On the 5th anniversary of the Iraq war, Iraqi Veterans Against War (IVAW) US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan will be gathering in Washington today for 4 days of testimony on their experiences and feelings. The testimonies will be streamed on the internet and broadcast on satellite TV.

The veterans are not against the military and seek not to indict it – instead they seek to shine a light on the bigger picture: that the Abu Ghraib prison regime and the Haditha massacre of innocent Iraqis are not isolated incidents perpetrated by “bad seeds” as the military suggests, but evidence of an endemic problem. They will say they were asked to do terrible things and point the finger up the chain of command, which ignores, diminishes or covers up routine abuse and atrocities.

Former British special forces trooper, Ben Griffin banned from speaking in public

As of 1940hrs 29/02/08 I have been placed under an injunction preventing me from speaking publicly and publishing material gained as a result of my service in UKSF (SAS).

I will be continuing to collect evidence and opinion on British Involvement in extraordinary rendition, torture, secret detentions, extra judicial detention, use of evidence gained through torture, breaches of the Geneva Conventions, breaches of International Law and failure to abide by our obligations as per UN Convention Against Torture. I am carrying on regardless ”
Ben Griffin, Former UK Special forces trooper

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Iraqi Veterans Against War
extraordinary rendition
Battle for Haditha
Abu Ghraib

The Australian government is to officially apologise to the “stolen children” of Kamerra but with a refusal to offer any financial compensation to the thousands [The Bringing Them Home report, of 1997, says at least 100,000] of indigenous children who were fathered [I cant find anything around the circumstances of the “fathering” but it seems highly probable that the mothers were raped and abused] by white men and taken away from their mothers and families.

“We are a broken people. A lot of our people have no identity, they have no pride in themselves,” says Wallace, who returned to her grandfather’s sacred Worita land to immerse herself in aboriginal culture seven years ago. “They have lost the will to survive, and that’s been passed on to their children. They have got into drugs and alcohol and a lot of our youth are killing themselves. Recognising that we were stolen, it’s admitting that a wrong was done to us.”

Her mother’s sister, whom she affectionately calls Mum-Aggie, recalls the way part-Aboriginal children were removed. “A middle-aged white man came, a short man who smoked a pipe. He would go around the communities and pretend to have a conversation with people but really his eyes were on the children playing,” she says. “That’s how he took note of the kids and reported them.”

Interviews with some of the stolen children

LINK: Facing Australia´s history: truth and reconciliation for the stolen generations

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Stolen Children
Australia

The Atlanticist : Africa needs tough love, not more aid poured down a rat hole:

There is not a single state on the African continent that would not today be better off administered under a colonial regime, as Hong Kong was by Britain. If the West genuinely cared about Africa and wanted to make a difference rather than more charity, it would send soldiers to overthrow corrupt and despotic regimes, and constitutional law experts and administrators to architect and operate governing legal and economic systems there patterned after our own.

Like it did in Iraq? I kind of followed this line of thought, clipping my mouth shut with clothes pegs at places, so I wouldn’t yell out obscenities in front of my children. And I went through without a single f-word. I think the writer does identify the problem most of the time:

The African continent is a patchwork quilt of artificially drawn and imposed borders, established, for the most part, by European colonial powers.

Apart from the wars being fought now in Africa, the ones that the colonial west interrupted (while the west itself was free to fight its own murderous wars and get them over with — effectively establishing its borders without African or other outside interference) — but I was saying, apart from these wars, frontiers on the African continent were established entirely by the colonial master and mistress. It is inaccurate therefore to say for the most part. Nevertheless, the writer identifies there a seed for conflict.

Monetary aid is poison. It does not encourage more responsible government. […] A deluge of aid will not fix what ails Africa.

Of course it doesn’t, and it won’t. Whoever said it did or will? But, again, the writer has identified part of the problem. Here’s the thing, as an African, I want the west out, not in, for several reasons. The writer mentions the first one. The second one is unfair trade practices from which Africa is getting thinner and its western trade partners fatter. The third one is that the west messed Africa up once, it’s time it stopped. Got on the bus home. Knowing that “legal and economic systems […] patterned after our own,” as the writer so shamelessly puts it, seem to the west to be the best because ours were uprooted and incapacitated by the same west.

Lack of access to Western markets for products in which African producers enjoy comparative advantage such as sugar, cotton and textiles is a huge problem. Western import restrictions and tariffs stymie wealth creation in Africa.

There again, the writer concurs with me. It is of course a huge problem. And the solution?  “American and European markets should be unilaterally opened to Africa goods, with protective regimes for Western producers being discarded.” Why not stop there, and also provide logical solutions for the other problems so nicely identified? Why talk of colonial regimes in Africa administered by America and Britain? We’re quite tired, as a people, of fighting the west off. We want to be left alone.

That’s all we’ve ever wanted, really, even as the west scrambled for chunks of our land. But guess what… instead of getting out, the west is getting in deeper: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7026197.stm . I think somebody took your advice, dear writer. The shame of it is that it’s a waste of money, and we’ll just have to fight and kick the west out again, albeit with an even more messed up continent.

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Arriving at Dubai airport you are first met by a huge red sign WELCOME TO TOMORROW. If this is the future, maybe I should bow out right now! Everything here is huge - the airport - the duty free shop, the immigration hall - endless free ways, glass skyscrapers reaching to the sky, and more cranes per sq meter than any other city (well it seems that way). I woke up the next day to find I had no voice. Lost and speechless in this material world I was taken to another Dubai phenomena, the Gigantic mall - what else do you do in Dubai? The Ibn Battutu Mall named after the famous explorer. The mall is divided into six sectors, China, India and Egypt, Tunisia, Persia and Turkey. My first thought was what happened to Morocco were Ibn Battutu was born? We entered at the India section, avoiding Starbucks on the way we sat and had very expensive but cosy chocolate cakes and skinny lattes - besides a huge elephant that looks like its made of paper mache and the top of which is encased in a wooden canopy that reaches up to the ceiling.

I am in a huge gated estate where every single house is exactly the same design and colour the only difference is the size. There are artificial lakes with ducks and beautiful flowers on the side, swimming pools for every block and private ones for those who can afford it. Each house has at least one huge silver grey 4X4 parked in the driveway and Hummers are everywhere. My hosts are saying they intend to buy one. I must have looked horrified as they made the excuse that driving was so dangerous only a Hummer would protect them from death and destruction on the road!

My throat got the better of me and I have not been out since but my voice is slowly returning. Enough for me to have a long conversation with Maria (not her real name) the maid who is from the Philippines. Maria has been in Dubai for three months. Before that she spent just over 2 years in Saudi Arabia, one of 25 maids for a high official. The whole time she was there she never went out on her own and whatever she needed to buy was bought by the driver. She worked 7 days a week sometimes up to 16 hours a day. She got the job through an agent in Manila and had to hand her passport over to her employers on arrival. Maria was lucky in that her employers were “good” people and she used to get extra tips from the family relatives but the other maids were beaten. She was spoken to in Arabic from the first day which she did not understand. But her madam would not speak to her in English so she spent the first few weeks in fear, trying to figure out what she was supposed to be doing until she eventually learned the language. There are many cases of employers and family members raping maids and of course there is nothing they can do as they would get beaten and end up being deported. Apparently less and less Filipino women are going to Saudi Arabia to work.
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“Before white settlers arrived, Australia’s indigenous peoples lived in houses and villages, and used surprisingly sophisticated architecture and design methods to build their shelters, new research has found….

The findings, by the anthropologist and architect Dr Paul Memmott, of the University of Queensland, discredits a commonly held view in Australia that Aborigines were completely nomadic before the arrival of Europeans 200 years ago.

The belief was part of the argument used by white settlers to claim that Australia was terra nullius - the Latin term for land that belonged to nobody.

Few of the original buildings remain, because “local authorities burned or bulldozed the structures in the belief they were health hazards.”

The original piece is from the UK Guardian and reposted in Reason Magazine. If you want or need to grasp the mindset of the “white settlers” who claimed Australian land belonged to nobody therefore they had a right to take what they wanted, then read the comments of today’s equivalent.

The white colonizers were right in stating the land belonged to nobody. This was the essence of indigenous society - a communal respect for the environment and the land which was shared by everyone and whether they build permanent homes or were nomadic or both is irrelevant. But instead the colonizers came and commodified not only the environment (resources) and the land but also people. The indigenous people did not have any sanctions for trespass because you can only trespass on land that is owned. The colonizers used this as an excuse to take what they wanted and then build walls and fences by creating laws of ownership and trespass.

In Tasmania the whole indigenous population was wiped out yet there is still a debate as to whether genocide took place. In “The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, author Keith Windschuttle argues that it did not whilst the various authors of the Colonial Genocide Project insist that it did. The argument of against genocide does not hold up for the simple fact that in a space of some 30 to 40 years the whole indigenous population were gone. The point whether their deaths were as a result of a systematic colonial government policy is difficult to refute. The indigenous people fought for the right to remain on the land that was owned by nobody and maintain their dignity for which they were killed. They were killed because of who they were. The Colonial Genocide Project lists “the incidents of kidnapping and multiple killings of Aborigines by the colonists between 1803 and 1835″.

Thanks to Emeka of Timbuktu Chronicles for sending me the link to Reason Magazine

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Australia
Tasmania
Genocide