terms of existence -- the political death capsule that apartheid South Africa could not get the ANC to swallow.

Responses from Israel have been mixed. The government does seem jumpy and has broadcast its "alarm," Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has threatened unilateral retaliation (unspecified) and government representatives have flown to various capitals securing international rejection. But Israeli protests could also be disingenuous. One tactic could be persuading worried Palestinian patriots that a unilateral declaration of statehood might not be in Israel's interest in order to allay that very suspicion. Another is appeasing protest from that part of Likud's purblind right-wing electorate that finds the term "Palestinian state" ideologically anathema. A more honest reaction could be the endorsement of Kadima party elder Shaul Mofaz, a hardliner who can't remotely be imagined to value a stable and prosperous Palestinian future. Right-wing Israeli journalists are also pitching in with disparaging but also comforting essays arguing that unilateral statehood won't matter because it won't change anything (close to the truth). For example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened unilaterally to annex the West Bank settlement blocs if the PA declares statehood, but Israel was going to do that anyway.

In the liberal-Zionist camp, Yossi Sarid has warmly endorsed the plan and Yossi Alpher has cautiously done so. Their writings suggest the same terminal frustration with the "peace process" but also recognition that this may be the only way to save the increasingly fragile dream that a nice liberal democratic Jewish state can survive as such. It also sounds like something that might please Palestinians -- at least enough to finally get their guilt-infusing story of expulsion and statelessness off the liberal-Zionist conscience. Well-meaning white liberals in apartheid South Africa -- yes, there were some of those, too -- held the same earnest candle burning for the black Homelands system.

Some otherwise smart journalists are also pitching in to endorse unilateral statehood, raising odd ill-drawn comparisons -- Georgia, Kosovo, Israel itself -- as "evidence" that it's a good idea. But Georgia, Kosovo and Israel had entirely different profiles in international politics and entirely different histories from Palestine and attempts to draw these comparisons are intellectually lazy. The obvious comparison is elsewhere and the lessons run in the opposite direction: for a politically weak and isolated people, who have never had a separate state and lack any powerful international ally, to declare or accept "independence" in non-contiguous and non-sovereign enclaves encircled and controlled by a hostile nuclear power can only seal their fate.

In fact, the briefest consideration should instantly reveal that a unilateral declaration of statehood will confirm the Palestinians' presently impossible situation as permanent. As Mofaz predicted, a unilateral declaration will allow "final status" talks to continue. What he did not spell out is that those talks will become truly pointless because Palestinian leverage will be reduced to nothing. As Middle East historian Juan Cole recently pointed out, the last card the Palestinians can play -- their real claim on the world's conscience, the only real threat they can raise to Israel's status quo of occupation and settlement -- is their statelessness. The PA-Ramallah leadership has thrown away all the other cards. It has stifled popular dissent, suppressed armed resistance, handed over authority over vital matters like water to "joint committees" where Israel holds veto power, savagely attacked Hamas which insisted on threatening Israel's prerogatives, and generally done everything it can to sweeten the occupier's mood, preserve international patronage (money and protection), and solicit promised benefits (talks?) that never come. It's increasingly obvious to everyone watching from outside this scenario -- and many inside it -- that this was always a farce. For one thing, the Western powers do not work like the Arab regimes: when you do everything the West requires of you, you will wait in vain for favors, for the Western power then loses any benefit from dealing more with you and simply walks away.

But more importantly, the South African comparison helps illuminate why the ambitious projects of pacification, "institution building" and economic development that the Ramallah PA and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have whole-heartedly embarked upon are not actually exercises in "state-building." Rather, they emulate with frightening closeness and consistency South Africa's policies and stages in building the Bantustan/Homelands. Indeed, Fayyad's project to achieve political stability through economic development is the same process that was openly formalized in the South African Homeland policy under the slogan "separate development." That under such vulnerable conditions no government can exercise real power and "separate development" must equate with permanent extreme dependency, vulnerability and dysfunctionality was the South African lesson that has, dangerously, not yet been learned in Palestine -- although all the signals are there, as Fayyad himself has occasionally admitted in growing frustration. But declaring independence will not solve the problem of Palestinian weakness; it will only concretize it.

Still, when "separate development" flounders in the West Bank, as it must, Israel will face a Palestinian insurrection. So Israel needs to anchor one last linchpin to secure Jewish statehood before that happens: declare a Palestinian "state" and so reduce the "Palestinian problem" to a bickering border dispute between putative equals. In the back halls of the Knesset, Kadima political architects and Zionist liberals alike must now be waiting with bated breath, when they are not composing the stream of back-channel messages that is doubtless flowing to Ramallah encouraging this step and promising friendship, insider talks and vast benefits. For they all know what's at stake, what every major media opinion page and academic blog has been saying lately: that the two-state solution is dead and Israel will imminently face an anti-apartheid struggle that will inevitably destroy Jewish statehood. So a unilateral declaration by the PA that creates a two-state solution despite its obvious Bantustan absurdities is now the only way to preserve Jewish statehood, because it's the only way to derail the anti-apartheid movement that spells Israel's doom.

This is why it is so dangerous that the South African Bantustan comparison has been neglected until now, treated as a side issue, even an exotic academic fascination, to those battling to relieve starvation in Gaza and soften the cruel system of walls and barricades to get medicine to the dying. The Ramallah PA's suddenly serious initiative to declare an independent Palestinian state in non-sovereign territory must surely force fresh collective realization that this is a terribly pragmatic question. It's time to bring closer attention to what "Bantustan" actually means. The Palestinian national movement can only hope someone in its ranks undertakes that project as seriously as Israel has undertaken it before it's too late.

Virginia Tilley is a former professor of political science and international relations and since 2006 has served as Chief Research Specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa. She is author of The One-State Solution (U of Michigan Press, 2005) and numerous articles and essays on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Based in Cape Town, she writes here in her personal capacity and can be reached at vtilley A T mweb D O T co D O T za.

Some OPEC Nations Charge Ahead Despite Slow Oil Demand

The Wall Street Journal
11/19/2009 12:04

Energy forecasters increasingly predict slowing growth in global oil demand in the years ahead, but some OPEC nations are heading in the opposite direction and ramping up their capacity to pump oil.

Qatar, for example, is set to raise its oil-production capacity early next year from an existing field known as Al Shaheen. The more than $6 billion expansion project brightens the revenue prospects of the Mideast state but highlights a bigger problem brewing for its partners in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

After keeping a tight tether on supply in recent years by cautiously investing, the 12-nation cartel finds itself battling an untimely convergence of lackluster consumption that magnifies its own rising supply capacity -- which may in turn reignite old battles between members over market share and ultimately push oil prices lower.

OPEC output capacity is expected to increase around one million barrels a day in 2010 as projects enter service in Angola, Iraq, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, according to Bill Farren-Price, energy director at Medley Global Advisors.

"Significant challenges face OPEC next year," Mr. Farren-Price says. "It will struggle to integrate a wave of new OPEC production capacity that vastly exceeds world demand for its crude." Many of the projects started development well before the recession.

Projects like Al Shaheen may swell OPEC's nominal spare production capacity, a measure of its overall capability to bring barrels to consumers, to roughly 7.5 million barrels a day. That would will leave OPEC capacity up about 15% from 2008, almost a 10-year high, depending on how much oil the group is actually producing.

Operated by Denmark's AP Moller-Maersk, the offshore Al Shaheen field started producing crude in the early 1990s and could almost double in capacity to over 500,000 barrels a day, says Qatar oil minister Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah. "The expansion is coming along as expected," he said, dismissing concern about depressed demand.

Mr. Al-Attiyah and other OPEC officials say China, India and other parts of Asia will remain OPEC's fastest-growing markets. OPEC exports to Asia, not including Japan, grew by 22% in 2000-08, according to OPEC data. By comparison, shipments to North America, mainly the U.S., were flat in that period.

Prices, meanwhile, have risen about 77% this year to $79 a barrel, thanks in part to a weak U.S. dollar that is encouraging investors to buy higher-yielding oil futures contracts, and in part to big OPEC production cuts this year. Those cuts are likely to be kept in place at the group's final meeting of the year scheduled for Dec. 22 in Angola, OPEC officials say.

But problems seem set to mount. In the near term, a persistent glut in crude inventory this year is expected to last into 2010. Yet OPEC is cranking up its ability to produce oil -- and that could extend the current supply glut.

Among the most aggressive has been Angola, which has doubled its production capacity -- from a low base -- since 2004, to about 2.1 million barrels a day. Most of the output from its 100,000-barrel-a-day Tombua-Landana offshore project will start in 2010. Chevron Corp. is developing the $3.8 billion project.

Source

Jahalin Bedouin suffer without representation

Kieron Monks, The Electronic Intifada, 19 November 2009

The Jabal Bedouin camp near Abu Dis is situated near a large garbage dump. (Lazar Simeonov)

Beyond the demolitions in its suburbs and the frequent, violent clashes around the al-Aqsa mosque, Jerusalem is the scene of a quieter shame. Southeast of the holy city live the Jahalin Bedouin, a community that has been repeatedly displaced and transferred, now enduring unimaginable poverty beside Jerusalem's largest garbage dump. An embarrassment to Palestinians and Israelis alike, the Bedouin and their unique way of life are under grave threat.

Eid Raeb is a coordinator between the Jabal camp and the European nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are its lifeblood. "Bedouin life is finished," he declared without hesitation. "Sometimes when I look outside I imagine how it was before, but I know that life is over." Eid is one of the founding members of the camp after they were displaced from their land that became Ma'ale Adumim, one of the fastest growing Israeli settlements. "After they built [Ma'ale Adumim] in 1979, they began to move us. At first very slowly, one family at a time. After 1993 and the Oslo agreements they built many houses and said they needed all the land." The Oslo agreements placed them in Area C, under Israeli control. "At first when they told us to move here we refused, but the Israelis said they would use force. They promised us building permission, electricity, water and streets. When we came here there was nothing, just open land."

The Jabal camp was established in 1997, with each Bedouin family receiving around $10,000 compensation from the Israeli government. But the promises of infrastructural support were reneged on; most crucially the Bedouin were denied permission to build, forcing them to live for six years in shipping containers. In 1998, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights expressed "deep concern at the situation of the Jahalin Bedouin families who were forcibly evicted from their ancestral lands to make way for the expansion of the Ma'ale Adumim settlement." The report also condemned the "manner in which the Government of Israel has housed these families -- in steel container vans in a garbage dump in Abu Dis in subhuman living conditions." After concerted pressure from aid organizations and foreign NGOs the residents of Jabal were finally granted permission to build on their land.

Eid claims that the site was uninhabited when the Bedouin were moved in, that it was Israeli land to give away and that "Palestinians have no problem with us being here." This is not the case according to Dr. Abdullah Abu Helal, a long-time resident of Abu Dis, the neighboring Palestinian village. "Their village is built on land confiscated from Palestinians in Abu Dis. We think very badly of them, that they work with Israelis and sometimes they behave like Israeli soldiers. We had a demonstration against the stealing of our land and they came to shoot at us. That they have their own problems and difficulties does not mean they should accept to live on Palestinian land." Abu Helal referred to a neighboring Bedouin camp where he claims the residents refused to displace Palestinians and now live in temporary tents away from Abu Dis town, explaining that "they trade milk and cheese with us, we provide them with teachers. They are with us in our struggle against the Israelis."

A home in the Jabal Bedouin camp. (Lazar Simeonov)

Eid freely admits to his split loyalties. "The Bedouin here are Palestinians. But before when Jordan had this land we were Jordanians and most Bedouin feel closer to Jordan. We work with Israelis and if there is a problem, Israeli police come here." It is easy to see how their dealings with the occupation forces would be enough to poison a Palestinian's view of the Jabal Bedouin, while Eid has nothing but contempt for the Palestinian Authority (PA). He explained that "They are not a government, they are like thieves. We are starting from zero here, we need schools, water, roads but the PA is helping us only with teachers. We know that more than $1 million has come from international aid but we do not see it. Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] and the PA take it."

The camp's greatest concern is the massive garbage dump located just 300 meters away where the majority of Jerusalem's waste is disposed, including tons of chemicals and dangerous gases each day. The site predates Jabal but as Eid explained, "For the last ten years [the Israelis] have been promising to take the garbage. They say they will relocate it to a place near Jericho but even if they do the problem will not go away, it is in the earth now. We have now many cases of skin disease in our people and animals and we do not know how to treat it. One animal will catch it and then spread the sickness to many others. Sometimes we cannot see it for weeks." Jabal's 3,500-strong population does not include a single doctor, so anyone who falls sick must take a long drive to Bethany. "If we need a doctor quickly it is a big problem", said Eid.

Two months ago, Eid was visited by a representative from the Israeli Land Administration, guaranteeing the garbage would be moved in the next two years. "I would like to trust her but I believe only in actions," he explained. There was less optimistic news from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. He added that the camp was informed by a spokesperson that "The most recent meeting between the interior minister and the mayor of Ma'ale Adumim resulted in a decision to postpone any kind of plan for at least six months."

There are many precedents for Bedouin being forced to endure such conditions. Between 2002-04 the Israeli government destroyed 7,500 acres of Bedouin crops in the Negev desert by spraying the area with illegal toxic chemicals. The effects were hugely damaging to residents and animals in the area and the policy was widely condemned. At the time Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert defended the policy, stating "we will displace unrecognized Bedouin communities to make room for thousands of Jews." Recognition has been a huge problem for the Bedouin and around 20 percent of their population are not even registered as refugees, giving them no protection from displacement and brutal treatment. There is currently a court case on behalf of Ezariya camp (Bethany), to determine whether their residents have any right to reverse the 257 eviction orders that have been issued against them.

Their rights infringed upon by the Israeli authorities and resented by their Palestinian neighbors, and struggling to maintain their way of life, the residents of Jabal face an uncertain future. Although they now own the rights to the land, the continued expansion of Ma'ale Adumim poses a constant menace. Without the resources to support themselves they are reliant on a handful of foreign NGOs which have been unable to find solutions for the garbage problem or the resultant diseases. Without urgent attention Jabal could become a humanitarian crisis, but there is no authority willing to represent them.

Kieron Monks is a freelance reporter from London, writing for Ma'an News, Palestine News Network and publications in Europe.

Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby

From Channel Four’s Dispatches program. The documentry on the disease crippling the Western governments.

IOF raids wound 3 Palestinians, IOF soldiers round up dozens in Gaza

19/11/2009 - 10:23 AM

RAFAH, (PIC)-- Israeli warplanes pounded the tunnels area in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, and a position for the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, at dawn Thursday wounding three citizens, local sources reported. They told the PIC reporter that Israeli F-16s fired two missiles at the tunnels area on the Palestinian-Egyptian border and injured three civilians. The sources noted that a few minutes later the warplanes blasted a position for the Qassam Brigades west of Khan Younis, also in southern Gaza, with two missiles but no casualties were reported. The third raid targeted the same position almost an hour later while police squads were combing the area, no casualties were known yet. The local initiative committee in Beit Hanun, north of the Strip, said that the Israeli occupation forces rounded up tens of Palestinians in an incursion in the vicinity of the industrial area near Beit Hanun (Erez) crossing. The committee said that the IOF soldiers opened fire at the Palestinian workers from the military watchtowers in the vicinity of the crossing wounding a number of them before detaining many others. It said in a statement that around 30 heavily armed soldiers attacked the workers and took them to the crossing.

U.S. nuclear arms in Japan: a firsthand account

By BRIAN A. VICTORIA -November 17, 2009
MSG, USAR (Retired) and Professor of Japanese Studies, Antioch University

Dear Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama,

In the fall of 1980 I was assigned as a civilian university professor to provide Japanese language instruction to the officers and men of the USS Knox (FF-1052), a destroyer home-ported in Yokosuka. Sharing quarters with the ship's nuclear weapons officer, I soon became aware that the Knox was outfitted with an ASROC antisubmarine missile system including nuclear depth bombs.

I say this because: 1) The operations manual for these nuclear weapons lay in plain sight on the floor beneath the officer's desk; 2) receipts for the nuclear weapons first loaded on the ship in Guam were on his desk; and 3) an armed marine stood guard 24 hours a day in front of a door on the ship marked with a radiation hazard sign.

I immediately realized that the presence of nuclear weapons in Japanese territorial waters violated Japan's three nonnuclear principles. Yet even then I suspected this violation could not have occurred without the Japanese government's consent. Recent revelations regarding related "oral agreements" between then Foreign Minister Masayoshi Ohira and U.S. Ambassador Edwin Reishauer have proven my suspicions correct.

In 1995 I returned to Japan, this time as U.S. Army intelligence specialist assigned to Headquarters, U.S. Forces, Japan, located at Yokota Air Force Base. There I participated in command and control exercises premised on the outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula.

Once, in response to the commanding general's query, my fellow intelligence analysts insisted that U.S. military bases in Japan would not be subject to antiwar demonstrations in the event of a second Korean war. Why? Because North Korean missiles aimed at U.S. bases in Japan were so inaccurate they would miss their targets and, instead, kill Japanese civilians in neighboring areas. This would so anger the Japanese people that they would forget that the reason for the missiles raining down on them in the first place was the presence of U.S. bases.

Significantly, there was never any discussion of how to prevent innocent Japanese civilians from being killed, only how to take advantage of their deaths to ensure the Japanese people's support for the U.S. war effort.

In 1997 I was reassigned to the U.S. Army-run military port in Naha, Okinawa. This was at a time when the U.S. had agreed to an Okinawan request to relocate the military port to a site further north on the main island. However, I soon discovered that while the U.S. military authorities had publicly pledged that, in the event of relocation, there would be no expansion of the port's facilities, there was nevertheless a secret plan to build a new hovercraft port to speed up the dispatch of marines to the Korean Peninsula in the event of war.

Prime minister, the conclusion I draw from my personal experiences is that neither the U.S. military nor previous Liberal Democratic Party governments can be trusted to tell the truth to the Japanese people. In light of the recent collision between a Japanese naval destroyer and a container ship in the narrow Kanmon Straits, who can guarantee that the same will not happen to one or another of the nuclear-armed U.S. Navy ships home-ported in Yokosuka, with the possible loss (or worse) of one or more nuclear weapons on board?

Further, is it right for the lives of Japanese civilians near U.S. military bases to be held hostage to U.S. military activities on the Korean Peninsula? Prime minister, I trust you will agree that the Japanese people should not become the unwitting and unwilling victims of yet another war.

Dedicated to the welfare of the people of Japan as I believe you and the Democratic Party of Japan are, I pray you will not allow the U.S. military to further betray and endanger this nation as it has done so often in the past. As you have rightly pointed out, it is highly unnatural to have foreign military bases located in one's country for more than half a century. Isn't it time, beginning with Okinawa, to work toward dismantling these bases even as you strive to build a new East Asian economic and security system?

Source

Local Currencies -The missing link in the quest for sustainability

by Helen Dew,
a founding member of the Living Economies Trust, New Zealand
November 4, 2009

Currency is the lifeblood of an economic system. Most people think that there’s only one type of money, because that’s all they’ve ever known. Cheques and credit cards etc. represent special-purpose forms of cash, but money is money, they think, regardless of the form it takes. Few realise that there are, potentially at least, many different forms of money, and each type can affect the economy, human society and the natural environment in a different way.

Bernard Lietaer, research fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Resources, California, and author of "The Future of Money" (2001), says

‘We create our exchange systems and then they create the world we live in.’

Richard Douthwaite, author of "The Ecology of Money" (1999), says

‘If we wish to live more ecologically, it would make sense to adopt monetary systems that make it easier to do so.’

Essentially, community currencies connect unused or under-utilised resources with unmet needs, enabling exchanges to take place despite a shortage of money.

A wide variety of currency models are currently in use throughout the world, including manually operated mutual credit systems, beautifully designed vouchers and on-line accounting systems.

Members form trading circles, list their offerings and needs, and offer and accept payment for goods and services either wholly or partly in the local currency.

Local Currencies are the ultimate in loyalty programs. Unlike profits derived from trading with national currencies, the wealth generated by trading with exchange systems created by and for local communities stays within the district.

Since community currencies work alongside and supplement national currency, once their advantages are understood they are welcomed by the community, particularly in times of economic stress. Historically, community currencies have been economic and social lifesavers.

The principle advantages of community currencies are:

• Protection against global economic instability
• Stemming ‘leakage’ of community wealth to outsiders/offshore
• Support for local small/medium businesses
• Business opportunities in import substitution
• Less fuel needed for imported product
• Increased employment opportunities
• Less conventional money required for desirable projects
• Enhanced sense of community
• Branding opportunity for the district
• Tourist attraction, especially for early adopters

Naturally, if we decide to change how money works we first of all need to understand how the current money system is designed, how the use of it manages to leave a trail of destruction in its wake and what other options are possible.

Deirdre Kent, in "Healthy Money, Healthy Planet", brings to light some surprising facts about the history and workings of money:

Almost all of our money supply is created by private banks as interest-bearing debt. The Reserve Bank has confirmed that only about two percent of the money supply in use in New Zealand is created interest-free.

The problem with this is that money is always in short supply. When banks provide loans they create the principle only. Borrowers must find extra money to repay the interest either by increasing their production, competing with others facing the same problem or by further borrowing.

Therefore:
• The never-ending need to increase production causes intolerable demand to be made on natural resources.
• The competition for an inadequate supply of money is a bit like musical chairs; someone misses out; bankruptcy is inevitable for some of the losers.
• Further borrowing compounds borrower’s problems, consigning them to long-term and often inescapable debt.

Given the above options imposed by the present money system it is little wonder that regionally, nationally and globally we are now faced with escalating environmental damage, economic strain and social dislocation.

In the search for effective means of meeting these challenges, particularly the immanent problem of diminishing and more costly supplies of energy communities are beginning to recognise the potential of community currencies.

Cuba’s response to ‘peak oil’

When Cuba lost access to Soviet oil in the early 1990s, the country faced an immediate crisis – feeding the population – and an ongoing challenge: how to create a new low-energy society. Cuba transitioned from large, fossil-fuel intensive farming to small, less energy-intensive organic farms and urban gardens, and from a highly industrial society to a more sustainable one. Although barely mentioned in the documentary film, "The Power of Community" documenting Cuba’s recovery, community currency played a very important role in that process.


Kinsale 2021, Ireland

The creators of the Kinsale 2021 energy descent plan( 7) (Kinsale has a population of 7,000), recently announced that the Kinsale Town Council has unanimously adopted the proposed long term plan. The plan, which involved the community in its development, is based on the changes that can be expected in the absence of cheap fuel. It is significant that 10 of the 53 pages of the plan are devoted to the design and implementation of a community currency system. Also noteworthy is the priority given to creating their local currency as the first step in the process of implementing the plan.

Regional currencies in Germany

Mounting economic, environmental and social pressures are prompting greater openness by communities and their business and civic leaders to seriously consider the implementation of community currencies. This is particularly so in Germany, where Prof Dr Margrit Kennedy has pioneered regionally-scaled systems. Seventeen ‘Regio’ currency systems have already launched their local vouchers, with 49 more in the pipeline.

The first example was launched in March 2005 by students at a Steiner school in Chiemgau, for the purpose of raising funds for major repairs to the school building.

Regio participants purchase vouchers at 1:1 for Euros and use them to purchase goods or services, either wholly or as a percentage of the price. Vouchers may be redeemed for Euros at any time, minus an administration fee. A combination of education and built in incentives leads to a preference for trades using the local currency.

A valued feature of local currencies is their tendency to build community. Like the growing appreciation of ‘slow food’, ‘slow money’ is helping to restore the social dimension of trading. It takes more time to process a transaction, time for graciousness, time for building connection with community of place.

Once would-be participants come to appreciate the advantage of having their own exchange medium promoters sign up members from all sectors of the community; local government, banks, businesses, community organisations and ordinary citizens.

In February 2007 an ABC TV news story reported the fast spreading voucher-based BerkShares? in Massachusetts, USA. US$835,000 worth of vouchers were distributed to the participating banks prior to the 2006 launch; 225 local businesses accept the vouchers. ‘Chambers of Commerce in three neighbouring towns recently asked how they can bring BerkShares? to their communities.’

Community currencies are a vital tool for the empowerment of local communities as they come to terms with the multitude of challenges related to energy and climate change.

source:Living Economy