Selves and Others

In recent weeks, the Canadian media’s embargo against critical coverage of this country’s role in Haiti has begun to be broken. Montreal activist Yves Engler got the ball rolling with his splashing of a red substance on Pierre Pettigrew’s favourite suit jacket (June 17 2005). Engler’s substantive critique might have been lost amid the Foreign Minister’s jokes about his stained Calvin Klein; fortunately, another Klein had just interviewed Haiti’s president-in-exile, who confirmed the growing assessment that Canada indeed “has blood on its hands.” (‘Aristide: on the record about Canada and Haiti,’ Rabble.ca, June 23 2005)

This breakthrough - followed by the Toronto Star’s (July 25 2005) publication of a critique of Ottawa’s role by Aaron Mate — for opponents of the 2004 Franco-American-Canadian coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide threatens to explode the government and establishment discourse of Ottawa’s interventions as mere benevolent peace-keeping and/or nation-building, in Haiti and elsewhere. (...)

An earlier version of this article was published in The Japan Times, this version was prepared for Japan Focus.

One of Japan’s longest-running legal feuds may be about to erupt again, driven by worsening Korea-Japan relations.

Bony, 80-year-old body floating around inside a nylon shirt and cigarette permanently clamped between what appear to be her two remaining front teeth; Kan Kyon Nam is an unlikely illegal squatter.

But frail or not, if the bulldozers come she wants it known there’ll be trouble. "If they try to evict me and demolish my house I’ll die under it," she says. "There’s no point in trying to stay alive otherwise at my age."

Fighting talk comes easy to the older residents of Utoro, a tiny Korean village of rickety houses in Uji City, Kyoto, which has struggled to avoid being wiped from the map for over half a century.

Kin Sunae, Kan Kyon Nam, and Gen Akio in the village.

One of Japan’s longest-running social disputes, Utoro has been largely forgotten here, but across the Japan Sea many see this community of 230 people as a living symbol of the hardships of Korean immigrants.

Now, against a background of soured bilateral relations, the village is again back in the media spotlight. (...)

Iraq combat veteran talks about his motivations for joining the army, the horrors of war and the anguish of returning home.

Editor’s Note: As of August 4, 2005, 1,821 American troops and between 22,500 and 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the war in Iraq. Domestically, the bill for the war has reached $204.6 billion.

This is the first in a continued series of profiles of some of the tens of thousands of Iraq War veterans who have come home bearing the scars of battle — emotional and physical wounds that may never heal unless the nation pays them the attention and care that they deserve. We at AlterNet believe it is the one issue that can and must bring us all together as Americans.

Zechariah, 25, of Lynnwood, Washington, enlisted in the Army when he was 21, and was deployed to Iraq from March 2003 to January 2004 with the 173rd Airborne Brigade as a medic.

Zechariah grew up in a military family; both his mother and father were medics in the Army. Zechariah wanted to work in the medical field as a nurse, but couldn’t afford school. So he signed up to be a parachute infantry medic for the job experience, money for school, and a little adventure.

He spoke to AlterNet about the war, his hopes and fears, and the hard road ahead.

Documents reveal that Britain supplied heavy water without safeguards against military use, enabling the production of nuclear weapons

Britain secretly supplied the 20 tons of heavy water to Israel nearly half a century ago which enabled it to make nuclear weapons, according to Whitehall documents which have been discovered at the Public Record Office.

Officials in the Macmillan government deliberately concealed the deal from the US, according to the files, which were discovered by BBC Newsnight and broadcast last night.

Historians and politicians have been startled by the discovery, which sheds new light on the process by which Israel was able to circumvent attempts to restrict membership of the "nuclear club" to the great powers.

Most of those involved are now dead, but Lord (Ian) Gilmour, who was active in Conservative politics during that era, said last night: "I would have been astonished and found it absolutely unbelievable." He said he did not believe Harold Macmillan or his ministers knew anything about the sale, which Britain permitted without demanding safeguards against military use. (...)

[page 8 | UK News]

Israel’s acquisition of nuclear bombs has been one of the most sustained pieces of deceit in recent history. The project was guarded with such passion that in the 1980s the technician Mordechai Vanunu was kidnapped and spent 11 years in solitary confinement for blowing some of its secrets.

It is remarkable then, that documents lying unnoticed in the Public Record Office at Kew should reveal Britain’s hitherto unknown role 47 years ago in deceiving the US and supplying Israel with the means to go nuclear.

The main files on the subject, from the UK Atomic Energy Authority, are still classified. But the BBC Newsnight producer Meirion Jones says he found a handful of key copies in a routinely declassified but obscure Foreign Office counter-proliferation archive.

Apart from a passing mention of a British connection in 1998 by an Israeli academic, Avner Cohen, the UK’s key role seems to have been completely unknown to historians.

What the documents still fail to reveal, however, is how high up in the Macmillan government the decision was taken to go behind the back of President Eisenhower and load 20 tons of heavy water from Britain on to Israeli ships, thus enabling Israel to start up its Dimona reactor. (...)

[page 8 | UK News]

Her face is seamed and her arms are painfully slender, but Mohadien Goumar is only 45. Her neighbour Aminata Musa, who is about 60, lies barely moving on a wooden pallet, staring at the world with flat, bloodshot eyes; dependent on the charity of fellow villagers to keep her alive.

As aid agencies focus their scant resources on saving malnourished babies and children, the elderly are the forgotten victims of the crisis in Niger. (...)

The use of torture by our own government is a huge setback for human rights advocates and for the rule of the law around the world. . . . Truth does not come from breaking people.

 Douglas A. Johnson, executive director of Centerfor Victims of Torture

Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 26, 2005

You have a very hard job, because it is your job to put the soul back in the body.

 A client of the Center for Victims of Torture

June 26 was the 20th anniversary of the Center for Victims of Torture, which provides technical assistance and training to more than 30 torture treatment centers in the U.S. and 15 others on five continents. The center also works for worldwide abolition of torture.

When the center was founded in 1985 in Minneapolis, there were-as its director, Douglas A. Johnson, noted on June 26-"only two other treatment centers in the world and little research to guide us. . . . What CVT has learned about [victims of government-sponsored] torture is from the survivors, who have taken the risk to trust us and tell us their stories. . . . [But] today our clients’ belief in the safety and sanctity of their new home has been damaged. We are faced with our country’s attempt to rewrite the rules of human rights and try to redefine torture." (...)

[August 1st, 2005]

The eight undersigned Special Procedures mandate holders of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights issued this appeal shortly after the one-year anniversary of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion ("Wall opinion"), concerning the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory:

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its 9 July 2004 advisory opinion held, inter alia, that the construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal; that Israel should dismantle the wall; that Israel should pay reparation to those individuals who had suffered as a consequence of the construction of the wall; and that the United Nations should consider what action to take, in accordance with the Opinion, to ensure compliance with the Opinion. In August 2004, in resolution ES-10/15 the General Assembly called upon Israel and other parties to comply with their legal obligations as mentioned in the Opinion. Further to that resolution, the Secretary-General is taking steps to compile a register of the persons who have suffered as a result of the construction of the wall.

However, neither the General Assembly nor the Security Council have considered the Opinion since. (...)

[Report, UNCHR, 4 August 2005]

When Shin Jin Tae’s first daughter died, her mother was still breast-feeding her.

"She became thinner and thinner until she passed away," the 62-year-old farmer says. When more mysterious diseases and inexplicable deaths occurred in Hapcheon county where he lives, Shin started to think that all this might be related to the past.

Shin was born in Hiroshima. When the atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945, he was two years old.

"More than 70 percent of the Korean victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Hapcheon," he says. Most of the survivors returned. Shin is one of 598 atomic bomb victims still living there. (...)

3 poems sent to Selves and Others from Doug Soderstrom, Ph.D.

ISRAELI PRIME Minister Ariel Sharon and his government have set August 15 as the date for what they call a “unilateral disengagement” from the occupied territory of Gaza and a few parts of the West Bank. Confrontations between the Israeli military and right-wing settlers who oppose the Sharon plan reached a fever pitch as the deadline approached.

Sharon has been praised as a peacemaker by the Bush administration for his Gaza plan. But the reality is very different. TOUFIC HADDAD, former coeditor of Between the Lines and the coeditor of a forthcoming book from South End Press on the Palestinian Intifada, writes from Bethlehem in the West Bank about what’s at stake in Sharon’s “withdrawal” from Gaza. (...)

[August 5, 2005 | Page 5]

WITH OPINION polls consistently showing a majority of Americans against the Iraq occupation, some prominent liberals are stepping forward to take credit for this welcome development. The “antiwar movement is winning by staying silent,” was the theme of a recent column by American Prospect editor Harold Meyerson in the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Congratulations are apparently in order to those responsible for the antiwar movement’s hiatus throughout John Kerry’s election campaign last year. “[H]owever perverse this may sound,” Meyerson wrote, “the absence of an antiwar movement is proving to be a huge political problem for the Bush administration.” (...)

[August 5, 2005 | Page 6]

AS GEORGE W. Bush left Washington for his annual month-long vacation in Texas, public approval for his administration hit the lowest level ever. The Gallup survey taken in late July put his job approval rating at 44 percent—a new low. A Quinnipiac University poll had Bush at 41 percent.

It’s clear that the main issue sapping Bush’s support is the war in Iraq. Having once provided him with the aura of “commander in chief,” which he brandished to silence all critics, the war is now proving to be a weight around his neck. The same Gallup survey showed that only 36 percent—most of that the Republican Party’s “base”—supported Bush’s Iraq policy.

[August 5, 2005 | Page 11]