Bolivia’s Morales to keep up hunger strike protest. By Eduardo Garcia

Via: Reuters.

Bolivian President Evo Morales vowed on Sunday to continue a hunger strike now three days old until opposition lawmakers approve an electoral law seen helping allies of the former coca farmer in a December vote.

The leftist president, who says he once went without food for 18 days in his days as a union leader, stopped eating on Thursday to protest opposition efforts to block the election law in Congress.

Rightist opponents fear that the bill, which has already been partially approved, would give Morales an edge in the legislature by assigning more seats to poor, indigenous parts of the energy-rich country where he is popular.

“Christ gave his life for the poor, and we’re here to give our lives for the poor,” Morales, the impoverished country’s first Indian president, told state television in an interview. He looked in good spirits and said he felt “rested.”

Morales, a close ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, has slept for three nights on a mattress on the floor of the presidential palace surrounded by hand-written protest banners and supporters chewing coca leaves to ward off hunger.

Taliban Murder Leading Afghan Female Rights Activist. By Jerome Starkey

Via: The Independent.

Taliban gunmen murdered one of Afghanistan’s leading female rights activists yesterday, as she stood outside her home. In the latest blow against women’s rights, two men on a motorbike shot Sitara Achakzai in the southern city of Kandahar.

Officials said the attack happened in broad daylight. The Taliban have claimed responsibility. Friends said Mrs Achakzai was returning from a provincial council meeting; her assassins were lying in wait nearby.

“This cold-blooded assassination puts in question the direction that Afghanistan is heading,” warned Wenny Kusuma, the director of the United Nations Development fund for Women in Afghanistan. “There is no respect for the rule of law.”

The Rotten Orchard. By Nima Shirazi

Via: The Palestine Chronicle.

On March 19th, two months after the 22-day devastation of Gaza and the slaughtering of over 1,400 Palestinians, the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz published harrowing testimonies by numerous Israeli soldiers who had participated in “Operation Cast Lead.” The soldiers, all recent graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory program, were speaking at an open academic forum about their recent military experiences and, as Sarah Anne Minkin of Jewish Peace News reports, “confessed that they’d knowingly shot civilians to death in Gaza, that they’d intentionally vandalized Palestinian homes, and that the rules of engagement in the war – rules handed down from above – were exceptionally permissive.”

In response to these testimonies, the Israeli military denied the claims made by their own personnel, stating that even if some of the allegations and anecdotes were true (since the troops had “no reason to lie”), they were isolated incidents and did not represent the IDF as a whole. Nonetheless, the IDF promised to conduct “intensive and comprehensive inquiries” and an investigation was launched.

Eleven days later, on March 30th – half the time it took the Israeli air force, navy, and army to murder 313 children, 116 women, 497 civilian men, and 255 non-combatant police officers, wound over 6,000 more, and leave tens of thousands homeless – the Israeli military concluded that the soldiers’ stories of gross misconduct and war crimes were baseless, that they were “based in hearsay” and “rumors,” and declared an end to the probe. Even though the pre-military program’s own founder and leader, Danny Zamir, who is himself a deputy battalion commander in the IDF, described the soldiers’ testimonies as “dismaying and depressing” and concluded that the stories reveal the truth about “an army with very low norms of value,” the IDF investigators disagreed. Luckily for the IDF, the “investigation” by the IDF found that the IDF was still, in fact, according to the IDF, “the most moral army in the world.” What a relief that must have been.

‘Rest has Come to the Weary..’ By Uri Avnery

Via: Gush Shalom.

Passover week is a time for outings. News programs on radio and television start with words like: “The masses of the House of Israel spent the day in the national parks..”

It is also a feast of homeland songs. On television one sees groups of white-haired oldsters surrounded by their children and grandchildren fervently singing the songs of their youth, the words of which they know by heart.

“Rest has come to the weary / And repose to the toiler / A pale night spreads / Over the fields of the Valley of Jezreel / Dew below and the moon above / From Beit-Alfa to Nahalal…” The camera focuses on the furrowed face of a grandmother with wet eyes, and it is not hard to imagine her as the beautiful girl she once was. It is easy to see her in a Jezreel kibbutz, with short pants and a long braid swinging behind her, smiling, bowed over tomato plants in the communal vegetable garden.

Nostalgia is having a field-day.

I admit that I am not free from this nostalgia. Something happens to me, too, when I hear the songs, and I join in them involuntarily.

Like many others, I am suffering from “cognitive dissonance”. The heart and the head are not coordinated. They operate on different wavelengths. In other words: my head knows that the Zionist enterprise has imposed a historic injustice on the people who lived in this land. But my heart remembers what we felt in those days.

At the age of 10, a few weeks after our flight from Nazi Germany and arrival in this country, my parents sent me to Nahalal, the first Moshav (communal village). I lived with a family of “peasants” – there were not yet known as “agriculturists” – in order to get “acclimatized” and learn Hebrew.

US courts put corporations on notice over human rights

Via: The Raw Story.

Agence France-Presse

A spate of US court cases is lighting a fire under the feet of powerful corporations doing business in countries that commit human rights abuses, analysts said Thursday.

General Motors and IBM are among the latest in the firing line after a federal court ruled Wednesday that apartheid victims can sue the corporate giants for aiding the former white South African regime.

Next month Royal Dutch/Shell will be in court, defending itself against charges of complicity in horrific government abuses against Nigeria’s Ogoni people, including the 1995 execution of renowned activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Other cases include claims from Iraqis against controversial US-based contractors like Blackwater (now known as Xe), accused of aiding and abetting abuses during the conflict in Iraq.

In each instance, victims are taking advantage of a US law known as the Alien Tort Claims Act that requires companies with a substantial presence in the United States to obey US law — everywhere in the world.

Sovereignty’s Dissipation: Consensus-Style Stabilization of the Arab World. By Dina Jadallah-Taschler

Via: The Global Research.

The adjectives weak and ineffectual come to mind when describing the military capability of most Arab regimes to exert internal and external territorial defense, a necessary component of sovereignty. We often hear about the clash of “crises of identity” among the multi-ethnic, religious, sectarian, tribal, and sometimes linguistic groups in the Middle East. It is often the reason given behind the “failure” of the Arab state. But naturally, this designation happens only if the said “identity” is inimical to the hegemon’s agenda. Otherwise, it absolutely requires Western help in order to save it. The state “failure” is trumpeted as the main reason for hegemonic intervention to “save” the world from “terrorism” and “insurgencies.”

Never acknowledged is the real cause of this “failure.” Dominant power intervention — military, intelligence, economic, and political – is presented as a reaction, and not as the reason that prompted some of these failures. Some obvious examples of Arab states’ growing territorial loss of control because of these types of dominant interventionist “fixes” are Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan. Palestine, of course, is the original lost territory / state and remains as a reminder of past colonialist injustice and of present racist hegemony. Even if we exclude the well-known inability of the state to deliver on promised socio-economic development goals, there is often an exogenous (dominant power) cause that fosters the growth of competing more narrowly focused identities that challenge the state’s sovereignty.

No end in sight. By Salah Hemeid

Via: Al Ahram weekly.

Six years on, Iraqis confront the tragedy of the US invasion amid spiralling violence, writes Salah Hemeid

Until a few weeks ago Iraqis were still hoping the sixth anniversary of the toppling of the regime of Saddam Hussein would bring some good news to their beleaguered nation, especially in terms of national reconciliation, peace and stability. Sadly, the sounds and the sights of a war-torn Iraq are as much in evidence as ever.

Bombs, ambushes and kidnappings have returned with a vengeance to Baghdad and other Iraqi cities after a decrease in recent months, calling into question claims by Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki, backed by US officials, that Iraq has finally returned to normal.

This week hundreds were killed and wounded in a string of bombings that wrecked markets and other busy meeting places, events that blatantly contradict the rosy picture both Baghdad and Washington are trying to paint. Iraq remains a country caught in the sway of sectarian violence.

Obama’s Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove. By Patrick Seale

Via: Dar Al Hayat.

Barack Obama performed faultlessly on his European Tour.  Eloquent, charming and unruffled, wherever he appeared he demonstrated his immense personal popularity. His implicit message — that America had turned a decisive corner away from the crass ignorance and numbing brutality of the Bush years – was greeted with a palpable sense of relief. America could now, once again, be respected and admired.
But there was another aspect of his performance which was more surprising. Behind the beautiful words beautifully delivered, behind the disarming modesty, there was more than hint of steel. Obama appears to know what he wants, and — more importantly — he seems determined to get his way. The world should take note: this is not an American president who can easily be bamboozled or led astray. There is an iron fist in the velvet glove.
Obama’s speeches — notably the one he delivered in the Turkish parliament to a standing ovation – contained a number of challenges to friend and foe alike. Some of his targets were predictable. As was to be expected, he pledged to ‘disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al-Qaeda’. To their delight, he told the Turks that ‘I pledge that you will have our support against the terrorist activities of the PKK’ – the Kurdish Revolutionary Workers Party, which has been battling, by violent means, to carve an independent Kurdistan out of Anatolia.
Obama refrained from threatening Iran, but he sent it a blunt message all the same. Its leaders, he said, ‘must choose whether they will try to build a weapon or build a better future for their people…The peace of the region will be enhanced,’ he said, ‘if Iran foregoes any nuclear weapons ambitions.’

Ben-Gurion and Massacre of Deir Yassin. By Iqbal Jassat

Via: The Palestine Chronicle.

The minutes of a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive on 12 June 1938 records a chilling statement made by David Ben-Gurion:

“I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it”.

Ben-Gurion, an ardent Zionist was a migrant from Poland where he was born in 1886. Since his arrival in Palestine as a 20-year old, Ben-Gurion was destined to be heralded as not only the founder of the State of Israel and its first prime minister, but also as the mastermind of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

In his Diary, an entry on 12 July 1937, Ben-Gurion records writing to his son that the only course of action open to Zionism was: “The Arabs will have to go”. What was needed was an opportune moment for making it happen, as Israeli historian and senior academic Ilan Pappe observes in his awesome study The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Pappe describes Ben-Gurion as short of stature, with a large shock of white hair swept backwards and invariably dressed in khaki uniform.

In order to make sense of the current politics of Israel, which under the right-wing leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu remains adamant in denying Palestinian rights, its significant to grasp the malicious intent on the part of his predecessors. Zionist leaders such as Ben-Gurion developed and implemented concrete actions to empty Palestine of its natives. Its equally useful to recollect that in the period between 1919 to 1933 after 35,000 more Zionists immigrated to Palestine, Jewish hold of the land constituted less than 3% while their population stood at 12%.

It means that at the time the League of Nations approved Britain’s Mandate for Palestine in 1922, population figures reflected on a British census of Palestine reveals: 78% Muslim, 11% Jewish, 9.6% Christian, total population 757,182.

PAKISTAN: A Marriage of Convenience? By Zofeen Ebrahim

Via: IPS News.

Pakistan’s Mukhtaran Mai, who gained global acclaim for daring to take her rapists to court, announced her marriage last month to an already married police constable.

Mai said she was left with no choice after Nasir Abbas Gabol, 30, her former bodyguard, threatened to kill himself, and his parents and first wife, Shahla, begged her to agree to the marriage offer.

The announcement sent shock waves through women’s and rights circles in the country. Mai, who has fought a valiant, 7-year-old battle against tradition and patriarchy, was suddenly no longer a role model and icon.

“Mukhtaran Mai has fallen from being a national heroine to a disappointment, even for the media,” asserts Karachi-based Najma Sadeque, a founding member of Shirkat Gah, a non-governmental organisation.

“One wishes she had not done it,” says Naeem Sadiq, a business consultant here who actively campaigns on pro-democracy issues.

Sadiq who considers Mai an “exceptionally brave woman” is concerned that her marriage sends a message that “she is promoting polygamy”.

Georgians rally against Saakashvili

Via: Al Jazeera.

Thousands of people have rallied in the streets of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, for a third day of protests aimed at pressuring President Mikheil Saakashvili to resign.

A coalition of opposition parties led the demonstration on Saturday in front of parliament, continuing what they call a “national disobedience campaign”.

The protests came a day after more than 25,000 people had gathered at the same location.

“We have come to a joint conclusion to show the government in a peaceful way that we are not just a small group of Tbilisi residents who want changes, that the whole of Georgia is with us,” Irakly Alasania, an opposition leader, said.

“Today we have realised that if we ourselves do not take back control of our country, do not return our statehood, then we will have to face this problem for many years to come.”

Saakashvili has rejected the calls to resign and has offered to hold talks with the opposition.

“There is poverty in the country which has been aggravated by the war and the economic crisis and our citizens are angry today because of these problems. I am angry too,” he said on Friday.

Taliban enforce rule in Pakistan’s Bajaur

Via: Press TV.

The Taliban have enforced their harsh rule in Pakistan’s Bajaur district after the army lost control of most of the northwestern region.

Maulvi Faqir Mohammad, the insurgents’ commander, announced new laws in the region during a 40-minute speech on his illegal FM radio station, media reports said Saturday.

The commander also warned local residents against seeking assistance from the Benazir Bhutto Income Support fund, a government program designated for lower income people.

According to the defiant commander, people supporting the fund as well as aid agencies will be dragged into Taliban courts.

He also barred women from stepping out of their homes without male relatives and banned men from shaving their beards.

Local people who listened to the radio broadcast described his tone as “aggressive”.

The insurgents have also formed forces in the region to punish people who violate their decrees.