Open Letter to Amnesty International : Melbourne Indymedia

Dear Amnesty International,

I strongly urge you to step back from your newly announced campaign to release the 75 US agents in Cuba. Associated Press reported on July 30 that your researcher Paige Wilhite has stated that "They are prisoners of conscience and the Cuban government has to release them immediately and without conditions." To the contrary, they have broken Cuban laws prohibiting funding from foreign governments, a law found in any sovereign state, including democracies like the USA and Great Britain.

To people of conscience on the left, this well-orchestrated campaign to isolate and punish Cuba economically is rather transparent. You have joined groups such as Reporters Without Borders, whose animosity to communism or state-owned media in 3rd world countries is driven more by bottom line considerations than freedom of expression it would seem. (42% of the budget of "Reporter Without Borders" is covered by the Commission of the European Union, a body which is fanatically pro-privatization.)

While Amnesty International has a rather preening posture about being "above politics", it has shown a rather dismaying tendency in the past to adapt to the foreign policy needs of the USA and Great Britain, where it seems to enjoy the greatest support both socially and economically.

For example, when the Iraqi army was accused of ripping babies from hospital incubators in December 1990, Amnesty International told the Washington Post that "We heard rumors of these deaths as early as August but only recently has there been substantial information on the extent of the killings." Not only were you spreading disinformation hatched by the infamous Hill & Knowlton public relations firm, you were helping to launch the war against Iraq whose opening salvos relied on this lurid fabrication.

Next you got involved in the Balkans--once again on behalf of US foreign policy. When you sponsored a 25 city tour in the USA for Jadranka Cigelj, Judith Miller (!) of the NY Times wrote glowingly about your efforts to raise awareness about how the Serbs were using rape as a political weapon--even quoting the wretched David Rieff, who has emerged as a frontline spokesman for humanitarian imperialist interventions.

Unfortunately neither Judith Miller nor your public relations department spelled out the exact character of Cigelj's activism around the rape issue, nor her sordid political past. In "Fool's Crusade", Diana Johnstone points out that "Cigelj was a vice president of Croatian president Franjo Tudjman's ruling nationalist party, the Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ) and was in charge of the Zagreb office of the Croatia Information Center (CIC), a wartime propaganda agency funded by the same cryptofascist Croatian émigré groups that backed Tudjman. The primary source for reports of rape in Bosnia was Cigelj's CIC and associated women's groups, which sent 'piles of testimony to Western women and to the press'".

She adds:

"The CIC benefited from a close connection with the 'International Gesellschaft fur Menschenrechte' (International Association for Human Rights, IGfM), a far right propaganda institute set up in 1981 as a continuation of the Association of Russian Solidarists, an expatriate group which worked for the Nazis and the Croatian fascist Ustashe regime during World War II. In the 1980s, this organization led a propaganda campaign against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, accusing them of running camps where opponents were tortured, raped, and murdered on a massive scale."

Finally, an article by Paul De Rooij in the October 31, 2002 online edition of Counterpunch titled "Amnesty International & Israel: Say it isn't so!" (http://www.counterpunch.org/rooij1031.html) takes you to task for trivializing Israeli violence and apolitical fence-sitting.

He writes:

"Reading AI's reports doesn't reveal why there is a conflict in the area in the first place. The portrayal of violence is stripped of its context, and historical references are minimal. The fact that Palestinians have endured occupation, expulsion, and dispossession for many decades, the explanation of why the conflict persists, is nowhere highlighted in its reports. This posture eliminates the possibility of taking sides, and AI doesn't automatically side with the oppressed victims; instead, it assumes a warped sense of balance. It qualitatively equates the violence perpetrated by the IOF with Palestinian resistance. In attempting to be impartial, AI is oblivious to the history of ethnic cleansing that is the root cause. Israeli violence is qualitatively different than Palestinian violence; it is different than that found in other conflicts because it aims to expel the native population."

Not that I would gainsay De Rooij's compelling argument, but I would quibble with one characterization. Instead of describing AI as "fence-sitting", I would regard you--at least in these instances--as having fallen off the fence and into the lap of the US and British foreign policy establishment.

Louis Proyect

-------------

From: "Eli Stephens"

It's interesting to compare Amnesty's treatment of Cuba and the US. If you go to their website (http://web.amnesty.org), you will find DISCUSSIONS of the situation in Cuba and the US detention of prisoners in Guantanamo. The discussions of the Guantanamo situation is reasonable honest. But the DEMANDS made in the two situations (in their suggested action or letter writing section) are quite different.

Here's what they urge people to demand of Cuba:

Amnesty International once again urges the Cuban authorities - to immediately and unconditionally release all prisoners of conscience, imprisoned solely for having peacefully exercised their rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly. - to ensure that, pending their release, the 75 prisoners of conscience arrested in March have access to appropriate medical care and that their conditions of detention meet international standards. - to put an immediate end to all forms of harassment and intimidation directed against dissidents who are solely attempting to legitimately exercise fundamental human rights. - to reverse the regressive decision to resume executions, and to publicly commit itself to respecting the de facto moratorium in place prior to the April executions.

And here's part of their suggested letter to the US authorities:

I urge that the Military Order be repealed, and ask that none of the six identified detainees or any others be referred for trial before a military commission. If the six are to be charged, they should be charged with recognizably criminal offences, and brought to trial in proceedings which fully meet international standards for fair trial, including the right to appeal, or else released. I am aware that, according to recent agreements, British nationals Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi and Australian national, David Hicks will not face the death penalty and urge that the death penalty is not imposed in any of the other cases.

Note there is no demand for the US to obey international law and hold a hearing to determine whether the prisoners are "prisoners of war", no demand to either charge the prisoners with a crime or release them, no demand to allow them to see lawyers, no demand for more humane conditions, no demand that they have access to appropriate medical care as in the case of the Cuban 75, etc. etc. While in Cuba, the death penalty is "regressive," no such adjective is found when discussing US actions, where Amnesty merely "urges that the death penalty not be imposed." Of course not to mention no mention of the competely illegal nature of the US invasion of Afghanistan and the seizing of people (in some cases from other countries) and bringing them to a place of "extraterritorial (il)legality" rather than to the US, etc.

The difference in demands is striking, to say the least.

--

CUBA: Criminals attempt to hijack fishing boat

BY DOUG LORIMER

On July 14, three Cuban adults were killed and a child was hospitalised after being shot in the head when three men lengthy criminal records attempted to hijack a fishing boat in the Cuban port of La Coloma.
[..]
rest @
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2003/546/

The trot sects are really determined to go down with El Caudillo so I'll help.The economist has an article on how the fruad Castro has 'assumed the position' for capitalism,and in fact did so 10 years ago.So like China we now see the worst of communism meets the worst of capitalism.Thank goodness the Cuban people will soon be free of the Jackanapes tinpot Dictator.As for his local apologists who inevitably point to all the Dr's and hospitals well what are the two biggest crops in Cuba 40 years after the revolution anyway?
And why are we having these discussions here and not the HAVANA IMC?

"Those who would swap some essential freedoms for more security deserve NEITHER!"

And don't spare the Hearse's!

Seing how Dougie Lorimer now covers the waterfront I had a stickbeak on his nym...I am the black swan of tresspass on alien waters after all...so check out this thread...Hearse later acknowledges that, for there to be a socialist revolution, there must be socialisation of the ownership of the means of production. However, once he makes this concession to the Marxist conception of the socialist revolution, he is driven by his need to defend permanent revolution against the dreaded "two-stage theory" to go the opposite extreme, i.e., to separate socialisation of the ownership of means of production from the necessary first step in the proletarian revolution the conquest of state power.

Under a section of his article subheaded "Lessons of Spain", he claims that in July 1936, in response to General Franco's pro-fascist revolt, the workers in Catalonia "socialised just about everything". Hearse argues: "Any two-stage theory indeed, any attempt to delay, prevent or obstruct spontaneous socialisation meant repressing the revolution, which is exactly what the Stalinists did".

Like most Trotskyists when arguing against the Leninist policy of a two-stage, uninterrupted revolution, Hearse implies that adherents of this policy will somehow inexorably be drawn to advocate the implementation of the neo-Menshevik class-collaborationist counterfeit of this policy put forward by the Stalinists in the late 1920s. Hence we are told by him:

Lorimer's theory cannot explain the blood of Spain. If national and democratic revolution has to be achieved first, before measures of socialisation; if combining socialist measures with national and democratic tasks simultaneously is a priori incorrect; then the actions of the working class in Barcelona were ultra-left, exactly as the Stalinists said.
Contrary to what Hearse implies here, I do not think these actions were "ultra-left". But nor do I agree with him when he claims they amounted to the "socialisation" of the ownership of the means of production.

For the working class in Catalonia in 1936-37 to have even begun the socialisation of the ownership of means of production, they would first have had to do what the Russian workers did on October 25 (November 7), 1917, i.e., raise themselves to the position of ruling class by effecting a revolutionary transfer of political power from the bourgeois republican government to a workers and peasants' government. As the US Trotskyist Felix Morrow observed in his November 1937 pamphlet Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain:

Under contemporary capitalism, finance capital dominates manufacturing and transportation. This law of economics was not abrogated because the workers had seized the factories and railroads. All that the workers had done in seizing these enterprises was to transform them into producers' co-operatives, still subject to the laws of capitalist economics. Before they could be freed from these laws, all industry and land, together with bank capital and gold and silver reserves, would have to become the property of a workers' state. But this required overthrowing the bourgeois state.[9]
Without the expropriation of factories, mines, banks, railways, etc., by a proletarian state power, the seizure of the factories by individual groups of workers amounted, not to socialisation, but rather, as Morrow put it, to "syndicalist capitalism" "a form of producers' co-operatives, in which the workers divided the profits" and in which "real planning was impossible".[10]

The identification of the factory takeovers in Catalonia as the "socialisation" of industry was how the anarchists conceived of the socialist revolution.

The spontaneous working-class revolt in Catalonia went down to defeat in large part because the workers' anarchist and POUMist leaders in practice rejected the Marxist perspective on how to achieve working-class power in favour of carrying out a Menshevik, i.e., class-collaborationist, policy in relation to the bourgeois republican government.

Hearse complains that in my pamphlet I make "just one reference to Spain". In fact, I did not make even one reference to Spain I cited a comment about Russia made by Trotsky in an article he wrote on Spain. Perhaps I should have commented on the Spanish Civil War. It might have spared us from being given a lecture by Hearse on the "Lessons of Spain" in which he attempts to teach us that the Marxist conception of the socialist revolution is identical with the anarchist conception!

http://www.dsp.org.au/links/back/issue16/Lorimer.html

Later on in this polemic,a great leader,Lenin quote from Lorimer...

The last paragraph of the article was written by Lenin, and it drew the following conclusions:

This article teaches us, first and foremost, that for representatives of the socialist proletariat to take part in a revolutionary government with the petty bourgeoisie is fully permissible in principle, and, in certain conditions even obligatory. It shows us further that the real task the Commune had to perform was primarily the achievement of the democratic and not a socialist dictatorship, the implementation of our "minimum programme". Finally, the article reminds us that when we study the lessons of the Paris Commune, we should imitate not the mistakes it made (the failure to seize the Bank of France and to launch an offensive against Versailles, the lack of a clear programme, etc.), but its successful practical steps, which indicate the correct road. It is not the word "Commune" that we must adopt from the great fighters of 1871; we should not blindly repeat each of their slogans; what we must do is to single out those programmatic and practical slogans that bear upon the state of affairs in Russia and can be formulated in the words "revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry".[21]

Doug Lorimer is the author of Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution: A Leninist critique.

http://www.dsp.org.au/links/back/issue16/Lorimer.html

Mmm,so the anarchists were on the right track after all! Now if they had had German Imperial funds,access to mercenaries,a Cheka and a rigid policy of 'Red Terror.' then they might have had a chance!
They didn't have a Lenin though.
Lorimer subjects Trotsky's thesis to a rigorous critique. He argues that Trotsky was incorrect on the main questions of the Russian Revolution, and that his theory cannot be applied to any subsequent revolution. The Trotskyist movement and its sympathisers argue that the 1917 revolution led Lenin to accept Trotsky's theory, a position Lorimer rejects.Doug Lorimer is a member of the Political Committee of the Democratic Socialist Party of Australia

Why hasn't he been purged yet?

After reading this,what is the DSP attitude to Al Qida?

Osama bin Laden is, to be sure, a fundamentalist, but his great enemy is the fundamentalist Saudi ‘royal’ clan. The contradiction here is basically not about religion, but about what to do about imperialism, especially US imperialism. The Laden clan’s Osama has seized the day by riding the insurrectionary possibilities of the profound anti-US imperialist movement in the world and created for it innovative military possibilities. Should the Left, which alone can steer the anti-imperialist struggle to victory but seems to have lost its nerve after the demise of the execrable Soviet state, then join the Bush chorus with some unreflected Marxist homilies and dismiss such action as on September 11 as terrorism?

Battle Joined
Would Lenin have done that? In the aftermath of the 1905 revolution in Russia, there appeared in several parts of the Russian empire small, secret groups that carried out assassinations and seized government and other enemy property in order to procure more arms to fight the Tsarist despotism. Whole swathes of leftist opinion, led by the likes of Plekhanov and Martov who were still considered to be great Marxists, were quick to denounce such activities as terrorism. Lenin who had already laid down the most powerful and comprehensive theoretical arguments against terrorism and the notion of ‘excitative violence’ was now called upon to judge the actions of those small groups. Lenin refused to characterise these actions as terrorism because these actions had risen from within an insurrectionary mass movement, were part and parcel of it and constituted a continuation of it. The presence and the action of the insurrectionary mass movement provided the litmus test for Lenin. For us too, the actions of September 11, no matter who did it, constitute the continuation of the insurrectionary and near-insurrectionary anti-imperialist mass upsurges throughout the world and as such do not fall within the category of terrorism. Those sophisticated activists who sacrificed their lives to take the worldwide battle into Fortress America have merely opened a new front.
The battle has been joined, not just in the streets and lanes of Hebron or Genoa, but behind the enemy lines. Inspite of the meticulous planning and organisation behind September 11, this battle is still the result of spontaneity. Nationalism or fundamentalism cannot carry the burden of a protracted war against imperialism. Not bin Laden, not even the great Blanqui with his putschist politics and secret elites could have risen to the level of the ideological, political and military organisation required to defeat imperialism on a worldwide scale.

As could have been expected, the Indian and Pakistani ruling classes have swiftly unburdened themselves of their comic nuclear bravado and are prostrate before Bush, the new Wyatt Earp on the range. They have totally shamed the people of south Asia by joining the US aggressors in their new war plans against Afghanistan and other countries as yet unnamed. The people of India and Pakistan, as also the people the world over, should come out in their millions against imperialist aggression. The Hindutvawadis in India are trying to get as much mileage as they can from the anti-Muslim stance of their US masters. They must not be allowed to succeed.

It is absurd to imagine that the US is putting together an anti-terrorist coalition when it is itself the greatest terrorist and the provider of the largest number of non-state terrorists. The Bush coalition, if coalition it can be called when states, other than such you-know-whose poodles as Tony Blair’s Britain, have been threatened and cajoled into lining up behind US imperialism, is not about terrorism but wholly about the reinvention of the self-assurance and sense of invincibility lost during Vietnam and re-acquired by the US ruling classes after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The three decades-old, intractable structural crisis in the world economy, now joined by a severe business cycle one, finds the reach of US power to be over-extended and hollow. The victims of that lawless and sanctimonious power have been trying to hack away at its limbs. Even Vietnam was just that, but of course so magnificently. Now the metropole is shaken to its foundation. Irrespective of what happens presently, the certainty that the 21st century will not be an American one is what throws the Bushes of the world into protracted paroxysms that reveal the despicable bravado of the ‘mastaan’. The line was drawn a long time ago between imperialism, mainly US imperialism, and the countries, nations and the peoples of the world. Everyone has to choose where to stand.

http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2001&leaf=10&filename=3635&filetype=html

Even snot green reds in weird trot sects.

I liked the letter, Louis.

Be There
by free flights to Judeo-Nazi Land Tuesday August 29, 2006 at 02:25 AM

'Hizbullah is doing more for our cause than any Arab government has ever done'

Jonathan Steele in Beirut
Friday July 21, 2006
The Guardian

His face smiles from posters all over Sabra and Shatila camp, the once world-famous home of 12,000 Palestinian refugees in Beirut, and finding anyone willing to criticise Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanon's Shia militia, is a hopeless venture.

The man who launched the attack into Israel last week that captured two soldiers is widely regarded as a hero, however grim the destruction that Israel's retaliation has caused.

"Hizbullah is doing more for the Palestinian cause than any Arab government has ever done. When he says he will resist Israel, he does," said Muhammad Hassan, who runs a small barber's shop. "We didn't know he had such technology - and especially the ability to hit an Israeli warship. It was a nice surprise."

His enthusiasm for Hizbullah's leader is not blind or unquestioning. A customer nodded in support as Mr Hassan conceded: "It's diverting attention from Gaza to Lebanon, and everyone's focusing on Lebanon now." After a pause, he added: "I'm not sure whether Hizbullah should have waited but it has lessened Israel's pressure on Gaza. He may have wanted to give Gaza a breathing space." The customer chipped in: "Now there are two fronts."

Sabra and Shatila became headline news in 1982, when Israeli forces during an earlier invasion of Lebanon surrounded the camp and allowed Christian militias in to slaughter unarmed Palestinians. At least 700 people, perhaps as many as 3,500, were massacred, an atrocity for which an Israeli inquiry concluded that Ariel Sharon, then Israel's defence minister, bore "personal responsibility".

About 400,000 Palestinians live in Lebanon, almost a 10th of the country's population. Although Israel's current onslaught has not specifically targeted any of the 12 camps registered by the UN relief agency, Palestinians have suffered as much as Lebanese.

Most of the camps are in the south, three close to the stricken port of Tyre, two near Sidon and four in Beirut's southern suburbs, near the Shia areas Israel has pounded with a huge tonnage of bombs in the past week.

In the narrow alleys of Shatila, most people are too poor to have anywhere to flee to. More than 700 go into the dusty basement of an unfinished school building every evening to shelter from the bombing. A few lightbulbs, strung from waterpipes, send dim rays through the gloom, illuminating mattresses and thin carpets on the concrete floor.

Nohad, a volunteer for Najdeh, a women's rights NGO which works in the Palestinian camps, says there was much criticism of Hizbullah before the current crisis. "But whatever people think of Hizbullah ideologically, it is weakening the enemy. It's showing the enemy is not as strong as it claims to be. Hizbullah is the only group which is doing something for Palestinians."