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Recent Articles about Bristol GlobalisationClass struggles in global supply chains Talk Hydra 27th June 7.30pm Jun 18 13 Bristol No Borders, Permanent Culture now & Indymedia Presents: Contro... Apr 26 13 Bristol, Benazir Bhutto, bullets, bombs, consumerism and capitalism and silence? bristol |
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news report
 Friday December 28, 2007 07:24 by Asif
 Will we be reading anything from Bristols Pakistani community? There are thousands of Pakistani's living in and around Bristol, why do we not hear from those people (Pakistani's) most affected by such a major global event? Another mega-event on the world stage, Benazir Bhutto assassinated, Pakistan in uproar, Musharraf supported by Britain and America in the "War on Terror" |
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Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54I feel sick.
Appalling news.
Killed for being a female.
So tragically Bhutto is assasinated and Asif takes a swipe at this website?
I don't see why you are saying?
Subject: FW: THE DICTATORSHIP OF "FREEDOM" / COLUMN WRITTEN BY MUMIA
ABU-JAMAL / 4 NOV, 07
From: "Free Mumia"
Date: Mon, November 26, 2007 12:24 am
To: freemumiauk@ gmail.com
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
The Dictatorship of "Freedom
[col. writ. 11/4/07] (c) '07 Mumia Abu-Jamal
With shining boots, cadenced marches and loaded arms, the Pakistan Army
entered the country's Supreme Court and announced martial law.
America's biggest ally in the so-called 'War on Terror' has launched
another war: one on democracy and the very notion of an independent
judiciary.
The problem, it seems, is that the Pakistani judiciary was growing a tad
too independent for President-General Pervez Musharraf.
The fig leaf of this pretend democracy has been discarded; it is a
military dictatorship plain and simple.
So much for the American rhetorical exercise of bringing democracy to
the benighted Islamic world.
Nor should we be surprised!
A month ago, when Pakistani opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif tried to
return home, he was met by a wall of military resistance that wouldn't allow
him to enter the country that he once led as prime minister.
While en route to Pakistan, in London's Heathrow Airport, Sharif
described his imminent return thus: "It's a final battle now between
dictatorship and democracy." Sharif added, "Civil society is there now
struggling for the restoration of the rule of law. The judiciary is today
independent. I think it is about time that we put an end to this menace of
dictatorship because it has inflicted so much damage to my country." (New
York Times, 9/11/07, p.A8.)
Denied his court ordered right of return, Sharif told reporters at the
Pakistan airport, "Mr. Musharraf does not believe in the rule of law. He
tries to bulldoze everything that comes in his way." (NYT, 9/11/07)
Sound familiar?
And what's the White House response? The Bush Regime has announced it
still supports the military junta that suspended the constitution, removed
objectionable judges from the Supreme Court -- and placed the whole capital
on lockdown.
Observers say Musharraf's moves comes just as the court was about to
rule on his right to stand in a recent election.
As Nawaz Sharif noted a month ago, "President Bush is somehow supporting
an individual who today has become a symbol of hatred in Pakistan, a man
whom everybody in Pakistan wants to get rid of." Added Sharif, " I don't
know why Mr. Bush is still supporting this man. He must not equate
Pakistan with Mr. Musharraf. He should have this friendship with the people
of Pakistan, not with an individual who is becoming more and more unpopular
in the country."
As democracy dies in Pakistan, it casts a pall on the biggest supporter
of this dictatorship -- the United States of America.
--(c) '07 maj
Subject: FW: DICTATORS IN THE EMPIRE'S EMPLOY / COLUMN WRITTEN BY MUMIA
ABU-JAMAL / 18 NOV, 07
From: "Free Mumia"
Date: Mon, November 26, 2007 12:24 am
To: freemumiauk@ gmail.com
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
Dictators in the Empire's Employ
[col. writ. 11/18/07] (c) '07 Mumia Abu-Jamal
With the teeth of the Pakistani dictatorship now bared, we are beginning
to see a mirror image of most of U.S. history throughout the last century.
Although perhaps best seen in the vicious wars of Latin America, it is a
fact that the U.S. government supported brutal, violent dictatorships on
every continent, almost always against popular, and especially workers
movements.
Although most Americans would be hard pressed to actually recall the
names of 4 U.S. backed dictators of the 20th century, it is a safe bet that
the people who tried to survive in those countries will remember them for
the rest of their lives.
From Haiti's infamous Duvaliers, to Cuba's Batista, there were no
dictators too wretched, too violent, too vicious for the U.S. to support.
There's a good reason why when President Lyndon B. Johnson took the Oval
Office after John Kennedy's assassination, he told one of his aides, "We've
been running a damned branch of Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean."*
That's because Washington was essentially internationalizing its program
of repression and McCarthyism, according to at least one Latin American
country. Scholar (and former diplomat) Clara Nieto wrote, in her remarkable
2003 work, Masters of War, the story of how the U.S. got almost the entire
continent to go its way:
At the Tenth Inter-American Conference requested by
{former State Dept. chief John} Dulles
and held in Caracas in 1954, he easily persuaded the
meeting to adopt a declaration
condemning international communism and advocating
hemispheric solidarity and mutual
defense against "Communist aggression." The chancellor
of Guatemala, Guillermo Toriella,
warned that on "the pretext of combating Communism,
fundamental principles of democracy
can be contravened, violations of human rights
justified, and the principle of non-intervention
infringed upon." The declaration, he argued was "the
internationalizatio n of McCarthyism. "
The majority - all dictatorships - supported it;
Argentina (under Peron) voted against it and
Mexico abstained. Costa Rica did not attend the
meeting, since Jose Figueres refused to
participate in this "assembly of dictators in a country
governed by the most brutal and corrupt
of them all, General Perez Jimenez" {C. Nieto,
pp.138-139}.
Thus, generations were subjected to the terrorism of their own
governments, their own armies, paid, and trained by the Americans. These
U.S. trained terrorists launched wars against their own people; students,
teachers, trade unionists, writers, intellectuals, priests, Indians, and
beyond.
Yet, that was then. What now?
Despite all the gas and rap about "freedom", "democracy", and the like,
the U.S. is, once again, depending on a dictator who has essentially shut
down the Supreme Court, whipped lawyers in the streets, waged fraudulent
elections, exiled his political opponents, and ruled with an iron fist. The
differences between Burma and Pakistan could be measured in inches.
Yet, none of this really matters to the White House. What matters is
what has always mattered. That the dictator do the bidding of his imperial
masters - the people be damned.
There's a reason why Latin America has elected predominantly anti
American governments in the past decade, and it had nothing to do with the
easy media fiction that Hugo Chavez made them do it. For millions of
people, they remember the so called 'secret wars' waged by armed puppets of
the Americans-and they want no more of it.
Dictatorship 2 -- Democracy 0.
--(c) '07 maj
*[Source: Nieto, Clara, Masters of War: Latin America and the U.S.
Aggression (From the Cuban Revolution Through the Clinton Years) {New York:
Seven Stories Press, 2003} ]
Who ever said you weren't welcome???
You could have posted the article, making clear what you consider the Bristol/South West relevance to be (i.e: the Bristol Pakistani Community), without also slagging the very website which actually accepts your post!!!
Try posting this on the Evening Post website! Oh, sorry, you can't, they don't accept articles posted from pakistanis, or anyone for that matter.
How often do you see black issues covered here then?
Why dont you see more?
As the western intelligence agencies' candidate it looked like she was going to lose the election in January. What would that say for 'democracy' and the 'war on terror' ?
In my experience Bristol's Pakistani community had no time whatsoever for Bennazir Bhutto and saw her as a continuation of colonial rule.
She was very close with the US republicans / big-business generally, I'd say less an agent, more an asset.
Asif is totally right.
Bristol Indymedia is pretty much a white, middle class, educated ghetto. This is not meant as a personal attack on the people in the BIM collective nor a personal criticism of activists ... but it seems to be true?
Political activism in Bristol is an 'elite privilege' consumed by those with economic power and social access. It is therefore racist.
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto is a huge event with Global impact (and that means in Bristol too!).
Issues like Rat Droppings that confuse Rentokill in the city centre or O2 loosing its mobile phone signal for a couple of hours in the South West seem, well ..... trivial in comparison?
Why hasn't there been at least 10 posts about Benazir's murder on BIM?
All I can say to Asif is that I personally feel ashamed that my Government (which I never voted for) is part of the insanity of the 'War on Terror' that has brought about the murder of Benazir.
We may never know who pulled the trigger but Robert Fisk is clear in today's Independent newspaper that General Musharraf and the ISI were behind her murder. Musharraf is backed by America and Britain so UK Tax payers have Benazir's blood on their hands.
Oh the shame of this!
So perhaps Asif ..... the white middle class people of Bristol tend to ignore the terrible recent event in Pakistan because they are (in part) responsible?
If we allow the present UK regime to stay in power any longer, we too are in part responsible for the acts they carry out in our name? eg: the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the destruction of the environment via Global Warming?
All this is very relevant to the people who live in Bristol and it is our responsibility to take action to end this insanity and end this regime ASAP.
Dear Asif,
May I suggest you study your history a little harder?
Apart from Tony's very astute observation above regarding a strongly held Pakistani community point of view, both the third and forth postings above were written by a black person, i.e. Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Come on Asif - STOP playing the victimised race card. And start fighting Imperial State Murders like Bush and Brown and their bullying supporters.
Firstly, none of the posts on here are specifically white oriented either, but are of relevance to people of all ethnic backgrounds who live in Bristol, unless that is you have such as narrow world view that you can only see issues as relevant if of direct relevance to your own colour.
One of the painful ironies of an excessive attachment to identity politics, is that it does at times seem to result in a self-alienating, self-limiting world view. Secondly, here's just a few recent posts over the last month of a more direct relevance to 'black' or 'non-white' people. Including your own.
http://bristol.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=27196
http://bristol.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=27183
http://bristol.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=27177
http://bristol.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=27159
http://bristol.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=27152
http://bristol.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=27138
http://bristol.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=27132
http://bristol.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=27127
8 posts out of 48 posts of a more direct relevance.
This equals about 17% of posts, compared to the 'non-white' population of Bristol which equals about 20% (as opposed to the national average of about 8% 'non-white'). So, there's a little way to go before BIM becomes proportionately relevant in terms of posts vs population ratios, but it's nearly there, and it is down to those who care about issues to put the effort in to write about them, instead of engaging in a form of consumer driven activism which always seems to leave it to others to do the work.
And I feel would in fact become more relevant more quickly, without the derogatory leaning of posts such as yours which are really spreading misinformation about BIM, and probably do more to put people off posting due to the negative, inaccurate, myth spreading you've engaged in.
It's also a shame that instead of primarily addressing the issues you claim to care about in relation to Pakistan, that you have instead engaged in such inaccurate, and off-putting misrepresentation towards BIM instead.
You remain very welcome, but don't confuse this with thinking that your counter-productive misrepresentations should be be placed above criticism.
but David, aren't you as white and middle class as it gets? please, i really don't need someone like you to patronise me.
I don't only define myself by my colour either, and think that on the whole BIM does a good job of giving a space for anyone who wants to make use of it.
We are subjected to racism every day of our lives here..
Your country became rich by stealing countries and continents in the past.
Your country is rich now because of your enslaving and taxing hundreds of millions of peoples all over the world during colonialism.
Millions died and you are rich today.
Billions are poor all over the world today "post-colonialism"
Thank you so much for allowing me to have a voice here, but remember, this "toy" you call Bristol.indymedia only exists because of what your country did to mine, and many others in the past.
Billions are poor so that you can be rich enough to read this, and to reply here also.
Thanks for everything you have, but know where it came from.
asif - everything you say most people that view this website agree with - britain sucked the life out of every colony it preyed on. But what we say is that this wasnt done to allow us freedom of speech in this country - it was done to benefit the rich elite and forestall a working class revolt in this country.
Included in this elite is jinnah and every other leader pakistan has ever had.
You are taking a nationalist perspective and accusing us of racism, when in fact your perspective is even more racist than ours.
This site mainly reports on direct action - if the community you say you represent starts taking direct action, then there is nothing to stop you posting it here, and getting the same mixture of applause and abuse as every one else.
I for one would love to see that, but all the stuff i see seems to be based on religious lines i.e. rule by yet another elite. Not very appealing to me and most other anti-capitalists i reckon.
Oxford educated law student, Butto Jnr (youngest of the family dynasty) who's hardly ever been in Pakistan,
OR
Military dictator
(Both of which are being manipulated by the american neo-cons)
Which is better? or should I ask least bad?
Surely Asif neither is any good. The sooner people learn to reject politicians and religion the better!
No gods, No masters
Courage in the Crosshairs: Ron Paul and the Republic
by Captain Eric H. May - www.ghosttroop.net Saturday, Dec 29 2007, 8:51pm
bristol / peace / news report
Captain Eric H. May, the Internet intelligence writer, offers fresh insight on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. He poses an all-important question for Americans: if presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul also in the crosshairs?
Courage in the Crosshairs: Ron Paul and the Republic
By Captain Eric H. May
Military Correspondent
Mideast Murder
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." -- Voltaire
Ecclesiastes was right when he wrote that there is nothing new under the sun. The Thursday assassination of Pakistani reformer Benazir Bhutto gives the world a fresh reminder of the old lesson that those who lead the way invite attack. Clearly Bhutto herself was aware of this grim reality, since she had discussed it months earlier in a letter to supporters laying the blame for her possible assassination squarely on the shoulders of Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf.
The devilish details of Bhutto's death have all Pakistan raising hell with a wave of riots that could turn in to a revolution before all is said and done. Her frenzied supporters demand answers to questions that their government does not have the credibility to answer satisfactorily. Where was her security at the fatal moment? Who fired the shots that rang out across the crowd, the pistol waving gunman in grainy photos from the scene or the sniper reported by Bhutto supporters? After being shot and then suicide bombed, why does the official autopsy report released a day later claim that neither bullets nor bombs had anything to do with her death?
Some Middle East experts estimate that two thirds of Pakistanis believe that Musharraf and the corrupt Establishment upholding him were either guilty of committing the Bhutto murder, allowing it it to happen or covering up details after it happened.
Domestic Deadliness
"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will." -- Dick Cheney
All the sound and fury from Southwest Asia would signify nothing in America if the vast majority of Americans believed that the United States of "unitary executive" Bush was fundamentally different from the Pakistan of military dictator Musharraf. The vast majority of Americans, though, believe that the Bush League is capable of any level of mischief. In fact, the two thirds of us who detest him also believe that Bush and the corrupt Establishment upholding him were either guilty of committing the 9/11 mass murder, allowing it it to happen or covering up details after it happened.
In these troubled days, it is quite credible to innumerable US citizens that we have been neoconned into standing our republic on its head. The new millennium was dubbed the New American Century by Ivy League Bush Boyz and Israel-first Zionazis, then on 9/11 -- the date number coinciding with our national emergency code -- a manufactured terror spectacular began a counterrevolution against our Declaration and Constitution. Our new King George established secret prisons, torture chambers and imperial wars, while snatching away civil rights all the way back to Magna Carta.
To a sizable chunk of the American electorate, the radical analysis in the paragraph above seems to be a fair exposition of our current political crisis, and the inability of such views -- or indeed of any anti-establishmentarian views -- to find expression in the mainstream media is just so much more proof that the System is flawed, the Establishment is inimical and the New American Century has always been a Bush League codeword for a dictatorial New World Order.
Paul's Peril
"I think we're at a point right now where they're still hoping I will go away, but the fact that they've started to attack me means that we are annoying them." -- Ron Paul
Since 9/11, the Internet has become the printing press of the Second American Revolution, fearlessly exploring issues that would never receive the imprimatur of the Globalist/Zionist mainstream media, political parties or apathetic academics. Its power is so unsettling to the elites and their pet projects of the Homeland State and Global War that in recent months the House and Senate have declared war upon it as an instrument of homegrown terror.
To the elites the most dreadful of all netizens is Dr. Ron Paul, the 10-term independent Republican from Texas, whose bread and butter as a presidential candidate is the freethinking Internet user. Paul has boldly proclaimed his presidential bid "The Ron Paul Revolution," and lived up to this billing by proposing the abolition of Homeland Security and the Global War. He envisions and proclaims vastly increased individual liberty and vastly reduced taxation. Organized efforts by the mainstream media to restrict or ridicule his message have only made it and his political base grow larger. He has been dubbed "Dr. No" for his prescription of less government to heal our sickly body politic, and there is a real possibility that untold millions of Americans will say yes to Dr. No in the upcoming state primaries.
To end where I began, there is nothing new under the sun, and those who propose radical treatments for radical maladies should be aware of that fact. To give credit and praise when and where it is due, Dr. No has spoken publicly on the dangers of his reformist -- even revolutionary -- candidacy, and pledged to continue forward. The Internet has been abuzz for weeks with rumors, reputedly from inside the American power elite, of considerations and contingencies to "remove" the candidate and candidacy that threaten to roll back the 9/11 counterrevolution. Across the World Wide Web those who long for a return to freedom remind themselves that the last candidate to endanger the powers that be as much as Ron Paul was Ross Perot, who temporarily abandoned his bid for the White House in 1992, claiming that an earlier King George Bush -- father of the present King George Bush -- had threatened him and his family with the CIA. As Ross Perot and Benazir Bhutto would agree, running for office can be a harrowing experience, one from which those without the courage of conviction would simply run away.
# # #
Captain May is a former Army military intelligence and public affairs officer, as well as a former NBC editorial writer. His political and military analyses have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Houston Chronicle and Military Intelligence Magazine. For his homepage and schedule of upcoming interviews, refer to:
http://www.spiritone.com/~pazuu/pow-mia/Ghost_Troop_Captain_Eric_H_May.htm
The Destabilization of Pakistan
Michel Chossudovsky | 01.01.2008 12:02 | Anti-militarism | Repression | Terror War | World
This US agenda for Pakistan is similar to that applied throughout the broader Middle East Central Asian region. US strategy, supported by covert intelligence operations, consists in triggering ethnic and religious strife, abetting and financing secessionist movements while also weakening the institutions of the central government.
The broader objective is to fracture the Nation State and redraw the borders of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Baloch population in pink - In Iran, Pakistan and Southern Afghanistan
Baloch population in pink - In Iran, Pakistan and Southern Afghanistan
map of 'The New Middle East'
map of 'The New Middle East'
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto has created conditions which contribute to the ongoing destabilization and fragmentation of Pakistan as a Nation.
The process of US sponsored "regime change", which normally consists in the re-formation of a fresh proxy government under new leaders has been broken. Discredited in the eyes of Pakistani public opinion, General Pervez Musharaf cannot remain in the seat of political power. But at the same time, the fake elections supported by the "international community" scheduled for January 2008, even if they were to be carried out, would not be accepted as legitimate, thereby creating a political impasse.
There are indications that the assassination of Benazir Bhutto was anticipated by US officials:
"It has been known for months that the Bush-Cheney administration and its allies have been maneuvering to strengthen their political control of Pakistan, paving the way for the expansion and deepening of the “war on terrorism” across the region.
Various American destabilization plans, known for months by officials and analysts, proposed the toppling of Pakistan's military...
The assassination of Bhutto appears to have been anticipated. There were even reports of “chatter” among US officials about the possible assassinations of either Pervez Musharraf or Benazir Bhutto, well before the actual attempts took place. (Larry Chin, Global Research, 29 December 2007) [1]
Political Impasse
"Regime change" with a view to ensuring continuity under military rule is no longer the main thrust of US foreign policy. The regime of Pervez Musharraf cannot prevail. Washington's foreign policy course is to actively promote the political fragmentation and balkanization of Pakistan as a nation.
A new political leadership is anticipated but in all likelihood it will take on a very different shape, in relation to previous US sponsored regimes. One can expect that Washington will push for a compliant political leadership, with no commitment to the national interest, a leadership which will serve US imperial interests, while concurrently contributing under the disguise of "decentralization", to the weakening of the central government and the fracture of Pakistan's fragile federal structure.
The political impasse is deliberate. It is part of an evolving US foreign policy agenda, which favors disruption and disarray in the structures of the Pakistani State. Indirect rule by the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus is to be replaced by more direct forms of US interference, including an expanded US military presence inside Pakistan.
This expanded military presence is also dictated by the Middle East-Central Asia geopolitical situation and Washington's ongoing plans to extend the Middle East war to a much broader area.
The US has several military bases in Pakistan. It controls the country's air space. According to a recent report: "U.S. Special Forces are expected to vastly expand their presence in Pakistan, as part of an effort to train and support indigenous counter-insurgency forces and clandestine counterterrorism units" (William Arkin, Washington Post, December 2007).
The official justification and pretext for an increased military presence in Pakistan is to extend the "war on terrorism". Concurrently, to justify its counterrorism program, Washington is also beefing up its covert support to the "terrorists."
The Balkanization of Pakistan
Already in 2005, a report by the US National Intelligence Council and the CIA forecast a "Yugoslav-like fate" for Pakistan "in a decade with the country riven by civil war, bloodshed and inter-provincial rivalries, as seen recently in Balochistan." (Energy Compass, 2 March 2005). According to the NIC-CIA, Pakistan is slated to become a "failed state" by 2015, "as it would be affected by civil war, complete Talibanisation and struggle for control of its nuclear weapons". (Quoted by former Pakistan High Commissioner to UK, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Times of India, 13 February 2005):
"Nascent democratic reforms will produce little change in the face of opposition from an entrenched political elite and radical Islamic parties. In a climate of continuing domestic turmoil, the Central government's control probably will be reduced to the Punjabi heartland and the economic hub of Karachi," the former diplomat quoted the NIC-CIA report as saying.
Expressing apprehension, Hasan asked, "are our military rulers working on a similar agenda or something that has been laid out for them in the various assessment reports over the years by the National Intelligence Council in joint collaboration with CIA?" (Ibid)
Continuity, characterized by the dominant role of the Pakistani military and intelligence has been scrapped in favor of political breakup and balkanization.
According to the NIC-CIA scenario, which Washington intends to carry out: "Pakistan will not recover easily from decades of political and economic mismanagement, divisive policies, lawlessness, corruption and ethnic friction," (Ibid) .
The US course consists in fomenting social, ethnic and factional divisions and political fragmentation, including the territorial breakup of Pakistan. This course of action is also dictated by US war plans in relation to both Afghanistan and Iran.
This US agenda for Pakistan is similar to that applied throughout the broader Middle East Central Asian region. US strategy, supported by covert intelligence operations, consists in triggering ethnic and religious strife, abetting and financing secessionist movements while also weakening the institutions of the central government.
The broader objective is to fracture the Nation State and redraw the borders of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Pakistan's Oil and Gas reserves
Pakistan's extensive oil and gas reserves, largely located in Balochistan province, as well as its pipeline corridors are considered strategic by the Anglo-American alliance, requiring the concurrent militarization of Pakistani territory.
Balochistan comprises more than 40 percent of Pakistan's land mass, possesses important reserves of oil and natural gas as well as extensive mineral resources.
The Iran-India pipeline corridor is slated to transit through Balochistan. Balochistan also possesses a deap sea port largely financed by China located at Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea, not far from the Straits of Hormuz where 30 % of the world's daily oil supply moves by ship or pipeline. (Asia News.it, 29 December 2007)
Pakistan has an estimated 25.1 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of proven gas reserves of which 19 trillion are located in Balochistan. Among foreign oil and gas contractors in Balochistan are BP, Italy's ENI, Austria's OMV, and Australia's BHP. It is worth noting that Pakistan's State oil and gas companies, including PPL which has the largest stake in the Sui oil fields of Balochistan are up for privatization under IMF-World Bank supervision.
According to the Oil and Gas Journal (OGJ), Pakistan had proven oil reserves of 300 million barrels, most of which are located in Balochistan. Other estimates place Balochistan oil reserves at an estimated six trillion barrels of oil reserves both on-shore and off-shore (Environment News Service, 27 October 2006). [2]
Covert Support to Balochistan Separatists
Balochistan's strategic energy reserves have a bearing on the separatist agenda. Following a familiar pattern, there are indications that the Baloch insurgency is being supported and abetted by Britain and the US.
The Balochi national resistance movement dates back to the late 1940s, when Balochistan was invaded by Pakistan. In the current geopolitical context, the separatist movement is in the process of being hijacked by foreign powers.
British intelligence is allegedly providing covert support to Balochistan separatists (which from the outset have been repressed by Pakistan's military). In June 2006, Pakistan's Senate Committee on Defence accused British intelligence of "abetting the insurgency in the province bordering Iran" [Balochistan]..(Press Trust of India, 9 August 2006). Ten British MPs were involved in a closed door session of the Senate Committe on Defence regarding the alleged support of Britain's Secret Service to Balcoh separatists (Ibid).
It would appear that Britain and the US are supporting both sides. The US is providing American F-16 jets to Pakistan, which are being used to bomb Baloch villages in Balochistan. Meanwhile, British alleged covert support (according to the Pakistani by Senate Committee) contributes to weakening the central government.
The stated purpose of US counter-terrorism is to provide covert support as well as as training to "Liberation Armies" ultimately with a view to destabilizing sovereign governments. In Kosovo, the training of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the 1990s had been entrusted to a private mercenary company, Military Professional Resources Inc (MPRI), on contract to the Pentagon.
The BLA bears a canny resemblance to Kosovo's KLA, which was financed by the drug trade and supported by the CIA and Germany's Bundes Nachrichten Dienst (BND).
The BLA emerged shortly after the 1999 military coup. It has no tangible links to the Baloch resistance movement, which developed since the late 1940s. An aura of mystery surrounds the leadership of the BLA.
Washington favors the creation of a "Greater Balochistan" which would integrate the Baloch areas of Pakistan with those of Iran and possibly the Southern tip of Afghanistan (See Map above), thereby leading to a process of political fracturing in both Iran and Pakistan.
"The US is using Balochi nationalism for staging an insurgency inside Iran's Sistan-Balochistan province. The 'war on terror' in Afghanistan gives a useful political backdrop for the ascendancy of Balochi militancy" (See Global Research, 6 March 2007). [3]
Military scholar Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters writing in the June 2006 issue of The Armed Forces Journal, suggests, in no uncertain terms that Pakistan should be broken up, leading to the formation of a separate country: "Greater Balochistan" or "Free Balochistan" (see Map below). The latter would incorporate the Pakistani and Iranian Baloch provinces into a single political entity.
In turn, according to Peters, Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) should be incorporated into Afghanistan "because of its linguistic and ethnic affinity".
Although the map does not officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a training program at NATO's Defense College for senior military officers. This map, as well as other similar maps, have most probably been used at the National War Academy as well as in military planning circles. (See Mahdi D. Nazemroaya, Global Research, 18 November 2006) [4]
"Lieutenant-Colonel Peters was last posted, before he retired to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, within the U.S. Defence Department, and has been one of the Pentagon’s foremost authors with numerous essays on strategy for military journals and U.S. foreign policy." (Ibid)
It is worth noting that secessionist tendencies are not limited to Balochistan. There are separatist groups in Sindh province, which are largely based on opposition to the Punjabi-dominated military regime of General Pervez Musharraf (For Further details see Selig Harrisson, Le Monde diplomatique, October 2006) [5]
"Strong Economic Medicine": Weakening Pakistan's Central Government
Pakistan has a federal structure based on federal provincial transfers. Under a federal fiscal structure, the central government transfers financial resources to the provinces, with a view to supporting provincial based programs. When these transfers are frozen as occurred in Yugoslavia in January 1990, on orders of the IMF, the federal fiscal structure collapses:
"State revenues that should have gone as transfer payments to the republics [of the Yugoslav federation] went instead to service Belgrade's debt ... . The republics were largely left to their own devices. ... The budget cuts requiring the redirection of federal revenues towards debt servicing, were conducive to the suspension of transfer payments by Belgrade to the governments of the Republics and Autonomous Provinces.
In one fell swoop, the reformers had engineered the final collapse of Yugoslavia's federal fiscal structure and mortally wounded its federal political institutions. By cutting the financial arteries between Belgrade and the republics, the reforms fueled secessionist tendencies that fed on economic factors as well as ethnic divisions, virtually ensuring the de facto secession of the republics. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, Second Edition, Global Research, Montreal, 2003, Chapter 17.)
It is by no means accidental that the 2005 National Intelligence Council- CIA report had predicted a "Yugoslav-like fate" for Pakistan pointing to the impacts of "economic mismanagement" as one of the causes of political break-up and balkanization.
"Economic mismanagement" is a term used by the Washington based international financial institutions to describe the chaos which results from not fully abiding by the IMF's Structural Adjustment Program. In actual fact, the "economic mismanagement" and chaos is the outcome of IMF-World Bank prescriptions, which invariably trigger hyperinflation and precipitate indebted countries into extreme poverty.
Pakistan has been subjected to the same deadly IMF "economic medicine" as Yugoslavia: In 1999, in the immediate wake of the coup d'Etat which brought General Pervez Musharaf to the helm of the military government, an IMF economic package, which included currency devaluation and drastic austerity measures, was imposed on Pakistan. Pakistan's external debt is of the order of US$40 billion. The IMF's "debt reduction" under the package was conditional upon the sell-off to foreign capital of the most profitable State owned enterprises (including the oil and gas facilities in Balochistan) at rockbottom prices .
Musharaf's Finance Minister was chosen by Wall Street, which is not an unusual practice. The military rulers appointed at Wall Street's behest, a vice-president of Citigroup, Shaukat Aziz, who at the time was head of CitiGroup's Global Private Banking. (See WSWS.org, 30 October 1999). [6] CitiGroup is among the largest commercial foreign banking institutions in Pakistan.
There are obvious similarities in the nature of US covert intelligence operations applied in country after country in different parts of the so-called "developing World". These covert operation, including the organisation of military coups, are often synchronized with the imposition of IMF-World Bank macro-economic reforms. In this regard, Yugoslavia's federal fiscal structure collapsed in 1990 leading to mass poverty and heightened ethnic and social divisions. The US and NATO sponsored "civil war" launched in mid-1991 consisted in coveting Islamic groups as well as channeling covert support to separatist paramilitary armies in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia.
A similar "civil war" scenario has been envisaged for Pakistan by the National Intelligence Council and the CIA: From the point of view of US intelligence, which has a longstanding experience in abetting separatist "liberation armies", "Greater Albania" is to Kosovo what "Greater Balochistan" is to Pakistan's Southeastern Balochistan province. Similarly, the KLA is Washington's chosen model, to be replicated in Balochistan province.
The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto
Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi, no ordinary city. Rawalpindi is a military city host to the headquarters of the Pakistani Armed Forces and Military Intelligence (ISI). Ironically Bhutto was assassinated in an urban area tightly controlled and guarded by the military police and the country's elite forces. Rawalpindi is swarming with ISI intelligence officials, which invariably infiltrate political rallies. Her assassination was not a haphazard event.
Without evidence, quoting Pakistan government sources, the Western media in chorus has highlighted the role of Al-Qaeda, while also focusing on the the possible involvement of the ISI.
What these interpretations do not mention is that the ISI continues to play a key role in overseeing Al Qaeda on behalf of US intelligence. The press reports fail to mention two important and well documented facts:
1) the ISI maintains close ties to the CIA. The ISI is virtually an appendage of the CIA.
2) Al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA. The ISI provides covert support to Al Qaeda, acting on behalf of US intelligence.
The involvement of either Al Qaeda and/or the ISI would suggest that US intelligence was cognizant and/or implicated in the assassination plot.
---------------------------
References:
[1] http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7699
[2] http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2006/2006-10-27-insmus.asp
[3] http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5003
[4] http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=3882
[5] http://mondediplo.com/2006/10/05baluchistan
[6] http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/oct1999/pak-o30.shtml
Michel Chossudovsky
- Homepage: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7705
I never said that I was about religion or politics, why do some of you insist on putting words into the mouths of others?
If I say one thing, why do you ASSUME I said something completely different?
Are Bristols activists capable of differentiating between the wood and the trees?
Asif
Using the mistakes of history is not a valid reason to hate or claim that you are being persecuted.
Yes the British Empire did some despicable things, but so did the Nazi's, and yet we all get along well with the Germans now. If we all held historical grudges like you where will it all end? Should we demand some kind of reparation from Norway because as Vikings they attacked us in the past?
No of course not. And bleating about the past from your rather twisted perspective is also just as silly.
And yet you want to play the race card based on something out of history. Have a look at the "Dispatches" program on the More 4 Channel at 10:00pm tonight "Undercover Mosque" - I have seen it before and it is truly shocking.
This documentary became a cause celebre earlier in 2007 when the West Midlands Police tried to ban it claiming that the program had misrepresented the Muslim preachers.
However after investigating the independent watchdog OFCOM concluded that it had not.
The extreme views expressed are chilling and demonstrate clearly that sexism, racism and bigotry are being preached in certain Mosques. I am proud of the multicultural Britain that I live in and want it to prosper. But that means we must all put away our prejudice – even you.
Its ok folks, Scotland Yard to the rescue, Musharraf will get off on a Health and Safety technicality, a la Jean Charles de Meneses.
Replying to Clive Hammond's comments, we shouldn't bear grudges, as he rightly points out.
But it is to be hoped that present day society is allowed to look fairly at what is happening in Pakistan, Palestine and Iraq, and comment on it with out being accused of bearing grudges.
Maybe he too would seek solace where he could find it, justice even, if his place were to be demolished by a powerful lawless gangster and a pack of rotweillers.
To accuse muslim people of "bleating" while we are in the process of blowing them to kingdom-come follows your usual pattern of over-bearing bigotry. An attitude which got us into this mess in the first place and common amongst politicians as they sit in their plush leather seats of Westminster Palace, far removed from cluster-bombs and depleted uranium.
How about a tad of empathy for the victims of our bombing campaigns which, incidentally, were cooked up by the West's very own couple of christian fanatics. Their actions have damaged our world immeasurably, far more than the muslims who have been driven over the edge by them, ever will.
So Hammond, WHY are there no Pakistani's communicating with you here then?
Perhaps it is because they see your bleeding heart liberalism for what it is?
Some of us do more to integrate than pontificate about past guilts.
You really, REALLY do need to get out more!
Whilst food-shopping yesterday at my local Asian corner-shop, in downtown, inner-city, muti-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and pretty well integrated St.Pauls, I quickly scanned the magazine rack looking for some reading material. I noticed that the front cover of The Economist (5 Jan 2008) had a photo of a hand-grenade with 'Pakistan' and that countrys flag on it, The headline : 'Pakistan, The worlds most dangerous place'
It got me to thinking, about what the word extremist means, and why does anybody become 'extreme' any - thing.
I resisted the temptation to give my hard-earned pennies to the Asian shopkeeper and buy the Economist magazine, but I was intrigued by that graphic and its power, but I am not a fan of the Economist.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10430237
Personally I am not persuaded that if a capitalist - commercial TV programme shows me a programme about 'Extremist islam' that I should believe everything it shows.
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/dispatches/undercover+mosque/158390
Or even that I should swallow any alternative perspective unthinkingly.
http://www.sacc.org.uk/index.php?catid=10&id=350&option=content&task=view
Which is 'true-er'......... the channel 4 programs take, or the SACC perspective?
A matter of perception possibly, but how are perceptions formed?
In an attempt to know and understand the truth of any matter, I feel it important to ask at least a few questions
After nine-eleven, some americans actually asked the question, 'Why do they hate us so?
What do Pakistanis think? http://fanonite.org/2008/01/07/pakistanis-see-us-as-greatest-threat/
What does the CIA Yearbook say?
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/pk.html
What does the New Internationalist say? http://www.newint.org/columns/country/2006/03/01/pakistan/
What is Extreme Intelligence?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8085945499556832271
http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/DeadlyDeceits.html
What are the CIA etc. doing in Pakistan today and why?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/01/06/2132569.htm
How ARE opinions and perceptions and beliefs formed?
Perhaps you would do better to watch less commercial TV, and ask a few more questions instead Mr Hammond.
If Mr. Hammond would really like to learn the truth, and write an article for www.bristol.indymedia.org I will happily contribute to his expenses incurred while researching the truth of the matter.
I will contribute £50 to the fund started here and now to send 'green' Mr Hammond on his bycycle overland to Pakistan to research an article on "Extremism" - this is a genuine offer Mr Hammond,
BIM does not log any ip or isp details due to this being a journalistic site intended to protect the identities of those posting news articles to this site.
If this thread continues in this off-topic vein, all previous and future off-topic posts will now be hidden. All contributors should have a little more respect for the intended discussion of the opening article. Comments will be hidden in accordance with the respect guideline.
http://bristol.indymedia.org/editorial.php
Thanks for that BIM, nice one!
Exellent vid Asif mate, I thought I knew about what the CIA gets up to in the name of US National Securty, but it was a real eye-opener.
Coincidently as I was buying some bananas in Sonni's - [the indian shop] on Mina Road, I noticed the latest edition of the New Statesman front cover with PAKISTAN PLOT emblazoned on the cover, with WHY THE SPIES KILLED BHUTTO underneath.
See - http://www.newstatesman.com/contents
I do not know which SPIES they are talking about, ISI or CIA, I've not had time to read it yet!
Watch that CIA vid people, its real spooky!
PNAC ROCKS, or do I mean PNAC destabilises?
Mell O x
Some good points made on this thread, I have always believed that socialism / communism in the past, and 'radical' or 'extreme' Islam is basically nothing more than a reaction against extreme greed and exploitation by the colonisers and extremist capitalists over the last 500 years.
How deeply extremist capitalism has conned and blinded us to its brutal reality is illustrated very well by something that happened in Nigeria recently.
A 'Shell' pipeline carrying petrol from and through Ogoni land was punctured by some of the local people who could not afford to pay for their own fuel, the fuel ignited and 200 plus locals were killed.
How did the BBC report this awfull tragedy?
The BBC reported that the 200+ Nigerians died as they were STEALING petrol from the pipeline!
People in this country are ignorant of the worlds realities, and are blinded by lies from politicians, the media, and corporations, whose whole reason for existance is to greedily exploit people/s and 'resources' for profit.
TRICKLE DOWN economics whereby the poorest in the world are supposed to benefit from globalisation is a big business and media lie, for centuries now there has been massive wealth FLOODING UP from the southern hemisphere into the northern hemisphere,
EXTREMIST CAPITALISTS greed is what caused the reaction amongst 'radical' muslims, (and many others) that have turned, or are turning towards it and socialism etc, and which our media now likes to call extremists.
We have a media, and a government, and an economic system which thinks it can exploit people and planet forever without consequences to the environment / climate, or resistance from the people who have been exploited and suffering for centuries, they ARE angry, and they ARE resisting.
We may not like it, but we should not be surprised by it, and we need to understand the reality of the present tensions caused by extremist capitalism and its effects and motivations.
Shell oil in Nigeria played a crucial role in Ken Saro Wiwa's execution, the greedy murderous bastards.
"'radical' or 'extreme' Islam is basically nothing more than a reaction against extreme greed and exploitation by the colonisers and extremist capitalists over the last 500 years"
Islamism is a lot more than that. It is a dangerously illiberal and reactionary ideology with its own culture, history and scholarship stretching back over 100 years.
The idea that it is just some short term and contingent reaction to the west is a dangerous misreading of the situation.
It's a bit like saying Nazism was nothing more than an understandable reaction to the Treaty of Versailles.
I totally agree with Anarchist Bob on this point:-
by Anarchist Bob Wednesday, Jan 9 2008, 9:39am
"'radical' or 'extreme' Islam is basically nothing more than a reaction against extreme greed and exploitation by the colonisers and extremist capitalists over the last 500 years"
Islamism is a lot more than that. It is a dangerously illiberal and reactionary ideology with its own culture, history and scholarship stretching back over 100 years.
The idea that it is just some short term and contingent reaction to the west is a dangerous misreading of the situation.
It's a bit like saying Nazism was nothing more than an understandable reaction to the Treaty of Versailles.
Imperialism, greed, our government lying us into war so that the arms trade flourishes. Absolutely no morals so that even the heads of our churches are tainted, these are the reasons why capitalism is an abomination to the human race. Capitalism is the driving force of the "rich against the poor wars", which we are now witnessing around the world.
‘It’s Madness’ by Felicity Arbuthnot
Posted on December 23, 2007 by dandelionsalad
Dandelion Salad
by Felicity Arbuthnot
Global Research, December 22, 2007
If the scale of the unimaginable tragedy the British have wrought in Basra was not of the historical enormity which it is and for which the UK will never be forgotten and likely, never forgiven, world wide (only second to the Americans, of whose accountability for unspeakable atrocities, words temporarily fail) with Prime Minister Gordon Brown again trying to dress up defeat as victory, as the British ‘left’ the city last week, it would be laughable. The British actually slunk off from their illegally inhabited palace in central Basra in September, to cower in a base well outside the town, spent, redundant and now with the loss of one hundred and seventy four tragically wasted lives, for UK government lies. Ironically, Iraqi women were photographed throwing sweets at the Iraq forces on December 16th’s Sunday ‘handover’ of the Iraqi city to Iraqis. The sweets and flowers promised by the CIA backed, convicted embezzler, Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraq National Accord’s Iyad Allawi to the invaders, transpired, absolutely predictably, to be rocket propelled and hand grenades, improvised explosive devices and ambush by varied imaginative booby traps and weaponry.
Gordon Brown, of course, again announced a troop draw down on 8th October this year, after they had (also predictably) lost Basra and already left. There is something about ‘October surprises’ that herald disasters. An early spectacular British defeat was the Charge of the Light Brigade on 25th October 1854, an ill conceived maneuver at Balaclava in Russia during the Crimean war, with the losses leading the Russians to speculate that the troops must have been drunk to have contemplated such a move. It was a black day for Commanders and politicians too, the ‘Basra’ of the Eastern front, an adventure of which French Marshall Pierre Bosquet commented: ‘C’est de la folie’ (’it’s madness’.)
In context, should anyone doubt the absolute disregard of parliamentary ‘democracies’ for the lives of their own citizens, yet alone other humanities, expendable for oil, gas pipelines, minerals, metals, gemstones, one only has to consider yet another October stunt. On the weekend of October 18-19, 1980, a former and future CIA head, met with Iranian officials in Paris. In an act of treason (US private citizens negotiating with a foreign government without official authorization) with calculated, cold, callous ruthlessness, the pair cut a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini’s clerics, to ensure that the fifty two American hostages held in Tehran, stayed hostage until after the upcoming election between President Jimmy Carter and Republican challenger Ronald Reagan. The Americans in question were George Herbert Walker Bush, the former CIA Director and William Casey, the future one.
‘The Republicans were terrified of an October Surprise–a move by the Carter government to free the hostages before the vote. So Bush (who became) Reagan’s vice-presidential candidate–and Casey were dispatched to Paris to offer the Iranians a covert deal to keep the Americans in chains until Reagan was safely in office. The proposed payoff? A newly-elected Reagan-Bush administration would supply Khomeini’s military with a secret supply of American weapons.’ (See: ‘Speak Memory’, Chris Floyd, Counterpunch, 9th September 2002.)
Another cynically manipulated October occurrence was Iraq’s 2002 referendum, where Saddam, predictably, garnered little short of 100% of the votes, in his favor. The American and British administrations notched it up as another reason for regime change, these people needed liberation from questionable vote manipulation. No one should know better about alleged vote fixing than the Bush administration, from dimpled chads, to excluded likely Democrat voters, to accusations of eminently adjustable vote counting machines. In post-invasion Iraq they turned it in to a murderous art form, with death threats, ration coupons confiscation and no potentially murderous or otherwise, manipulation barred, to get their puppet ‘government’ voted in.
So what October surprises have the British left for the people of Basra? The ancient, battered, but still heart-wrenchingly beautiful (B.C., - Before ‘Crusade’) ‘Venice of the Middle East’? They have left rubble where homes and historic buildings nurtured and were nurtured , by successive generations. They have left broken doors, windows and walls, kicked down or blown in on raids on families sleeping in their beds. They have left broken hearts and lives.
The have left fundamentalist militias they either brought in with them, or against whom they failed to control the borders (and then blamed the Iraqis.) They have confined women to their homes at best and to death, often by beheading, for even wearing makeup, at worst. Britain’s finest have returned secular women to the equivalent of the burkha they were so keen to free them of in Afghanistan (nonsense of course, it was about strategic interests and a gas pipeline.) They have taken a town, where the worst harassment a woman walking alone, through streets, by the canals, or the beauty of the Shatt Al Arab would suffer, was small, bare foot boys, selling dates, citrus fruits, sweets, who stuck like glue until they had beguilingly somehow persuaded you to buy the whole lot (then they would be back with more.) The embargo’s children, providing for their families, instead of aiming to be top of the class. Britain and America’s victims.
‘I came to rid Basra of its enemies, and I now formally hand Basra back to its friends,’ Britain’s Major General Graham Binns said, before signing documents giving Iraqi forces operational control of the province, which holds most of Iraq’s proven petroleum reserves. Before Britain’s invasion , Basra had few ‘enemies’, just the sort of policing issues found in any city. He has handed it, in fact, also to police and security forces riddled with Basra’s enemies. The British being unable to speak the language, culturally clueless, know not from where their recruits have come -or if they are even Iraqis at all. They have ‘handed back’ their rubble and mass graves, in a city bleeding from lack of essential services, its children seeping away from malnutrition and lethal diseases resultant from the killer water supply the British army has left them with. Seldom has: ‘We gave them a wasteland and called it peace’, been more appropriate.
No better example of British depthless floundering , was fellow speaker, Muwaffaq Al Rubaie, Iraq’s ‘government security advisor’. ‘The security of Basra is one of our main responsibilities. I address, directly, the governor, the general commander of the security forces in Basra, the provincial council and the people of Basra. Will you agree with militias? Will you engage in corruption? Will you go easy on terrorism?’ Asked Rubaie. Thus under the nose of and with General Binns, was speaking the man many respected Iraqi and Middle East experts allege is actually Karim Shaboori, an Iranian, who came in with the invaders and changed his name and acquired himself an Iraqi passport to which he has, allegedly, no entitlement. If correct, stones and glasshouses, again come to mind.
So unphased by the lynching of Iraq’s legitimate President and the horrifying scenes around his body, Rubaie/Shaboori responded: ‘This is the tradition of the Iraqis - when they do something they dance around the body and they express their feelings’ - a ‘ tradition’ no Iraqi seems to be aware of. Does General Binns know that Iraqis joke that the dominant language in the ‘Iraqi Ministries’ in the Green Zone is Farsi (and indeed say many Iraqis, in their Embassies abroad, along with Kurdish, not Arabic.)
The British stole even the myths and legends from Basra. They took the city known to children world wide, as from where Sinbad left for his magical journeys and named a killing spree on the population (dressed in press briefings as a ’security crackdown’) as: ‘Operation Sinbad’. They are now illegally inhabiting the airport, of which the city was so proud, when they had rebuilt it, opening again in 2000. Hope returned. The British and Americans of course, bombed it, but damage was repaired within days, to be bombed, repaired again … Having subsequently destroyed homes, history, lives, ‘our boys’ are now again doubles ‘restructuring’ the airport.
What else has Britain’s illegal invasion and occupation contributed to? A snapshot : 2.4 million internally displaced; 2.2 million fled (UNHCR) 1.1 million dead (Just Foreign Policy) 3 million wounded (’a conservative estimate’) 4 million in need of emergency aid (ICRC) 5 million orphans (Iraqi ‘government’ figures.) As the tireless Dahr Jamail writes: ‘Iraq’s population at the time of the US invasion in March 2003 was roughly 27 million and today it is approximately 23 million. Elementary arithmetic indicates that currently over half the population of Iraq are either refugees, in need of emergency aid, wounded, or dead.’ Is this genocide, a holocaust, deliberate de-population, or will the usual suspects just mess around with semantics? ‘What we have done in Iraq, are tears in the fabric of history’, comments Hussein Al Alak of the (UK) Iraq Solidarity Campaign.
Basra’s dead have been hard to enumerate (but then the British, historically, were always better at keeping the lid on atrocities for a while. Not ‘Perfidious Albion’ for nothing.) However, Iraq ‘government’ figures, in a rare glimpse, revealed in May 2006, that the previous month, under British Army watch, one person had died violently every hour. The killing after April 2006, certainly did not miraculously stop. How many have the British disappeared, how many are still in British custody, how many have died in British custody - and how many, in the ‘hardback’, have been handed over to those who will drill their heads and chuck them in to the garbage? Figures are, to say the least, elusive.
There have been a number of kidnappings (including ones the West noticed, like Margaret Hassan and Ken Bigley. Iraqi ones, shamefully, rarely are, in their uncountable numbers) where the request has been to release Iraqi women prisoners (usually held by the occupiers as a bargaining chip for men in the family - totally illegally.) The word was that, as the US denied they held any women , they had in fact transferred them to British custody in Basra. Still, as yet, impossible to prove or disprove. When I heard the story denied by Anthony Charles Lyndon Blair QC., however, I thought again of MP George Galloway, who recounted, as a little boy in Glasgow, running home to tell his Father excitedly: ‘Dad, Dad, my teacher says “the sun will never set on the British Empire”. ‘
‘Aye, son’, said his father: ‘That’s because God would never trust the British in the dark’.
Meanwhile, Ann Clywd MP (who for years has been dubbed ‘Mrs. Talabani’ by many) Blair’s formerly silent ‘human rights’ advisor on Iraq, said this week that she was ‘right to support the war’ to rid the country of brutality. Is she psychologically challenged., or just delusional.? However, as founder of the CIA funded INDICT (launched in the House of Parliament) and a close friend of the embezzler Ahmed Chalabi, who fed fairy tales of non-existent weapons of mass destruction to the British government, the words culpability and duplicity come to mind regarding Ms Clywd.
As George Orwell (real name : Eric Arthur Blair) spins in his grave, the other Blair is reinvented as ‘Middle East Peace Envoy’ and reiterates he has no regrets. He knows ‘it was the right thing to do,’ and ‘I’d do the same thing again’. The terminal patients that are Gaza and Iraq, the threats to the rest of the region, the misery and torment heaped on the region’s humanity, have taken second place to his finding time to appear in a Christmas video with Barney, George Bush’s dog, once described as the only sane being in the White House. It shouldn’t happen to a dog. And sorry for the pun, but is - as many have speculated for a long while - Blair truly ‘barking’?
The joys of Eid Al Adha escaped Basra and Gaza. The Chaldean Bishop of Basra has ‘cancelled’ Christmas, as has happened throughout Iraq (with the Eids) for many years now. How can we celebrate amid such death, destruction, deprivation, misery, fear and poverty? he asked.
In a BBC Panorama programme, aired on 17th December, the night before Eid Al Ahda, presenter Jane Corbyn asked a woman in Basra, who had returned to Iraq after thirty years, after the fall of Saddam Hussein: ‘What have the British left you?’
‘Nothing’, she replied : ‘Just misery.’
And in a December surprise, three days before Christmas and little over a week to the anniversary of the lynching of Iraq’s legitimate President, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, QC., has announced his conversion to Catholicism. He was received into the Church by the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O-Connor. Having morally bankrupted the Palace of Westminster, he has now done the same to its Cathedral. Hope they have enough cleaning staff to wipe the blood from his hands off the church furniture after his visits. As former Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray remarked: ‘Perhaps the Catholic church has a dearth of mass murderers in their congregation.’ It is all ‘madness’.
An interesting debate.
The Bristol Respect Coalition is hosting a forum entitled;
Pakistan at the Crossroads: The war on terror and the Fight for Democracy
Saturday 2nd February, 2.30pm
Easton Community Centre
Speakers: Yuri Prasad (Respect Coalition)
Amer Salman (Bangladesh Association - personal capacity)
Farooq Saddique (Bristol Muslim Cultural Society - personal capacity)
All welcome.
IRIN is an excellent source of information for those who care and like to think global.
We previously stated: "If this thread continues in this off-topic vein, all previous and future off-topic posts will now be hidden. All contributors should have a little more respect for the intended discussion of the opening article. Comments will be hidden in accordance with the respect guideline. http://bristol.indymedia.org/editorial.php"
Unfortunately off-topic threads and personal attacks that breach the respect guideline have continued. Therefore posts in this vein have now been, and will continue to be, hidden.
....for seeing the relevance to capitalism of Felicity Arbuthnot's heart rending eye witness report, and for allowing it to remain on this topic.
Felicity Arbuthnot has seen the horrors that the invasion of neocon capitalist "democracy" has wrought on these poor people, and feels it her moral duty to inform those of us who have ears to hear.
I am not Pakistani, but I am Muslim. I shall address the question of why there are not more Pakistanis, or people of a non-white origin on this board. I must say that I do not know the colour of any contributors on here unless they state their origin, so it would be presumptive, even discriminatory, to assume they are all white, or even that white people cannot know discrimination. Anyone who knows their European history will know the terrors inflicted upon people who are of Irish origin. Or of white Muslims in places such as Bosnia or Chechnya.
It has also been pointed out that it is unrealistic to expect an entirely even split of contributors along lines of colour, when it is the case that our Bristol population is about 80% white. A proportionate level of contributions is to be expected, not a disproportionate one.
However, I also believe that our Muslim communities are far too insular and disinterested in forums which are not directly made for Muslims. This is unfortunate. It is as much for us Muslims to reach out and involve ourselves as it is for spaces such as Bristol Indymedia to reach out to us.
But what has made Bristol Indymedia off putting in the past is the level of abuse. This is not unique to Bristol Indymedia, and it seems to be normal for British people to nowadays address each other in the most insulting manner as a matter of routine. Bristol Indymedia is one space which does appear to be attempting to tidy up its act and discourage abuse. The respect guideline is a hopeful indicator that Bristol Indymedia desires to make itself a more welcoming space, even if some of its contributors continue to confuse abuse with debate.
But it may take some time for the message that Bristol Indymedia desires a respectful environment for debate to spread, and also for some of its contributors to heed that message. I will end by thanking those who run Bristol Indymedia for at least attempting to break that culture of abuse.
Thank you for the cleanup.
I will also add this, as i am sure it will come up. As a muslim I cannot pretend that there are not certain lifestyles which i disagree with, however, i am also a supporter of the separation between the public and private. I remain free to exercise my religion in private, while accepting the anti-discrimination codes of this society in public (itself still a relatively recent change in this society). I am sure many other muslims are willing to accept this trade off, as christianity has already largely agreed to within this country.
I am willing to accept criticism and debate, but i'm sure many muslims still find it difficult to enter a place such as this where our beliefs are questioned, even while our concerns on issues such as war are also addressed.
Could I refer to Asifs original title:-
"Bristol, Benazir Bhutto, bullets, bombs, consumerism and capitalism and silence"
Shame that an artificial "silence" has been imposed ...........................?
I fail to see that the now "hidden" content could possibly be "Off Topic" when it is clearly mentioned by Asif in the title.
A lot of problems arise in communications forums like this, when people do not see or feel the human connection as they type.
Without wishing to lay down any kind of law here, maybe we could benefit from a little thinking more about the way we come across to others here.
Do unto others as you'd have others do unto you. Imagine how you'd feel if you were in the other person's shoes. Stand up for yourself, but try not to hurt people's feelings.
In cyberspace, we state this in an even more basic manner: Remember the human.
When you communicate electronically, all you see is a computer screen. You don't have the opportunity to use facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice to communicate your meaning; words -- lonely written words -- are all you've got. And that goes for your correspondent as well.
When you're holding a conversation online -- whether it's an email exchange or a response to a discussion group posting -- it's easy to misinterpret your correspondent's meaning. And it's frighteningly easy to forget that your correspondent is a person with feelings more or less like your own.
It's ironic, really. Computer networks bring people together who'd otherwise never meet. But the impersonality of the medium changes that meeting to something less -- well, less personal. Humans exchanging email often behave the way some people behind the wheel of a car do: They curse at other drivers, make obscene gestures, and generally behave like savages. Most of them would never act that way at work or at home. But the interposition of the machine seems to make it acceptable.
The message of Netiquette is that it's not acceptable. Yes, use your network connections to express yourself freely, explore strange new worlds, and boldly go where you've never gone before. But remember the Prime Directive of Netiquette: Those are real people out there.
Would you say it to the person's face?
Writer and Macintosh evangelist Guy Kawasaki tells a story about getting email from some fellow he's never met. Online, this fellow tells Guy that he's a bad writer with nothing interesting to say.
Unbelievably rude? Yes, but unfortunately, it happens all the time in cyberspace.
Maybe it's the awesome power of being able to send mail directly to a well-known writer like Guy. Maybe it's the fact that you can't see his face crumple in misery as he reads your cruel words. Whatever the reason, it's incredibly common.
Guy proposes a useful test for anything you're about to post or mail: Ask yourself, "Would I say this to the person's face?" If the answer is no, rewrite and reread. Repeat the process till you feel sure that you'd feel as comfortable saying these words to the live person as you do sending them through cyberspace.
Of course, it's possible that you'd feel great about saying something extremely rude to the person's face. In that case, Netiquette can't help you. Go get a copy of Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior.
Another reason not to be offensive online
When you communicate through cyberspace -- via email or on discussion groups -- your words are written. And chances are they're stored somewhere where you have no control over them. In other words, there's a good chance they can come back to haunt you.
Never forget the story of famous email user Oliver North. Ollie, you'll remember, was a great devotee of the White House email system, PROFS. He diligently deleted all incriminating notes he sent or received. What he didn't realize was that, somewhere else in the White House, computer room staff were equally diligently backing up the mainframe where his messages were stored. When he went on trial, all those handy backup tapes were readily available as evidence against him.
You don't have to be engaged in criminal activity to want to be careful. Any message you send could be saved or forwarded by its recipient. You have no control over where it goes.
So who did kill Benazir Bhutto, and why was she killed, and what future for Pakistan now?
This by Rami G. Khouri
"The tragic assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto will engulf Pakistan in grief and turmoil. Her death symbolizes the wider calamity that envelops us all -- throughout the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the United States.
The real significance of this latest killing -- and the others that are sure to follow -- is not their surprise but rather how common, almost inevitable, this sort of event has become in my part of the world. If we wish to end this horror show engulfing more Arab-Asian regions and increasingly sucking in American and other Western armies, we should start getting serious about what it means and why it happens.
We should largely dismiss the many exhortations we will now hear about democracy, stability, restraint, terrorism and patience in the face of extremism. These are increasingly vacuous appeals by leaders who willfully ignore a central, miserable reality in which they participate: Much of the vast region from North Africa and the Middle East to South Asia is now routinely defined by political violence as an everyday fact of life.
A telltale sign in Pakistan today, as it has been in Lebanon for years and in many other similarly scarred countries, is that we can identify multiple plausible culprits, because so many political people -- good guys and bad guys alike -- kill on the job.
Bhutto, her father and brother have all been assassinated, as have been successive generations of other political families in Arab and Asian countries. The lack of novelty is another telling sign that should clarify for us the wider meaning of this crime beyond Pakistan.
After grieving for one family and one country, we must react to the chronic nature of political violence by trying to understand the entire phenomenon, rather than its isolated, episodic manifestations.
An honest beginning in this direction would be to acknowledge that political violence does not occur in a historical vacuum. Lone gunmen, local militias, suicide terrorists, state armies and even democratically elected leaders in dozens of countries have all become players in an extensive global drama.
On this stage, the use of force is an everyday event -- the threat of force is never off the table. It makes little difference if this is the work of democratic or dictatorial leaders: Dead children and war-ravaged societies do not value such distinctions.
When the military and political violence of democrats and dictators goes on for several generations, social values are distorted, and human values are disjointed. It does not matter if this occurs in Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Northern Ireland or pre-democratic Southern Europe.
The absence of credible governance systems based on the rule of law and the equal rights of all citizens slowly pushes citizens and rulers alike to rely on the law of the jungle. They use death and intimidation, rather than electoral or accountable legitimacy, to make their point, to perpetuate their incumbency and to eliminate their opponents.
When everyone uses violence and intimidation as a routine, daily expression of their political aims, when terrorists and presidents use firepower to lay down the law, the circle of culpability widens like the ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond. It is becoming harder and harder to tell the difference between gunmen, gangs and governments -- in Asia, the Middle East and parts of the West -- when the chronic use of violence and lawlessness makes death and assassinations routine and subsequently inevitable.
We will continue to hear passionate appeals about courage, democracy and terror from presidents, kings and warlords alike. These emperors appear increasingly naked as they exhort us to higher values. It is hard to take them seriously -- these Asians, Arabs, Americans, Israelis, Iranians, Turks, Europeans, Africans and anyone else who wishes to stand up and be recognized.
These pontificating presidents, kings and warlords who preach about life and democracy have spent the last generation sending their armies to war, overthrowing regimes, authorizing covert assassinations, arming gangs and militias, trading weapons for political favors, buying protection from thugs, cozying up to terrorists, lauding autocrats, making deals with dictators, imprisoning tens of thousands of foes, torturing at will, thumbing their nose at the U.N. Charter, buying and bullying judges, ignoring true democrats and blindly refusing even to hear the simple demands of their own citizens for minimum decency and dignity.
I have spent my entire adult life in the Middle East -- since the 1970s -- watching leaders being assassinated, foreign armies topple governments, local colonels seize power, foreign occupations persist for decades, the rule of law get thrown in the garbage, constitutions being ignored and, in the end, ordinary people finally deciding that they will not remain outside of history or invisible in their own societies. Instead, they decide to write themselves into the violent and criminal scripts. They kill as they have been killed. Having been dehumanized in turn, they will embrace inhumanity and brutality.
Who killed Benazir Bhutto? We all killed her, in East and West, Orient and Occident, North and South. We of the globalized beastly generation that transformed political violence from an occasional crime to an ideology and an addiction."
Article reprinted with permission
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
by Bill Van Auken
Global Research, December 30, 2007
With Pakistan erupting in violence over the assassination of its former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and amid conflicting accounts as to both the identity of her assassins and even the cause of her death, official Washington and the American mass media have coalesced around a version of events that has been crafted to suit US strategic interests.
Without any substantive evidence, the crime has been attributed to Al Qaeda, while Bhutto herself has been proclaimed a martyr both in the struggle for democracy in her own country and in the US “global war on terror.” Meanwhile, the government of President Pervez Musharraf has been exonerated. There is ample reason to question this “official story” on all counts.
The obvious intent is to turn this undeniably tragic event into a new justification for the pursuit of US strategic interests in the region. In the week leading up to the assassination, there have been a number of reports indicating that US military forces are already operating inside Pakistan and preparing to substantially escalate these operations.
At this point, there is no proof as to the authorship of the assassination. The military-controlled government of President Musharraf claims to have intercepted a phone call in which an “Al Qaeda leader” congratulated his supporters for the killing. Yet web sites that have claimed responsibility for previous Al Qaeda terrorist acts have not done so in relation to the Bhutto killing.
Then there is the question as to how Bhutto died. In the wake of numerous eyewitness accounts that she had been shot before a bomb blast ripped through the crowd at an election campaign rally in Rawalpindi, the Pakistani Interior Ministry issued three conflicting accounts: the first saying that she died from a bullet wound to the neck, the second that she was killed by shrapnel from the bomb and a third claiming that she had fractured her skull against a door handle while ducking down into the sunroof of her vehicle to dodge either the bullets or the explosion. How the government reached this last novel conclusion is unclear, as no autopsy was conducted on Bhutto’s body.
A spokesperson for Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, Farooq Naik, called the Musharraf government’s shifting story “a pack of lies” and insisted that the real cause of death was sniper fire. If indeed the Pakistani politician was shot to death by a sniper in Rawalpindi, the historic garrison town which is headquarters to the country’s military, suspicion would shift even more sharply towards the government or elements within its powerful military-intelligence apparatus.
This is already the predominant popular sentiment within Pakistan itself. As Philadelphia Inquirer’s columnist Trudy Rubin reported from the country, “Just about every Pakistani with whom I spoke blamed her death not on Al Qaeda, but on their own government—and the United States.”
And, there is irrefutable evidence that Bhutto herself saw the government, rather than Al Qaeda, as the main threat to her life.
The New York Times Friday cited one Western official who met with the Pakistani politician the day before she was killed. He said, according to the Times, that Bhutto “complained that while the militants represented a threat, the government was as much a threat in its failure to ensure security. She suggested that either the government had a deal with the militants that allowed them to carry on their terrorist activities, or that President Musharraf’s approach at dealing with the problem of militancy was utterly ineffective.”
And in Washington, Bhutto’s American lobbyist, Mark Siegel, released an email from Bhutto that she had asked him to make public if she were assassinated. The message was sent shortly after the attempt on her life last October—a massive bombing that claimed the lives of nearly 140 people during a procession in Karachi following her return to the country. She had publicly accused the Pakistani military-intelligence apparatus of having a direct hand in this attack.
In her email, she said that she would “hold Musharraf responsible” if she were killed in Pakistan.“I have been made to feel insecure by his minions,” she wrote of the Pakistani military strongman.
Detailing the refusal of government officials to provide her with elementary security, Bhutto wrote, “There is no way that what is happening in terms of stopping me from taking private cars or using tinted windows or giving jammers [to detonate roadside bombs] or four police mobiles to cover all sides could happen without him.”
In an interview on CNN, Siegel commented: “As we prepared for the campaign ... Bhutto was very concerned she was not getting the security that she had asked for. She basically asked for all that was required for someone of the standing of a former prime minister. All of that was denied her.”
Asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer whether Bhutto had herself not been reckless, Siegel responded, “Don’t blame the victim for the crime. Musharraf is responsible.”
Meanwhile, Senator Joseph Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, held a press conference in Iowa in which he revealed that he had personally interceded with Musharraf to ask for specific security procedures to protect Bhutto, but his requests were ignored.
“The failure to protect Mrs. Bhutto raises a lot of hard questions for the government and security services that have to be answered,” Biden said. When asked if he believed the Pakistani government had deliberately placed Bhutto in harm’s way, he backed off, however, claiming he did not know what security was in place when Bhutto was killed.
The military-Islamist connection
The lines separating Al Qaeda—or, to be more precise, radical Islamist elements in Pakistan—from the country’s military-intelligence apparatus are hardly firm. Pakistan’s military-controlled regimes have encouraged and rested upon support from Islamist forces—as a counterweight to the working class and the left—ever since General Zia-ul Haq seized power and carried out the hanging of Benzir Bhutto’s father, then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1979. The military regime—and in particular its intelligence arm, the ISI—further cemented these ties during the US-backed war against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It was then that the ISI and the CIA worked to build up the movement that became know as Al Qaeda and collaborated directly with Osama bin Laden.
That these ties still exist is without question. US military commanders have repeatedly complained that their Pakistani counterparts have warned Al Qaeda elements of impending US operations. That the Musharraf government or elements within the military could utilize Islamist elements to carry out such an assassination—or facilitate their committing such a crime—is obvious.
As for a motive, Musharraf and his main base of support, the military command, have a clear one. They had no interest in sharing state power—and access to both graft and billions of dollars in US aid—with the Pakistan People’s Party. Benazir Bhutto was twice elected prime minister in the 1990s—and twice removed. Each of these changes in power involved bitter conflicts between her government and hostile elements in the top brass of the Pakistani military and the ISI.
Now Musharraf’s principal rival for political power is dead and her party in disarray. He remains the principal figure upon whom Washington depends in Pakistan, a reality reflected in the insistence by the Bush administration, the media and the leading Democratic presidential candidates that he had nothing to do with the killing.
While the violent death of a 54-year-old woman with three children is both tragic and shocking, the attempt to turn Bhutto into a martyr for democracy is preposterous.
She was brought back to Pakistan as part of a sordid scheme hatched by the Bush administration to give the military-controlled regime headed by Musharraf a pseudo-democratic facade.
The Washington Post spelled out the details of this deal in a report Friday.
With mounting political unrest in Pakistan, Washington was desperate to prop up the military strongman, whom it viewed as a principal asset in the so-called war on terror.
“As President Pervez Musharraf’s political future began to unravel this year, Bhutto became the only politician who might help keep him in power,” the Post reported.
It quoted Bhutto’s lobbyist, Mark Siegel, as stating, “The US came to understand that Bhutto was not a threat to stability, but was instead the only possible way that we could guarantee stability and keep the presidency of Musharraf intact.”
The terms of the arrangement were that Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party would not oppose Musharraf’s widely unpopular bid for a third term as president last September and, in return, Musharraf would grant Bhutto immunity from criminal charges related to the rampant corruption that characterized her previous terms as prime minister.
US officials, including Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher, served as the direct brokers in 18 months of negotiations leading to the deal, flying back and forth between Islamabad and Bhutto’s homes in Dubai and London.
Musharraf was reportedly opposed to any amnesty for Bhutto, not to mention her return to power. According to the Post report, it was Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte—a veteran of dirty deals with dictators—who finally convinced him. “He basically delivered a message to Musharraf that we would stand by him, but he needed a democratic facade on the government, and we thought Benazir was the right choice for that face,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and National Security Council staff member, told the Post.
In the end, it was Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who phoned Bhutto in early October, telling her to return to Pakistan to serve essentially as an instrument of US policy and a prop for the Musharraf regime. In doing so, Rice sent Bhutto to her death.
Musharraf had no real desire to move ahead with Washington’s attempt to make Bhutto the presentable “face” for his reactionary regime, which led to, at the very least, the denial of state protection to Bhutto, if not her outright assassination by elements of the state.
The political reality behind Bhutto’s facade
Had the deal been consummated, it hardly would have led to a flowering of democracy in Pakistan. Rather, it would have installed a Washington-controlled prime minister as the figurehead for a military-dominated regime aligned with the Bush administration in a country where 70 percent of the population is hostile to US policy in the region.
And, while Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party has engaged in populist and even pseudo-socialist rhetoric, it has always been a representative of the Pakistan’s landed aristocracy and a firm defender of its power and privileges. During her two terms in power, the Bhutto family used their control over the state apparatus to enrich themselves, with her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, earning the nickname “Mr. ten percent,” for the kickbacks he extracted for state contracts.
Her governments—like that of Musharraf—were characterized by harsh repression, disappearances and state killings, including that of her own brother, Murtaza, who had split from the PPP.
That Washington was able to broker a deal between Bhutto and Musharraf is testimony to the entirely rotten and anti-democratic character of the Pakistani bourgeoisie as a whole, a ruling elite that is separated by a vast gulf from the masses of impoverished workers and peasants and which has defended its wealth and power through savage repression, open alignment with imperialism and appeals to every form of religious obscurantism and communalist hatred.
The direct involvement of Musharraf and the Pakistani military in the Bhutto assassination will not stop the Bush administration from continuing to collaborate with him or, if necessary, another military strongman. Washington has maintained its strategic alliance with Pakistan through the continuous assassinations and military coups that have characterized the country’s history.
It has acted as a direct accomplice in many of these crimes, most notoriously in the support given by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State of State Henry Kissinger to the bloodbath unleashed against Bengali nationalist movement in 1971, in which US-supplied arms were used to butcher hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians, while millions more were turned into refugees.
The Bush administration’s aim remains that of rescuing and somehow legitimizing the Musharraf regime. Bush spent a large part of Friday in a secure video conference linking his ranch in Crawford, Texas with the US National Security Council in Washington and the American ambassador in Islamabad to discuss the Pakistani crisis.
The entire country has been plunged into violence by the assassination, with banks, police stations, government offices, railroad terminals and trains burned and dozens of people killed. Pakistani security forces have been given “shoot on sight” orders against anyone seen to be engaging in “anti-state activities.” Transportation services have been shut down and gas stations closed by government order, leaving huge numbers of people stranded.
Under these conditions, the White House and the State Department are publicly calling for parliamentary elections set for January 8 to be held as planned, claiming that to postpone them would dishonor Bhutto’s memory. While even before the assassination, holding these elections with Musharraf still in power would have stripped them of any credibility, to stage them after the killing of the principal opposition leader would render them farcical. The White House sees such an exercise solely as a fig leaf for its imperialist policy in Pakistan, serving the same function as similar votes staged in US-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan.
The urgency attached to this exercise is bound up with Washington’s plans for expanded military operations in the country. The day before Bhutto’s assassination, the Washington Post’s national security columnist William Arkin reported, “Beginning early next year, US Special Forces are expected to vastly expand their presence in Pakistan, as part of an effort to train and support indigenous counter-insurgency forces and clandestine counterterrorism units, according to defense officials involved with the planning.”
Several days earlier, NBC’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski reported that US special operation troops are already “engaged in direct attacks against Al Qaeda inside Pakistan” operating in the tribal regions in the west of the country. The report made it clear that the so-called “trainers” sent by the US are directly involved in combat alongside Pakistani forces.
The report also quoted US Defense Secretary Robert Gates as stating, “Al Qaeda right now seems to have turned its face toward Pakistan and attacks against the Pakistani government.”
Meanwhile a Pentagon spokesman stressed Friday that Washington is confident that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are “under control.” Nonetheless, there have also been reports that the US military is reviewing contingency plans for a military intervention in the country on the pretext of safeguarding its nuclear arsenal.
The mass popular revulsion over the Bhutto assassination has unleashed intense instability in Pakistan. A further unraveling of the political situation could well draw the US military into direct involvement in the attempt to suppress popular upheavals in a country of 165 million people.
Bill Van Auken is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Nice to be back on topic!
Chekkin out Pakistan situation on the interweb, I found this interesting little piece by Ayesha Ijaz Khan on the New Internationalist website.
This was written before BB was killed ................
Martial law in Pakistan is aimed at only some of the President’s opponents. Ayesha Ijaz Khan explains.
Thirty years ago an Islamic Revolution besieged Iran because a despot was propped up against the will of the people. Had the Shah not been supported by Western powers against the nationalist Mossadegh, perhaps the ayatollahs would never have been able to cash in on the revolutionary tide. Nuclear-armed Pakistan today is in a far more precarious position.
On 3 November Musharraf imposed a ‘state of emergency’, essentially martial law, leading to a brutal crackdown on independent media and mass arrests of lawyers, judges, human rights activists, teachers and students. Curiously, for the first five days after the imposition of martial law there was no concrete condemnation from the US Administration. Speaking partially in English, Musharraf had explained that extremists were destabilizing Pakistan and thus the emergency was warranted. As former US Ambassador to Pakistan, Teresita Schaffer, correctly noted, however, that only two of the nine points in his address attacked the extremists, while seven were directed towards the judiciary.
The Supreme Court was considering a challenge to Musharraf’s dual office as both President and Chief of Army Staff. They had yet to deliver a verdict, but the bold remarks of the newly empowered judiciary and unprecedented questioning of high-ranking officials of the police, army and intelligence services in several other cases led to the pre-emptive strike. The media was blacked out and as judges refused to take the oath under the new Provisional Constitutional Order, and lawyers protested and hesitated to appear before the kangaroo courts being set up, law enforcement unleashed a reign of terror and torture against the most liberal and progressive segments of society.
Extreme Frontier.
The Frontier has become a haven for radical forces so extreme in their thinking that they regard even the ruling religious alliance as infidels
Meanwhile, Mullah Fazlullah was free to broadcast his firebrand and distorted version of Islam from an FM radio station in Swat, resulting in attacks on music shops, women and tourist resorts. Secular-minded civilians have time and again complained of Musharraf’s tentative commitment to eradicating extremism from Pakistan. In 2002 he entered into a pact with the religious alliance, permitting them to form a government in the Frontier Province as long as they voted for the notorious Seventeenth Amendment, allowing him to retain the office of President and Chief of Army Staff for five years. As a result, the Frontier has become a haven for radical forces so extreme in their thinking that they regard even the ruling religious alliance as infidels. Initially confined to the tribal belt, these militants have now infiltrated settled areas like the scenic valley of Swat. Musharraf, however, is inclined to approach them timidly, with diplomacy, dialogue and barter (trading captured soldiers for militants), reserving brute force for moderate members of the civil society.
Yet Musharraf has done a brilliant job of selling himself in the West as the great secular saviour. He has prolonged his illicit rule by consistently playing both sides, using the ‘war on terror’ to scare international powerhouses while secretly entering into deals and placating militants with concessions. On the other hand, he has shown no mercy in eradicating democratic opposition to his government. Soon after he took over, both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, leaders of the two mainstream political parties, were safely in exile. Corruption charges against both were frequently advertised.
Nevertheless, Musharraf reluctantly agreed to a Washington-brokered power deal earlier this year which would retain him as a civilian President and allow Ms Bhutto to become Prime Minister. To achieve this so-called ‘transition to democracy’, only so it could prolong Musharraf’s own time in power, he has absolved Ms Bhutto of corruption charges and provided her state security, while political workers of other opposition parties are jailed. But, as many sceptics predicted, the plan is not working so well. Both Musharraf and Bhutto are used to absolute power and the emergency measures have made it far more difficult for Bhutto to be seen as negotiating with the General. There is considerable pressure from within her party to ally herself with other opposition political parties challenging Musharraf, but her hesitation may stem from the fact that a pre-3-November judiciary, a key demand of other opposition forces, may strike down the special ordinance passed to clear her of corruption charges.
Perpetuating an image
As the political drama unfolds, there are serious reservations about Ms Bhutto’s willingness to take on the army establishment that has often facilitated the return of civilian leadership, as long as it agrees not to question constants such as military spending, or perpetuating the image of a key ally in the ‘war on terror’ while cracking down on grassroots movements that could serve to counter-balance the clout of the militants. But the intelligentsia in Pakistan is increasingly reaching a consensus on re-negotiating the power balance with the army, questioning its dedication to eradicate extremism and confining its reach. Prior to 3 November, the Supreme Court’s choice of cases, its method of investigation and the remarks of the individual judges reflected this sentiment. Not only are those judges now under house arrest and denied medical attention, but the four lawyers who played a pivotal role in the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry earlier this year face the brunt of police brutality.
Musharraf has done a brilliant job of selling himself in the West as the great secular saviour
The lawyers’ movement has nevertheless sewn the seeds for a vibrant and dynamic popular undercurrent which may yet save Pakistan from further militant Islamic penetration. Although Musharraf’s onslaught has been unforgiving, packing vans designed for 12 people with 60 lawyers and releasing them only when a few have fainted and the rest imbibed sewerage water, members of legal bar rooms and media press clubs continue to resist in large numbers. They are joined by students, human rights activists and even women with their milder ‘flowers for justice’ campaign, laying floral wreaths outside homes of house-arrested judges who have declined to take the oath under the new order. Remarkably quick to take the oath, on the other hand, were the two Supreme Court judges who had freed the alleged Red Mosque terrorists.
Whether the opposition political forces join hands with each other to define Pakistan’s future civil-military relationship or are swayed by opportunism to strike a deal with the military remains to be seen. Civil society has clearly demonstrated its willingness to sacrifice and struggle against martial law for the supremacy of the constitution and rule of law. If, however, the ferocious crackdown continues, it may stifle the peaceful pleas and pickets of the temperate professionals, leaving a gaping hole. In the absence of a genuinely free and fair electoral process, in which all political actors are allowed to participate and an independent media and judiciary are tolerated, this may only be filled by heavily armed and ruthlessly confrontational militant forces.
Ayesha Ijaz Khan is a London-based lawyer and writer who be contacted via her website www.ayeshaijazkhan.com.
Hi
Thanks to the Indymedia people for cleaning this all up. And thanks to those on topic giving us important information on this issue,
Reading around on the web, I notice some people are suggesting that the CIA might be responsible for her assassination, any thoughts?
Or is such a scenario nothing but just another conspiracy thingy?
No good news from Pakistan right now,
ISLAMABAD, 14 January 2008 (IRIN) - Insecurity continues to dominate the concerns of non-governmental organisation (NGO) staff in Pakistan, a country still reeling from last month's assassination of opposition figure Benazir Bhutto.
"Security is a big concern for us," Sana Zafar, programme coordinator for the American Refugee Committee in the capital, Islamabad, told IRIN.
"The situation is still very volatile," she said, citing the start of the holy month of Muharram - often marred by violent clashes between Sunni Muslims and the Shia minority - and parliamentary elections now rescheduled for 18 February.
An interesting article;
"48% of Pakistanis blame either government agencies or politicians linked to the government as responsible for the murder....Nearly half of the sample suspected Government agencies (23%) and Government allied politicians (25%). Al-Qaeda or Taliban were suspected by 17%, while 16% suspected other external forces, principally the United States (12%) and India (4%). 19 % said they do not know.”
See http://icga.blogspot.com/2008/01/half-of-pakistanis-believe-bhutto.html
Certainly seems rather depressing Asif, but think back to the UK's problem in Northern Ireland where two Christian groups - the Catholics and the Protestants were knocking the living **** out of each other just a decade ago.
Now they are working together remarkably well.
And they did this by making a tremendous effort and putting aside the history of past bloody episodes on both sides and moving forward without any past "baggage".
I sincerely hope Pakistan can do the same.
Nuclear weapons.
I watched this programme on BBC4 tonight, quite an eye-opener, it goes a long way to explaining what we call the 'war on terror' and what they call 'jihad' is about, I'm beginning to understand that those we call 'extremist' are our own creation, we made them so!
American Irish put pressure on the British government to finally come up with the peace process in Ireland.
Chances of that happening anywhere else in the world are pretty slim.
Mostly the yanks covertly stir the sh1t and then sell arms to both sides and reap the profits. Still, that's capitalism.
Excellent TV programme!
Follow the link to watch or download.
A look at how past conflicts can help explain the violence of recent events like nine-eleven and seven seven etc.