Anglo-Persian BP past is present

Re-reporting, excerpting, editing with minor comment by Carolyn Bennett

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the British Secret Service joined together to protect the interests of the oil company now known as BP, to overthrow the democratic government in Iran, and to cause consequences occurring in Persia over the past half-century [Stephen Kinzer]

Author Stephen Kinzer on today’s Democracy Now program contextualized BP in a bloody British-U.S.-Iranian hegemonic history. This is some of what Kinzer had to say.

BP
The history of the company we now call BP traces, over the last hundred years, “the arc of global transnational capitalism. In the first decade of the twentieth century, this company began as a kind of a wildcatting operation in Iran.”

What is today called BP was then “entrepreneurial and risk-taking,” a company with “a bunch of geologists running around in these very forbidding steppes and deserts.” Then “they struck what was the greatest find up to that time in the history of the oil industry.”

Stole Iran’s oil
“They discovered Iran was sitting on an ocean of oil and they decided they would take it. Under a corrupt deal they struck with a few representatives of the old declining Iranian monarchy, all of whom had been paid off by the company, this concession [later known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company] guaranteed itself or won the right to own all of Iran’s oil [What of U.S. and Iraq oil today?].

Given this deal, nobody in Iran had any right to drill for oil, extract oil, or sell oil.

The British government, soon after the find was made, decided to buy the company ─ [the company now known as BP]. “The British Parliament passed a law and bought 51 percent of that company.”

Stolen oil built British way of life
During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, “the entire standard of living that people in England enjoyed was supported by oil from Iran.

“All the trucks and jeeps in Britain were being run on Iranian oil.
Factories all over Britain were being funded by oil from Iran.
The Royal Navy, which projected British power all over the world, was run 100 percent on oil from Iran.
That became a foundation of British life.

Iran wanted its oil back
“After World War II, when the winds of nationalism and anti-colonialism were blowing throughout the developing world, Iranians developed the idea that they had to take back their oil. Mohammad Mosaddegh, the most prominent figure in the democratic period of Iran during the late 1940s and early 1950s, desired to nationalize what was then the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company; and with Iran’s democratically elected parliament voting unanimously, they nationalized their oil.

British/U.S. retaliated
“The British and their partners in the United States fiercely resisted Iran’s nationalizing of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and when these giants failed to prevent nationalization, they set in force (1953) the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh.

“This overthrow forced the end of the Mosaddegh government and the end of Iran’s democracy. Longer-term consequences of UK and U.S. violent aggression against Iran followed.

“The authoritarian Shah of Persia ruled for twenty-five years with increasing repression. His rule produced the explosion of the late 1970s, which produced the Islamic Republic.

“The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the British Secret Service [had] joined together to protect the interests of the oil company now known as BP and to overthrow the democratic government in Iran and to produce all the consequences we’ve seen in Iran over the past half-century.”

Sources and notes
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (b. 1919-d.1980 in Egypt) was the Shah of Persia. He was born in Tehran, Iran, and succeeded on the abdication of his father, Reza Shah, in 1941. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s reign brought “many years of social reforms” but during the latter 1970s, religious fundamentalists waged rising protests against “western-style ‘decadence’” In the 1979 Revolution, the Shah was forced out of Iran. The United States admitted him for medical treatment, which provoked Iran’s detention of 52 U.S. diplomats.
The Iranian Revolution is cited as “one of the great revolutions of modern history.” Like the French or Russian revolutions, the Iranian Revolution “confronted the West with a disruptive new political order. The consequence of widespread discontent at rapid socio-economic change and the authoritarian rule of the Shah of Persia, the revolution took the exiled religious scholar Ayatollah Khomeini as its figurehead.”
As the Shah bore down, his security forces in Qom killed six theology students (January 1978). Demonstrations ensued and hundreds of protesters were massacred in Tehran’s Juleh Square (September 1978). Unable to stem the protests and regain control, the Shah went into exile (January 1979). On February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to lead the revolution and establish the Islamic Republic of Iran.
“Stephen Kinzer on the History of BP/British Petroleum and Its Role in the 1953 Iran Coup,” Democracy Now, June 14, 2010, [http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/14/steven_kinzer_on_the_history_of
Stephen Kinzer is author of All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, looks at the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s role in the 1953 CIA coup against Iran’s popular progressive prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh
Mohammad Mosaddeq (b. 1880 - d, March 5, 1967 in Tehrān, Iran)
Mosaddeq [also spelled Masaddiq , or Mossadegh] was an Iranian political leader who nationalized the huge British oil holdings in Iran. As premier in 1951–53, he almost succeeded in deposing the shah. Mohammad Mosaddeq was the son of an Iranian public official who grew up as a member of Iran’s ruling elite. He received a Doctor of Law degree from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.
Reference sources: Cambridge Encyclopedia (third edition); Britannica (Deluxe edition 2008)

Week’s geopolitics: looming U.S. Asia conflict

June 13 update ─ The report on Pakistani intelligence (below) leaves no other conclusion than that the United States government ─ while claiming to fight “an enemy” and killing and traumatizing thousands of Afghanis, Pakistanis, Americans and sundry foreign nationals ─ is simultaneously funding (with debt and taxes) the very group it insists is a mad “extremist” bent on destroying “the West’s way of life.”
Compiled and edited with comment by Carolyn Bennett

Without constantly factoring in these engagements, theaters, and proxies, which critically affect social, educational, governmental, structural policy and action in every sense ─ often looming silenced in a room ─ any talk about U.S. foreign or domestic conditions and relations is nothing more than empty rhetoric.

MIDDLE EAST

Israel’s “Double game”
“When dealing with world superpowers, Israel has long played a double game whenever its relationship with the U.S. permitted it. In the 1990s, Israel tried to help China out of its global isolation following the Tiananmen massacre. It even tried to lobby Washington for Chinese interests. The Israelis have long boasted of lobbying the U.S., the White House, Congress and media in favor of countries of little importance to the United States; countries with poor human rights records; or merely need U.S. support.… Eventually many tapped Israel and its U.S. lobby for help in return of better relations with a country long considered an international pariah.…One wonders if boasting that its lobby has major influence in Washington doesn't indirectly fuel anti-Semitic claims of Jewish influence and control.…

“The Netanyahu government’s aggressive policies and settlement expansion in occupied Palestinian lands following his predecessor’s war on Lebanon and Gaza is driving Israel further to isolation. The only regional issue that has kept Israel in the loop is the Iranian nuclear issue.…” [“Israel shakes down China,” (Marwan Bishara in Imperium on June 10th, 2010), http://blogs.aljazeera.net/Israel shakes down China Al Jazeera Blogs].

Palestine
A Palestinian died Friday when Israelis opened fire in occupied East Jerusalem. “Palestinian witnesses said the man was standing on the side of the road when Israeli police officers started firing indiscriminately, killing him and seriously injuring a young woman.” Israelis said the man had attempted to ram his car into two Israeli police officers. It remained unclear whether the incident was an accident or a deliberate attack. Israeli security forces were deployed across East Jerusalem in large numbers in anticipation of possible unrest. Israeli police had announced a policy of limited-access for under-40-year-old Palestinian men travelling from East Jerusalem to the al-Aqsa Mosque for Friday prayers. Tensions between Israelis and Arabs in East Jerusalem remained high [“Israeli police kill Palestinian man,” June 11, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/06/201061116939579309.html].

Iraq blowback
June 8
Video footage from a helicopter cockpit shows a deadly aerial strike carried out in 2007 in the Iraqi capital. Twelve civilians died in the attack among them two Reuters’ journalists.

Twenty-two-year-old U.S. Army Specialist Bradley Manning deployed at a base near Baghdad last year allegedly leaked the classified combat video to a whistleblower website Wikileaks. Manning was arrested last month after he reportedly bragged online about leaking the video and U.S. diplomatic cables. The U.S. military is reported to have issued a statement saying the soldier currently in Kuwait is in “‘pre-trial confinement for allegedly releasing classified information’” [“U.S. solider arrested over Iraq video,” June 8, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/06/20106815818808270.html].

Yemen
June 7
Fifty-five people among them 14 women and 21 children died in this attack. Amnesty International released photographs on Monday apparently showing parts of a U.S. cruise missile and cluster munitions gathered from the site of the military strike last December in the village of al Ma'jalah in southern Yemen.

After the rights group published what is said to be new evidence of U.S. involvement in the strike, the United States faces fresh questions concerning its role in the 2009 attack on an alleged al-Qaeda camp in Yemen. Fourteen alleged al-Qaeda members also died.

“The Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program said, ‘A military strike of this kind against alleged militants, without an attempt to detain them is, at the very least, unlawful.… The fact that so many of the victims were actually women and children indicates that the attack was in fact grossly irresponsible, particularly given the likely use of cluster munitions’” [“‘U.S. missile’ used in Yemen strike,” June 7, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/06/20106653442608341.html].

Yemen
June 12
Tribal fighters in eastern Yemen today blew up an oil pipeline in retaliation for an army raid on the home of one of their leaders accused of harboring al-Qaeda operatives. “The sabotage targeted a section of the pipeline that runs about six kilometres east of Maarib, capital of the province of the same name” [“Oil pipeline blown up in Yemen,” June 12, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/06/20106126547917129.html].

SOUTHWEST ASIA
AF/PAK

Afghanistan
June 9
Four foreign soldiers died Wednesday in Afghanistan when their helicopter was shot down in the south of the country.

U.S. and British forces stationed in southern Afghanistan are planning major operations in the Kandahar area where the U.S. president has said 30,000 more U.S. troops will be deployed. Following the plane hijacking of September 11, 2001, the U.S. government accused Taliban of harboring al-Qaeda in the area and invaded Afghanistan [“NATO troops killed in Afghanistan,” June 9, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/06/20106911642572476.html].

Afghanistan
June 10
More than 40 people in a wedding party in Kandahar died on Wednesday. Dozens suffered wounds. Afghan president Hamid Karzai called the incident ‘a crime of massive inhuman proportions.’

Rising deaths among foreigners (nearly 300 British soldiers have died in Afghanistan since 2001) and rising costs straining already stretched public finances “are eroding the UK's public support for the war” [“Karzai condemns Kandahar bombing,” June 10, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/06/201061010921894475.html].

Afghanistan
June 11
Eleven civilians (among them women and children) and two U.S. soldiers died Friday in violence across southern Afghanistan. Taliban fighters have increased attacks ahead of the planned U.S.-NATO operation. Nine of the civilian deaths occurred when a roadside bomb struck a minibus in the city of Kandahar. The other two civilians died in Zabul, a province neighboring Kandahar, when a suicide bomber detonated explosives in a shopping area of Shahjoy district. Sixteen people suffered wounds [“Many killed in Afghan blasts,” June 11, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/06/201061174818697945.html].

Pakistan
June 11
Fifteen people have died in two U.S. drone attacks launched “against alleged Taliban strongholds.” Carried out 12 hours apart, these attacks hit “west and east of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan, a tribal region near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.” U.S. policy prohibits confirming drone attacks but “the U.S. army and Central Intelligence Agency are the only forces in the region with access to pilotless drones.”

More than 900 people among them many civilians have died “in nearly 100 drone raids on Pakistan since August 2008 and there have been at least 35 suspected drone attacks so far this year. This is a large increase over previous periods.”

Commenting on these drone killings the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions issued a report this month questioning the legality of CIA-directed drone attacks and calling them ‘license to kill without accountability.’ Moreover, critics have called these attacks “extra-judicial killings that create a ‘video-game warfare’ mentality … where civilian lives are not seriously valued” [“Deaths in Pakistan drone attacks,” June 11, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/06/201061113424264165.html].

EASTERN EUROPE/WESTERN ASIA

U.S.-Russia-Afghanistan Connection
NATO is said to have begun moving military supplies to Afghanistan through Russia after its convoys moving through Pakistan faced deadly attacks from the local Taliban. … Cargo had previously been shipped to the Pakistani port of Karachi and then transported into Afghanistan. The Alliance “cannot ship supplies through Iran’s southeastern port of Chahar Bahar due to the political dispute over Iran’s nuclear program [and] the Chinese route through the Wakhan Corridor is impractical “because the dirt road is blocked by snow for much of the year” [“NATO route opens through Russia,” June 12, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/06/2010611204927850979.html].

EAST ASIA

Koreas
Following the sinking of a South Korean warship in March, South Korea has put up loudspeakers in 11 locations along the tense border in order to resume anti-Pyongyang broadcasts, suspended since 2004. The North Koreans are calling the move ‘a direct declaration of a war’, a ‘flagrant violation’ of the inter-Korean declaration for peace and reconciliation signed in 2000. North and South Korea technically have remained at war since the end of the 1950-53 conflict and each side has waged cross-border propaganda campaigns during and since the end of the Cold War [“S Korea warned over loudspeakers,” June 12, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2010/06/20106124113542531.html].

Notes and more sources
“Yemen, an international quagmire,” Inside Story, January 5, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/insidestory/2010/01/20101562037795156.html
“Threats from al-Qaeda frightened the U.S. and the UK into indefinite closure of their embassies in Yemen. According to the U.S. embassy website, the danger is that the group’s Yemen-based offshoot, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is growing stronger and planning attacks on Western targets.”
Al Jazerra report May 30, 2010
A UN report released in January of this year revealed that at least 2,412 civilians had died in the Afghan conflict in 2009. The figure represented a 14 per cent increase over the previous year. NATO and Afghan government forces were responsible for 25 per cent of the deaths; and of those, about 60 per cent were due to airstrikes [“U.S. crew faulted in drone deaths,” May 30, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/05/201053034934522302.html].

Casualty sites reporting

June 12, 2010 (accurate totals unknown)
• Anti-war dot com Casualties in Iraq since March 19, 2003

[U.S. war dead since the Obama inauguration January 20, 2009: 177]

Wounded 31,844-100,000;

U.S. veterans with brain injuries 320,000;

Suicides 18 a day

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

• Iraq Body Count figures:

96,663 – 105,409,

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

• ICasualties IRAQ: 4,405 U.S., 4,723 Coalition;

AFGHANISTAN: 1,114 U.S., 1,823 Coalition

http://icasualties.org/oif/

AF/PAK/IRAQ
UPDATE ─ UK
Iraq
June 13
“Baghdad bombings hit central bank,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/middle_east/10304652.stm
Twelve people died today when bombs went off within a few minutes of each other in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. The attacks come on the eve of the Iraqi parliament’s first day in its new session.

Britain/Afghanistan
June 13
“[UK] Armed forces chief to quit early - Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup is to quit as head of the armed forces in the autumn, before the end of his term in April 2011.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/default.stm
Britain’s most senior military officer Jock Stirrup will cut short his tenure and leave his position in the autumn. As Air Chief Marshal, Jock Stirrup has been chief of the defense staff since 2006. The previous Labour government had asked him to extend his term. The UK Ministry of Defense civil servant Bill Jeffrey will also leave his position.

“British troops joined a U.S.-led coalition that invaded Afghanistan because the Taliban in that country were accused of providing a sanctuary for al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.” Approximately 295 British service personnel have died in Afghanistan since military operations began in 2001.

June 13
Pakistan
“Pakistani agents ‘funding and training Afghan Taliban’ ─ Pakistan's links with the Taliban could go much deeper than thought,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/default.stm
“Pakistani intelligence gives funding, training and sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban on a scale much larger than previously thought, a report says. London School of Economics authors of the report suggest that support for the Afghan Taliban was ‘official ISI policy.’

“The ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] first became involved in funding and training militants in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979. Since 2001 the ISI has been a key U.S. ally, receiving billions of dollars in aid in return for helping fight al-Qaeda.”

Wikipedia ref. note: “The Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (also Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI) is the largest intelligence service in Pakistan. It is one of the three main branches of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.”

The report on Pakistani intelligence leaves no other conclusion than that the United States government ─ while claiming to fight “an enemy” and killing and traumatizing thousands of Afghanis, Pakistanis, Americans and sundry foreign nationals ─ is simultaneously funding (with debt and taxes) the very group it insists is a mad “extremist” bent on destroying “the West’s way of life.”

U.S. BREACH unleashed British oil

Re-reporting, excerpting, editing, commentary by Carolyn Bennett  

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America [Preamble to the U.S. Constitution].

Taking the oath of office, U.S. Government Officials swear to uphold the Constitution and, failing that, they stand in breach of this Constitution. A report today in the New York Daily News illustrates that the U.S. Government and a long line of government officials are in continuing breach of their oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. 

U.S.-BP is the case in point. British Petroleum “suffered the most spills” of any oil company in the period 2000 to 2010, Juan Gonzalez reports, and the U.S. government knew about it. “Federal records show BP reported 23 significant oil spills” in this period; two of them within weeks of each other in 2003. Involved was “the same Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that was destroyed in the April 21” catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

• January 19, 2000: 2,400 barrels of 60 percent synthetic-based drilling mud [with approximately 60,000 gallons of oil] leaked into the Gulf of Mexico.
• May 21, 2003: 2,450 barrels of 58 percent Accolade synthetic-based drilling mud (SBM) spilled at Mississippi Canyon 778 containing approximately 1,421 barrels (59,000 gallons) of Accolade synthetic base oil.
• June 30, 2003: 944 barrels (est.) of Nova Plus synthetic base oil were spilled into the sea.
• August 3, 2003: 143 barrels (est.) spilled after the boost line leaked because of a rupture in the boost hose and several worn places along the hose

Between 2000 and 2009 “there have been thousands of spills,” Gonzalez quoted the head of Toxics Targeting in Ithaca, N.Y, a company that tracks and analyzes federal hazardous spill reports.

 “Spills mounted,” Gonzalez, and “no one paid attention. Now the big one has come and nothing can hide the gushing hole at the bottom of the sea” [“Devastating BP oil spill was inevitable as government failed to learn from past tragedies” (Juan Gonzalez – News), June 11, 2010, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/06/11/2010-06-11_previous_oil_spills_taught_them_zilch.html]

Today on the Democracy Now program, Juan Gonzalez talked about the current Gulf of Mexico catastrophe and his reporting for the New York Daily News story.

“New government estimates have found the BP oil spill may be spewing twice as much oil into the Gulf of Mexico as previously thought. On Thursday, the Flow Rate Technical Group released its new estimate of 25,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil a day based on information gathered last week, before BP installed a new capture device.

“Some scientists have warned that the flow rate sharply increased after BP last week cut the pipe known as the riser to install the new device. The current estimates from the government panel suggest that an amount equivalent to the Exxon Valdez disaster could be flowing into the Gulf of Mexico every eight to ten days. The new numbers were released shortly after a scientist on the Flow Rate Technical Group publicly warned that the oil might be spewing out at a rate of more than 100,000 barrels a day, a figure BP once called its worst-case scenario. …”

Based on the Toxics Targeting analysis, Gonzalez reported that in government databases over the past several decades “there had been literally thousands of spill reports in the Gulf of Mexico and they have been increasing dramatically ─ especially the significant spills ─ since the Bush administration…. BP has been the firm with the most spill reports, twenty-three in the last ten years…. The number of incidents clearly should have signaled to the government that the number of accidents was increasing ─ and that a big one was bound happen.”

In the clean up now being undertaken in the Gulf, Gonzalez commented, “many of the people working out there are getting sick as a result of the lack of safety provisions” and “BP [has hired former U.S. Vice President] Dick Cheney’s former spokesperson as their director of communications” [http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/11/].

 In the entrenched earmark-making, broken U.S. governmental system where money and luxury buy legislation and policy (government officials), deregulation and blindness ─ governance in the interest of private for-profit and nonprofit corporations ─ the constitutional principle of providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves, and our posterity is abandoned. A “more perfect union” where justice takes root, peace among the people is insured is a pipedream ─ a betrayal of public trust, a BREACH of the people’s law.

History meets current conditions ─ conflict comments

A Second 2nd Intifada? From Professor Mark LeVine
Excerpting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

Her “gift”

To the Israeli government and its supporters her words were “an unexpected but welcome gift,” Mark LeVine writes in an opinion piece posted at Al Jazeera-English. For a while, media obsessed on her comments, downplayed or ignored reports of “30-plus shots fired into the bodies of activists on the high seas, and bent over backwards to demonstrate their commitment to Israel’s narrative [‘the world is against Jews’].” Instead of demanding better access to Gaza, media [had] “to refute the liberal anti-Israel bias of the media.”

Her “warning”…

“Her words were also an admonishment,” LeVine wrote. For as long as the American establishment and crucial political and economic constituencies perceive Israel as a strategic and political asset, Israel will continue its occupation, continue defying world opinion. “Israeli leaders are betting that their best chance of continuing the status quo indefinitely is for the United States to remain embroiled in so many conflicts abroad that no administration has the energy or political capital seriously to challenge Israel’s actions even when the actions contradict the assessment of generals and policy-makers about the best interests of the United States.”

… Of a breaking point

“With double-dip recession, weak job numbers, increasing casualties in distant battlefields, more oil and coal mining disasters, another this time successful attack by ‘terrorists’ … Americans are going to start looking for people to blame....”

However intemperate or prejudiced her words may have seemed, they warned also of letting Israel continue “the business of destroying itself while [Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran] look on, waiting to pounce ─ just as Israel did to Palestinian society during the worst years of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, when the pressure led to widespread chaos and infighting among Palestinians.

“The question is: will Israel play according to their script. Continue to defy world public opinion, slowly alienating the population of its only (until now) unequivocal benefactor? Or will Israel’s leaders and so-called friends change course before it is too late?”

Sources and notes
Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC-Irvine, senior visiting researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (Lund University, Sweden) and author of Heavy Metal Islam and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989. His opinion: “The cautionary tale of Helen Thomas,” June 9, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/06/201068132838677696.html

Al-Aqsa Intifada

A Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip

Al-Aqsa Intifada, or the Second Intifada, began after Ariel Sharon, a leader of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, visited al-Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem on September 28, 2000. AlHaram, which contains al-Aqsa Mosque, is the third holiest shrine of Islam. The visit itself was provocative, especially because 1,000 riot police accompanied Sharon.

But what triggered the Intifada the following day was the Israeli police’s use of live ammunition and rubber bullets that killed 6 and injured 220 rock-throwing (but otherwise unarmed) Palestinian demonstrators.

The fundamental cause of the Intifada (‘shaking off’) was the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David in July 2000 that were supposed to end the occupation had broken down. Palestinians had expected that the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) recognition of Israel would lead to an end of the thirty-three-year Israeli occupation and to the establishment of a Palestine state. However, in the 1990s the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza had doubled to 200,000, for which Israel confiscated more Palestinian land for the settlements and their access roads. Israel extended its policy of closures, which restricted movements, and its network of checkpoints, where Palestinians were often humiliated. Israel also continued to demolish homes and to uproot and burn olive and fruit trees for security reasons and as a form of collective punishment for acts of terrorism. In short, Israeli repression and Palestinians’ unmet expectations of freedom and independence had contributed to years of pent-up Palestinian frustration, despair, and rage.

As in the first Intifada (1987 - 1991), in October 2000 Palestinians began by using nonviolent methods. But after 144 Palestinians had been killed, Islamist groups such as HAMAS and Islamic Jihad began a campaign of suicide bombings against mostly civilians in occupied territories and Israel. Groups associated with al-Fatah such as al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade focused on resisting Israeli army incursions and attacking settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. Starting in January 2002, al-Aqsa Brigade also began conducting suicide bombings against mostly Israeli civilians, a practice condemned by the international community. Although Yasir Arafat (head of al-Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization and president of the Palestinian Authority since 1996), did not initiate the Intifada, he reportedly gave tacit approval to armed resistance and terrorism despite his promise made in the Oslo Accord in 1993 to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to renounce ‘the use of terrorism and other acts of violence.’

Palestinian violence contributed to the downfall of Israel’s Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak and to the rising popularity of Ariel Sharon, who became prime minister on February 6, 2001.

Sharon ─ a proponent of Greater Israel, an architect of the settlements, and an opponent of the Oslo process ─ proceeded with broad public support to use harsh measures against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. In response to Palestinian violence, he initiated a policy of assassinations ─ euphemistically called ‘targeted killings’ ─ of suspected terrorist leaders, that sometimes included activists and innocent bystanders. He reoccupied major Palestinian cities, using helicopter gunships, warplanes, and tanks. Some of Sharon’s methods were considered to be war crimes by human rights groups, and were condemned by the United States.

The Intifada was costly to the Palestinians, to Israel, and to the United States.

Some Palestinian analysts considered the militarization of the Intifada to be a blunder. The Oslo process was destroyed, Arafat sidelined, the Palestinian economy damaged, and PA (Palestinian Authority) areas occupied, as Israeli settlement construction and a separation barrier (called wall by Palestinians, fence by Israelis) continued apace.

By early 2004, Sharon’s harsh measures had led to the deaths of about 3,000 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians, including about 500 children.

In addition, the Palestinians lost much popular, moral, and diplomatic support around the world.

The Intifada also cost the lives of about 900 Israelis, most of them civilians, and brought insecurity to the everyday lives of Israelis, who lost faith in the Palestinians as peace partners. It also contributed to Israel’s worst economic recession, for which the government sought a large loan from the United States.

President George W. Bush’s neglect of the peace process and support for the hard-line policies of Sharon resulted in anger at the United States in much of the Muslim and Arab world, which has helped anti-American Muslim extremist groups to recruit members.

The Intifada also had unintended positive consequences. Pressure from Sharon and Bush prompted reform of the Palestinian Authority, which most Palestinians had sought for years because they viewed the PA as corrupt, inept, and autocratic. A new office of prime minister was created to assume many of the duties and much of the authority of the PA president. One diplomatic by-product of the Intifada was the Arab League’s approval in March 2002 of a Saudi plan calling for Arab recognition and normalization of relations with Israel ─ provided that United Nations Resolution 242 is implemented and an independent state of Palestine is created.

Another was the U. S. initiation of another peace effort, the Road Map, in 2003. The Intifada also increased support within Israel for the dismantling of most of the settlements and withdrawal from Gaza. Despite the violence, destruction, and insecurity, and despite the failed leadership of Arafat, Sharon, and Bush, most Israelis and Palestinians continued to support the concept of a two-state solution as the only viable solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

http://www.answers.com/topic/al-aqsa-intifada

People struggle, people bring change ─ Jahangir

Excerpt, editing, re-reporting by Carolyn Bennett

In awarding the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Freedom Medal to Pakistani lawyer and human rights activist Asma Jahangir, the citation said Asma Jahangir understood early in life the requirements and sacrifices associated with a commitment to human rights. She understood that a flourishing democracy requires nourished and free civil society institutions. These convictions inspired her public career and, despite intimidation, arrest and imprisonment, and threats to her life, she “never compromised her commitment.” She saw injustice first-hand and took up the study and practice of law, a profession in 1970s Pakistan deemed unsuitable for women. Asma Jahangir co-founded the first all-woman law practice and the first free legal-aid center in Pakistan; then challenged ordinances making blasphemy a capital offense.

Women together uproot entrenched bigotry

“I firmly believe that women across the world, regardless of their positions in life or cultural backgrounds, have much in common,” Asma Jahangir said in accepting the award. “My clients often express Eleanor’s [Eleanor Roosevelt’s] admission to a friend that she could ‘forgive but not forget.’ However, several women can do neither. Dependency and an all-pervasive male environment force them to accept ill-treatment as their fate. This must change.

“The worst threats and attacks made on me were during two cases that I defended. One of a fourteen-year-old, Salamat Masih, who was accused of blasphemy which carries a mandatory death penalty in our country; the second of a 22-year-old woman who had defied her family and married a man of her choice. Fortunately, both cases were won but at a huge price.

“The litigants could no longer live in the country. The presiding judge who acquitted Salamat was killed. I escaped two assassination attempts. Such challenges are instructive. I have never regretted defending the vulnerable. They often put us to shame. Their courage and patience is exemplary.

“Religious intolerance knows no borders. It is contagious and rears its head in almost all regions of the world.”

Democracy, rule of law, human rights interwoven

“Rights of religious minorities are compromised, even in a system where democratic norms are otherwise respected. However, dictatorial and autocratic systems provide a fertile ground for intolerance to entrench itself deeper into society. It is therefore important for us to recognize that democracy, rule of law and human rights are closely interlinked. They flourish together or perish one by one.

“In my early years of activism, I was dubbed as a controversial person. This is the initial step of marginalizing an activist for human rights. People like myself are then considered dangerous and a threat to moral, and traditional values. Harassment, arrests, and eventually physical attacks follow vilification. A number of human rights defenders go through these hurdles. My life was no different.”

However, in an interview with Radio Netherlands’ South Asia Wired program, she said, “‘we don’t have the luxury of fear, we have to act.’”

“‘The West is only learning now, but extremism took over Pakistan [30 years ago]’ … The attacks of 9/11 in New York just highlighted the ‘sleepiness’ of the Western intelligence and diplomatic communities to something that ‘every Pakistani on the street had been talking about for years.…’”

People bring change

In a 1990s interview, Asma Jahangir spoke of progressive change rising, not from governments, but from the people. “‘Eventually things will have to get better. However, the way they will improve is not going to be because of government, elite or political leadership, or the institutions of our country ─ most of which have actually crumbled.

“‘It will be the people of the country themselves who will bring about the change in society because they have had to struggle to fend for themselves at every level.’”


Sources
Asma Jahangir’s Acceptance speech at The International Four Freedoms Awards 2010, Middelburg, The Netherlands, May 29, 2010, http://fourfreedoms.nl/index.php?lang=en&id=58
http://www.fourfreedoms.nl/index.php?lang=en&id=57
“Asma Jahangir” (Laila Kazmi, Interview by Farahnaz Junejo, Zameen, December 1997), http://www.jazbah.org/asmaj.php
“An Outspoken Woman” (South Asia Wired, South Asians talking to each other, Dheera Sujan’s interview with Asma Jahangir), June 3, 2010, http://blogs.rnw.nl/southasiawired/2010/06/03/an-outspoken-woman/

Israeli Blockade starves 60 percent ─ UN report

“Gaza food supplies are strangled by 1,000-day blockade.” From UN reports edited excerpts by Carolyn Bennett

Citing UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) findings, the Integrated Regional Information Networks reported in May of this year, “the amount and quality of food available to the estimated 1.5 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip has been severely restricted by more than 1,000 days of a near-complete blockade.”

Sixty-one percent of people living in Gaza are “food insecure” [hungry, undernourished or starving]

• Israel’s import and access restrictions have suffocated Gaza’s agricultural sector, directly contributing to rising food insecurity
• Protein-rich foods such as meat and poultry are especially difficult for Gazans to afford
• The number of Palestine refugees unable to access food and are lacking the means to purchase basic items ─ such as soap, school stationery and safe drinking water ─ has tripled since the imposition of the blockade in June 2007.
• Israeli naval forces since January 2009 have restricted the access of Gaza fishing boats to only three nautical miles from shore, often in practice reduced to two nautical miles.
• Reduction in electricity supplies to Gaza as part of the Israeli blockade causes significant damage to vegetable crops due to the lack of refrigeration, adds to production costs
• Movement of goods through tunnels from Egypt then sold at inflated prices and inaccessible to most Gazans is not a viable solution.… Unregulated entry of livestock and veterinary medicines to Gaza from Egypt via tunnels result in animal diseases in Gaza and trans-boundary disease outbreaks in the region.

Sources and notes
Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) is part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, but its services are editorially independent. Its reports do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations and its agencies or its member states. Founded in 1995 to improve the flow of vital information to those involved in relief efforts in the Great Lakes region following the 1994 Rwandan genocide, IRIN’s headquarters are in Nairobi, Kenya. The principal role of IRIN “is to provide news and analysis about sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia for the humanitarian community.”

Pakistani poverty, Taliban popularity

Inequality, hatred, Desperation – People are desperate
BBC's Owen Bennett-Jones travelled to Pakistan to find out why the Taliban gained support in the Swat Valley. The report examined fears and the Taliban’s message of hope to those who are trapped in rural poverty, and how they could see them taking hold of Punjab, Pakistan’s most powerful province.
Edited excerpts from that report with commentary by Carolyn Bennett

“‘He gathered his last few rupees, sent his children to buy some sweets from the market and whilst they were away hanged himself.

“‘My son could not cope with the poverty… He didn’t say anything to me or his family. He just killed himself. He was fed up because he could not get his creditors off his back and he could [not] pay them either.’”

[The father of Nawaz Mohammed, a 30-year-old with seven children who decided there was no way he could repay money he had borrowed from his employer.]

“Almost every day the newspapers carry reports of fathers committing suicide because they are unable to feed their families.

“The leading farming families in Pakistan are generally described as ‘feudals.’ The Taliban denounce the ‘feudals’ as exploiters of the common people.”

The message of the Taliban is “‘there is a lot of injustice and we will give you land. We will look after you. We will be the empowered future ─ join us and be part of the future.’” [Khalid Aziz, a retired senior official from North West Pakistan].

“This message, along with the anti-Americanism resulting from the invasion of Afghanistan, fuels the Taliban’s popularity, particularly among the dispossessed.

“There is speculation that the Taliban might make a concerted effort to win control of the country’s most powerful province, Punjab.

“Punjab may be the country’s richest state, but many Punjabis do not know where their next meal is coming from and in rural areas, there is real despair.”

However, “the Taliban suffers from having failed to deliver when it has won power. In the Swat Valley, the Taliban told the poor and dispossessed that they would get land and they attacked leading landholders, some of whom held senior political positions. Once the Taliban commanders took over estates in Swat they decided they would hang on to them for their own families. They turned out to be venal as well as violent. If the Taliban kept their promises, they would be a far more formidable force.”

One comes away from Crossing Continents’ report of Inequality and the Taliban thinking about the global situation of conflict rising and spreading because of intolerable poverty and the fact that nations, sects and corporations take advantage of and worsen this situation. One thinks about poverty creation by “entitled” wealth, national leaders’ neglect of society and individuals generation after generation, suffering well into the future. One thinks about the callously filthy rich (often public “charities,” private and nonprofit foundations, tax sheltering tax evaders) and desperately poor divide. One thinks of U.S. and other powerful nations’ foreign and domestic policies that deepen desperation, pour on flames of war, cause the rise and raging of perpetual conflict.


Sources and notes
“Pakistan inequality fuelling Taliban support,” May 13, 2010 “Crossing Continents” program Owen Bennett-Jones investigates the grievances that lie behind Pakistan’s Taliban movement,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8681024.stm
Britannica notes on Punjab and Swat Valley:
Punjab
Punjab province of eastern Pakistan is bordered by the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir to the northeast, the Indian states of Punjab and Rājasthān to the east, Sindh province to the south, Balochistān and North-West Frontier provinces to the west, and Islāmābād federal capital area and Azad Kashmir to the north. Punjab is Pakistan’s second largest province, after Balochistān, and the most densely populated. The name Punjab means ‘five waters,’ or ‘five rivers,’ and signifies the land drained by the Jhelum, Chenāb, Rāvi, Beās, and Sutlej rivers, which are tributaries of the Indus River.
Swat River Valley
Swat River in northern Pakistan formed by the junction of the Gabriāl and Ushu rivers at Kālām in the Kohistān region. Fed by melting snow and glaciers and receiving the drainage of the entire Swāt River valley, the river flows southward, then westward, until joined by the Panjkora River. The united stream then flows southwestward into the Peshāwar Plain and joins the Kābul River at Nisatta after a 200-mile (320-kilometre) course. The Swāt canals irrigate about 160,000 acres (65,000 hectares) in which sugarcane and wheat are the chief crops.
“Crossing Continents,” recipient of the Amnesty International, One World and New York Festival Awards, is BBC Radio 4’s award-winning foreign affairs documentary series. The program is broadcast 28 times a year on Thursdays and is repeated on Mondays, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/2712645.stm
Journalist Owen Bennett-Jones, educated at the London School of Economics and Oxford University, has been based in Geneva, Islamabad and Hanoi. In 2003, he wrote Pakistan: Eye Of The Storm, a modern history of the country, and is working on a second edition. His coverage of events in Pakistan in 2007 and 2008 included interviews with Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and President Pervez Musharraf, reporting on the country’s corruption, Benazir Bhutto’s return and on the aftermath of her assassination. For excellence as an interviewer and reporter, Bennett-Jones won the Sony Radio Gold Award in the News Journalist of the Year category for 2008. He has written for key British newspapers including The Guardian, Financial Times and The Independent and, in addition to “Crossing Continents,” has been a presenter on another BBC World Service radio news program, “The Interview.”