There’s been many, many reports and testimonies coming out of Iraq of totally disproportionate use of aggression by coalition soldiers, be they the contracted mercenaries of Xe/Blackwater (read here, here and most particularly here for some of the most gruesome accounts), US Army soldiers (or robots). Very sadly they are most likely but the tip of the iceberg. The above video, posted on wikileaks.org yesterday, probably spells much about today’s video game generation of soldiers that we send into combat completely detached from reality, and about the training they receive. The video shows how a US helicopter crew engages and kills a group of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, based on grainy video images showing ‘insurgents’. In fact the people on the street were unarmed civilians and a Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver, Saeed Chmagh, whose cameras were mistaken for weapons and quickly translated into ‘AK47′s and ‘RPGs’. The video pretty much speaks for itself, but the N.Y.Times also wrote about it here. Just horrible, horrible.

From A context for Gaza article by Duncan Kennedy, Harvard Law School – excerpt:

” Numerous observers have charged Israel with committing war crimes during the war. Without downplaying that aspect, I think it is important to understand the 1,300 Palestinian casualties, including 400 children as well as many, many women, versus 13 Israeli casualties, as typical of a particular kind of “police action” that Western colonial powers and Western “ethno-cratic settler regimes” like ours in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Serbia and particularly apartheid South Africa, have historically undertaken to convince resisting native populations that unless they stop resisting they will suffer unbearable death and deprivation. Not just in 1947 and 1948, but also in Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, Israel used similar tactics.

Causing horrific civilian deaths is often perfectly defensible under the laws of war, which favor conventional over unconventional forces in asymmetric warfare. The outright “crimes,” like the My Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib, or Russian massacres in Afghanistan and then in Chechnya, are less important for the civilian victims than the daily tactics of air assault, bombardment, and brutal door-to-door sweeps, meant to draw fire from the resisters that will justify leveling houses and the people in them.

Can this picture be right? If so, what is to be done? If not, what is to be done? (…) “

Alison Des Forges (1942 – 2009)

Reading about genocide these days, a subject that has been intermittently on my mind since I became aware of the extend of the violence in Darfur in the fall of 2006. At the time the conflict had been raging since 2003, but whether because of the poor media coverage, or slow fermentation of my sociopolitical awareness of the world, somehow it had escaped my attention until then. That summer I had been discovering the work of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, who had showed me that it was possible to work with art from one’s moral conscience, from a feeling of obligation and solidarity towards the world, without compromising aesthetic integrity or a poetic powerfulness. Jaar worked for on a six-year project to represent the 1994 Rwandan genocide, creating a series of works which he believed all failed in representing the genocide to the public. Today I’ve probably lost faith in most of those values of integrity, certainly departed from responsibility towards the art world, but at the time art school discourse was still having a heavy influence on me. When the reality of the conflict began to dawn on me, I saw that it was following the same pattern as the historical events in Rwanda that I was introduced to through the work of Alfredo Jaar. I tried to do art projects that dealt with the Darfur conflict, but it would be a shame to say that it went very well. It didn’t go well at all, but I’ll recognize it as a point of departure into the process that has let me to where I am now.

Today I came across the obituary of Alison Des Forges, historian and influential human rights activist with Human Rights Watch (HRW) for almost twenty years, and a forefront expert on the Rwandan genocide. Des Forges died on February 12 in a plane crash along with the 48 other passengers of a flight from Newark to Buffalo in upstate New York. Des Forges ‘dedicated her life to working on Rwanda and was the world’s leading expert on the 1994 Rwanda genocide and its aftermath’, and HRW characterized her as ‘the epitome of the human rights activist — principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and,’ (this especially resonates with me) ‘to using that truth to protect ordinary people.’ I haven’t read any of her work – she authored the book ‘Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda’ (the title alone says something about the scale of conflict) – but here is a video commemorating the anniversary of the Rwandan genocide in 2004, from the HRW home page.

“Alison’s loss is a devastating blow not only to Human Rights Watch but also to the people of Rwanda and the Great Lakes region. [...] She was among the first to highlight the ethnic tensions that led to the genocide, and when it happened and the world stood by and watched, Alison did everything humanly possible to save people. [...] She never forgot about the crimes committed by the Rwandan government’s forces, and that was unpopular, especially in the United States and in Britain,” [...] “She was really a thorn in everyone’s side, and that’s a testament to her integrity and sense of principle and commitment to the truth.”

- Kenneth Roth, exec. dir. of HRW

Since I came to Guatemala for the first time, this world of grave human rights violations has become very present and real; although I live a very priviledged life of a westerner here, the hard reality and sad history of Guatemala is evident in the testimonies of people I meet, who lost their friend and family to the civil war, and in the faces of people I meet on the street. The unmistakable prevailing poverty of a majority of the Mayan population reflects the century-long discrimination of the indigenous peoples, an issue that have been hardly dealt with since the peace accords in 1996, when for the first time in history the Mayan population was even recognized by the constitution, as peoples in their own right. Close to half the population, they’ve always been brutally victimized and discriminated against; during the worst years of the Civil War (roughly 1978-85), they were directly targeted by the military governments, and under the presidencies of Lucas García and Efraín Rios Montt, over 200,000 Mayans were very brutally  killed, and tens of thousands disappeared. Although it was claimed to be an attempt to ‘pull up from the roots’ the support for oppostition resistance guerillas, you’d have to add four hundred years of racial discrimination to the causes of what was essentially the worst genocide of the Americas since colonial times.

There’s so much more to tell, and I will return in future posts to the subject. Night has fallen and I’m about to turn in, to the simple words of William Carlos Williams:

it is difficult
to get the news
from poems
yet men die miserably
every day
for lack
of what is found
there

.

Update Monday 16: a long feature on Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch on today’s show of Democracy Now. Amy Goodman interviews Kenneth Roth about Alison Des Forges, about Rwanda, genocide, and the Israeli/Palestine situation. If the link ceases to work, this should be a direct link to the show.

“… the legacy of the Rwandan genocide: It’s as if you took a picture of a family, and ripped it down the middle. And then tried to fit the halves back together again. Even with the best glue in the world, it’s never gonna be the same. People betrayed their deepest values in order to kill (…). Whether you look at it from the point of view of the victims or the point of view of the perpetrator, these are not things that can ever be forgotten.”

- Alison Des Forges

photo from cnn.com

Gaza is burning, and while Israel continues its aggression against the civilian Palestinian population of Gaza, now going on twenty days, the children are a majority among those innocent caught in the crossfire – I doubt even Israel’s most stiff-necked official can claim that these are enemy combatants and keep a straight face. By all accounts, at least one third of the victims in Gaza are children, more than three hundred so far. What is happening right now is horribly, fucking wrong, a humanitarian disaster of sinister proportions in the face of an international community that so far can only look in from the outside.

As their rockets and artillery keep dropping, Israel is still preventing international reporters from entering the territories, claiming that it would compromise military operations. According to cnn.com, “Israel has accused Hamas militants of exploiting the deaths of civilians to garner international sympathy through the media,” in other words, of painting a rather unfair image of Israel’s military operation by focusing too much on civilian casualties — echoing the 2004 second bombing of Falluja in Iraq by Israel’s ally the United States; here too, the city under seige was cordoned off so no-one were able to flee the bombing raids because they were turned back at the city gates. The New York Times, known for their ardent support of the war, applauded the shutdown of hospitals like Falluja General Hospital, regarded by the invaders as “a propaganda weapon for the militants, [...] with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.”  So, it was considered a legitimate target, since “inflated civilian casualty figures [...] had inflamed opinion throughout the country, driving up the political costs of the conflict.” (my emphasis). Subsequently, Al-Jazeera was harshly critized by high US officials for, again, having “emphasized civilian casualties” during the destruction of Falluja, in other words, reporting the truth – known as bad for business. ¹

But what is happening in Gaza right now looks less like a military operation and more like a state-run campaign of mass-homicide on innocent civilians (again the resemblance with Iraq is striking). The president Evo Morales of Bolivia and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez both announced today that they are severing diplomatic relations with Israel on the basis of “the gravity of the atrocities against the Palestinian people,” and continued by accusing Israel of participating in “state terrorism” against “the most weak and innocent human beings: children, women and the aged.” ²
In this article on Z Space we find some numbers to back that up: “…largely unmentioned by the media, prior to the latest invasion, 14 Israelis had been killed by mostly homemade rockets fired from Gaza over the last seven years as against 5,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks.”

Figures that surely deserve to enter the debate about Israels proclaimed legitimacy..

I appreciate that even in a small city like Quetzaltenango, local Guatemalan youth were able to muster a crowd for a peace march for Gaza yesterday, which, however small, managed to get a lot of attention, carrying a casket on its way through the city and up to the Plaza de Israel, effectively blocking traffic for a  good while. I hope as many as possible will summon of the strength to participate in denouncing Israel’s crimes in Gaza right now so that pressure from the international community will convince Israel to put and end to the atrocities.

News updates at cnn.com/gaza, and a few articles:
Robert Fisk: Keeping out the cameras and reporters simply doesn’t work,
and, this just in:
Avi Shlaim: How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe.
Naomi Klein: Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction.

And the words of another man, far more clear sighted and eloquent than I, on the conflict as seen from the Americas, in fact not far from where I am now (copy-pasted from Lucas Mulder’s blog, where he also shares his own thoughts on Palestine – these words however come from Chiapas, Mexico):

Two days ago, the same day we discussed violence, the ineffable Condoleezza Rice, a US official, declared that what was happening in Gaza was the Palestinians’ fault, due to their violent nature.

The underground rivers that crisscross the world can change their geography, but they sing the same song.

And the one we hear now is one of war and pain.

Not far from here, in a place called Gaza, in Palestine, in the Middle East, right here next to us, the Israeli government’s heavily trained and armed military continues its march of death and destruction.

The steps it has taken are those of a classic military war of conquest: first an intense mass bombing in order to destroy “strategic” military points (that’s how the military manuals put it) and to “soften” the resistance’s reinforcements; next a fierce control over information: everything that is heard and seen “in the outside world,” that is, outside the theater of operations, must be selected with military criteria; now intense artillery fire against the enemy infantry to protect the advance of troop to new positions; then there will be a siege to weaken the enemy garrison; then the assault that conquers the position and annihilates the enemy, then the “cleaning out” of the probable “nests of resistance.”

The military manual of modern war, with a few variations and additions, is being followed step-by-step by the invading military forces.

We don’t know a lot about this, and there are surely specialists in the so-called “conflict in the Middle East,” but from this corner we have something to say:

According to the news photos, the “strategic” points destroyed by the Israeli government’s air force are houses, shacks, civilian buildings. We haven’t seen a single bunker, nor a barracks, nor a military airport, nor cannons, amongst the rubble. So–and please excuse our ignorance–we think that either the planes’ guns have bad aim, or in Gaza such “strategic” military points don’t exist.

We have never had the honor of visiting Palestine, but we suppose that people, men, women, children, and the elderly–not soldiers–lived in those houses, shacks, and buildings.

We also haven’t seen the resistance’s reinforcements, just rubble.

We have seen, however, the futile efforts of the information siege, and the world governments trying to decide between ignoring or applauding the invasion, and the UN, which has been useless for quite some time, sending out tepid press releases.

But wait. It just occurred to us that perhaps to the Israeli government those men, women, children, and elderly people are enemy soldiers, and as such, the shacks, houses, and buildings that they inhabited are barracks that need to be destroyed.

So surely the hail of bullets that fell on Gaza this morning were in order to protect the Israeli infantry’s advance from those men, women, children, and elderly people.

And the enemy garrison that they want to weaken with the siege that is spread out all over Gaza is the Palestinian population that lives there. And the assault will seek to annihilate that population. And whichever man, woman, child, or elderly person that manages to escape or hide from the predictably bloody assault will later be “hunted” so that the cleansing is complete and the commanders in charge of the operation can report to their superiors: “We’ve completed the mission.”

Again, pardon our ignorance, maybe what we’re saying is beside the point. And instead of condemning the ongoing crime, being the indigenous and warriors that we are, we should be discussing and taking a position in the discussion about if it’s “zionism” or “antisemitism,” or if Hamas’ bombs started it.

Maybe our thinking is very simple, and we’re lacking the nuances and annotations that are always so necessary in analyses, but to the Zapatistas it looks like there’s a professional army murdering a defenseless population.

Who from below and to the left can remain silent?

Is it useful to say something? Do our cries stop even one bomb? Does our word save the life of even one Palestinian?

We think that yes, it is useful. Maybe we don’t stop a bomb and our word won’t turn into an armored shield so that that 5.56 mm or 9 mm caliber bullet with the letters “IMI” or “Israeli Military Industry” etched into the base of the cartridge won’t hit the chest of a girl or boy, but perhaps our word can manage to join forces with others in Mexico and the world and perhaps first it’s heard as a murmur, then out loud, and then a scream that they hear in Gaza.

We don’t know about you, but we Zapatistas from the EZLN, we know how important it is, in the middle of destruction and death, to hear some words of encouragement.

I don’t know how to explain it, but it turns out that yes, words from afar might not stop a bomb, but it’s as if a crack were opened in the black room of death and a tiny ray of light slips in.

As for everything else, what will happen will happen. The Israeli government will declare that it dealt a severe blow to terrorism, it will hide the magnitude of the massacre from its people, the large weapons manufacturers will have obtained economic support to face the crisis, and “the global public opinion,” that malleable entity that is always in fashion, will turn away.

But that’s not all. The Palestinian people will also resist and survive and continue struggling and will continue to have sympathy from below for their cause.

And perhaps a boy or girl from Gaza will survive, too. Perhaps they’ll grow, and with them, their nerve, indignation, and rage. Perhaps they’ll become soldiers or militiamen for one of the groups that struggle in Palestine. Perhaps they’ll find themselves in combat with Israel. Perhaps they’ll do it firing a gun. Perhaps sacrificing themselves with a belt of dynamite around their waists.

And then, from up there above, they will write about the Palestinians’ violent nature and they’ll make declarations condemning that violence and they’ll get back to discussing if it’s zionism or anti-semitism.

And no one will ask who planted that which is being harvested.

For the men, women, children, and elderly of the Zapatista National Liberation Army,

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
Mexico, January 4, 2009. ³

.

¹ Noam Chomsky, in Failed States
² (CNN.com)
³ (100cm.org)

A man found Alladin’s lamp lying around. Since he was a big reader, the man recognized it and rubbed it right away. The genie appeared, bowed deeply, and said: “At your service, master. Your wish is my command. But there will be only one wish.”
 Since he was a good boy, the man said, ”I wish for my dead mother to be brought back.”
 The genie made a face. “I’m sorry master, but that wish is impossible. Make another.”
 Since he was a nice guy, the man said, “I wish the world would stop spending money to kill people.”
 The genie swallowed. “Uhh … What did you say your mother’s name was?”

Yuri Kozyrev / dispatches © Copyright 2008 dispatches magazine

Soldiers from the first amored division celebrate American Independence Day at a palace that belonged to Saddam Hussein’s son Uday. Baghdad, July 4, 2003.

For the Beyond Iraq issue at the dispatches website, Yuri Kozyrev has published the photo essay ирак, documenting post-invasion Iraq, what struck me the most was the above photo. Besides from making me think of the iconic scene of surfing soldiers after napalming a vietnamese fishing town in Apocalypse Now, it kind of sums up a great deal of what I’ve been learning for the past five months; about a war that has obviously failed, and while bringing about a deepening segregation between cultures, has cultivated ideological blowback and left a culture as old as civilization in rubble. The soldiers on the image celebrate their Independence Day amid the wreckage of a country that has not only been robbed of its promise of own national independence, but also looted of its cultural heritage, its infrastructure, and history – literally loaded onto trucks and disappeared. And while the soldiers were high on a sense of victory and, I suppose, of liberation, the country was in flames while the priority of the Bush administration was to fling open the borders for foreign multinational investment, privatize all institutions, industries and social services to non-Iraqi companies, and creating the widest of free-market zones anywhere in the world; an Iraq open for business, a shopping mall for disaster production and relief industries. According to Michael Ledeen, adviser to the Bush administration, invading Iraq was an attempt at “a war to remake the world” – and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times proclaimed that “we are not doing nation-building in Iraq. We are doing nation-creating,” as if there was nothing there to begin with.

Back in the seventies in military governments throughout Latin America, it was decided that in order to build and maintain stable societies and economies, “whole categories of people and their cultures would have to pulled up “from the root”" (quotes so far from Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine), including their cultural heritage, more often than not in order to make way for economic policies beneficial to investors. Full circle back to Guatemala, where the recent trend of United States sponsored military interventions had its kickoff. In these parts, little over fifty years ago, business had its buddying introduction into transnational politics when a banana company managed to have the U.S. overthrow the democratically elected government and install the first military dictatorship in a long row that went on until the nineties. They also witnessed the worst genocide in 20th century Latin America; the attempt to pull up from the roots the indigenous Mayan population, another culture as old as civilization, one of the richest and most beautiful I’ve encountered.

Now I’m back in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. I hope to be able to address these things more, in the very least understand it and the context around me, and in the meanwhile keep looking for a voice and a medium. The policies and politics of these events of the past continue today, in other parts of the world, and continues to reverberate right here where it started; the Mayans are still targeted, now by static and insufficient social policies and discrimination and a still corrupt government. One of the better (or worse) examples is that of Efrain Rios Montt, the man responsible for ordering the destruction of some 400 Mayan villages during his presidency thirty years ago, who to this day retains a seat in the Guatemalan parliament.

By the way I’m violating the copyright acknowledged above as the image is reproduced without permission. If anyone has a problem with it contact me and I’ll remove the photograph from here right away. It’s taken from the photo essay by Yuri Kozyrev linked to in the first paragraph (and here).

Actually, just a side note before that.

So just a few words on the election (you know, THE election). I was very excited when I searched out an internet café two days ago to get the news, and admit that I felt not only a big wave of relief, but yes – a big hope for the future. Some of my friends in radical circles in the U.S. (Jen Angel, for one, like here) have been warning me about Obamanian rapture obscuring the real politics and challenges at hand, as have various other commentaries I’ve read. Indeed they are right, and indeed, from most European points of view, Obama is far more conservative than radical. In a znet commentary, Cynthia Peters arguments that popular movements are were we ought to be putting our hopes and efforts, because not only are there still plenty of cracks in the edifice for Obama’s policies, but there’ll be further pressure from corporate power and financial organizations to push through their policies in Obama’s presidency. The democratic base for change lies in continued pressure from beneath towards the site of power to push through the will and policies of the people.

That said I for one find me inspired to hope for a better future with this presidency. At least the election have shown us that the U.S. is capable of change, after all.

I remember seeing Howard Zinn speak to an audience in Cambridge some months before the Iraq war started. An audience member asked, “What do we do if Bush invades Iraq?”

“That’s not the question to ask,” Zinn pointed out. “The question to ask is: what are we going to do to make sure he doesn’t invade Iraq?” ¹

Oh, and on that note, here’s a link to a video about the military industrial complex: Why We Fight, Eugene Jarecki, dir., on YouTube. I haven’t seen the film itself, but would like to. I did read a book by Chalmers Johnson, featured here in the clip, called Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, and he’s got his numbers right. The documentary is about the United States’ relationship with war as business, the development of the military-industrial complex in the United States and, following 9/11, the privatization of war.

But let’s talk about something else…

¹ Cynthia Peters