Check It Out for Wednesday, June 24th
Johann Hari at The Independent writes about the fight for the Amazon that should inspire the world.
"In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies – and, for today, they have won. Earlier this year, Peru's right-wing President, Alan Garcia, sold the rights to explore, log and drill 70 per cent of his country's swathe of the Amazon to a slew of international oil companies. Garcia seems to see rainforest as a waste of good resources, saying of the Amazon's trees: "There are millions of hectares of timber there lying idle."
"There was only one pesky flaw in Garcia's plan: the indigenous people who live in the Amazon. They are the first people of the Americas, subject to wave after wave of genocide since the arrival of the Conquistadors. They are weak. They have no guns. They barely have electricity. The government didn't bother to consult them: what are a bunch of Indians going to do anyway?
"But the indigenous people have seen what has happened elsewhere in the Amazon when the oil companies arrive. Occidental Petroleum are facing charges in US courts of dumping an estimated nine billion barrels of toxic waste in the regions of the Amazon where they operated from 1972 to 2000. Andres Sandi Mucushua, the spiritual leader of the area known to the oil companies as Block (12A)B, said in 2007: "My people are sick and dying because of Oxy. The water in our streams is not fit to drink and we can no longer eat the fish in our rivers or the animals in our forests." The company denies liability, saying they are "aware of no credible data of negative community health impacts".
"Why is he [Garcia]doing this? He was responding to intense pressure from the US, whose new Free Trade Pact requires this "opening up", and from the International Monetary Fund, paid for by our taxes. In Peru, it has also been alleged that the ruling party, APRA, is motivated by oil bribes. Some of Garcia's associates have been caught on tape talking about how to sell off the Amazon to their cronies. The head of the parliamentary committee investigating the affair, Rep. Daniel Abugattas, says: "The government has been giving away our natural resources to the lowest bidders. This has not benefited Peru, but the administration's friends."
"So the indigenous peoples acted in their own self-defence, and ours. Using
their own bodies and weapons made from wood, they blockaded the rivers and
roads to stop the oil companies getting anything in or out. They captured
two valves of Peru's sole pipeline between the country's gas field and the
coast, which could have led to fuel-rationing. Their leaders issued a
statement explaining: "We will fight together with our parents and
children to take care of the forest, to save the life of the equator and the
entire world."
"Garcia responded by sending in the military. He declared a "state of emergency" in the Amazon, suspending almost all constitutional rights. Army helicopters opened fire on the protesters with live ammunition and stun-grenades. More than a dozen were killed. But the indigenous peoples did not run away. Even though they were risking their lives, they stood their ground. One of their leaders, Davi Yanomami, said simply: 'The earth has no price. It cannot be bought, or sold or exchanged. It is very important that white people, black people and indigenous peoples fight together to save the life of the forest and the earth. If we don't fight together, what will our future be?'
"And then something extraordinary happened. The indigenous peoples won. The Peruvian Congress repealed the laws that allowed oil company drilling, by a margin of 82 votes to 12. Garcia was forced to apologise for his "serious errors and exaggerations". The protesters have celebrated and returned to their homes deep in the Amazon.
"Of course, the oil companies will regroup and return – but this is an
inspirational victory for the forces of sanity that will be hard to reverse.
"There is something thrilling about the fight in the Amazon, yet also something shaming. These people had nothing, but they stood up to the oil companies. We have everything, yet too many of us sit limp and passive, filling up our tanks with stolen oil without a thought for tomorrow. The people of the Amazon have shown they are up for the fight to save our ecosystem. Are we?"
Pepe Escobar at AsiaTimes writes about the street of Tehran being lost but hope returns.
"The angel of history lives in Iran- even though Manichean progressives of all stripes, especially in the United States insist on believing the overwhelming popular uprising in Iran is nothing but one more US Central Intelligence Agency-engineered "color" revolution.
"Confronted with this, Iranian journalists and the diaspora in Paris, including people just arriving from Tehran, are puzzled: how hard is it to understand, they say, that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has in fact ceased to be an arbiter and has legitimized a coup, steering the regime towards totalitarianism, striking off "republic" from "Islamic Republic" and, in a Brechtian twist, virtually abolishing the people?
"As an Iranian businessman who goes back and forth between Tehran and Paris puts it, 'People in the West don't seem to understand that the political struggle in Iran is not about liberals versus conservatives, but conservatives against a fascist tendency uniting some sectors of the clergy, and this state within the state which are the Pasdaran [IRGC - Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps]. Both the nuclear program and the missiles are under the control of the Pasdaran. And who are they? They are former fighters in the Iran-Iraq war [of the 1908s], the religious police ... They control everything, they have informants in every building, every street, every neighborhood, like the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s.'
"Mohsen Sazegara, president of the Washington-based Research Institute for Contemporary Iran, was one of the founders of the IRGC (Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps) , in the earliest stages after the 1979 revolution. He does not mince his words. For him, Khamenei "made the biggest mistake of is life"; "he thought that with the Revolutionary Guards and the Ministry of Interior he could conquer a nation". Sazegara stresses, "for the first time in 120 years, Iranians mobilize themselves without religious help and with no religious motivation".
"Sazegara insists Khamenei's regime "is already security obsessed and militarized. There's no turning back for such a brutal regime. For last Friday's prayers, he mobilized his supporters all over the country. I was expecting to see 500,000 people, but according to our friends, there were no more than 50,000. Many of his partisans remain neutral, or are ashamed. If he manages to repress the Iranian people, he'll become a military dictator like Saddam Hussein. He'll be the king of a cemetery."
"Philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, from the University of Toronto...'the protesters are not revolutionaries. These young people remind us that a monolithic image of the country does not necessarily reflect the state of mind of the 70% of the population that is less than 30 years old. The fracture between state and people has never been greater'.
"So this is a "political fight between the republican nature of Iran and its religious oligarchy. The republican instinct consists in paying almost exclusive attention to the legitimacy of public space, while the religious establishment refuses to concede a minimum of legitimacy to the judgment of public opinion". That's why 'Iran is immersed in a crisis of legitimacy without precedent in its political history.' "
Analysis by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler at IPS News titled: The Writing Is On the Settlement Walls.
"A paralysing equation has long bedevilled would-be Middle East peacemakers: either, go directly to negotiating the kernel issues of the Israel-Palestine conflict - borders, security, refugees, Jerusalem - and leave, in the context of a full peace, the thorny question of Israeli settlements in the West Bank to fall naturally into place. Or, tackle the settlements head-on, thereby opening the way for a peace drive.
"Under U.S. prodding, during the past decade the first side of the equation has been tried over and over again. Fruitlessly. The result has been a zero-sum game.
"Now, U.S. President Barack Obama is plumping for the second approach: the dismantling of Israel's settlement policy. An absolute freeze on all settlement activity is a must, the White House says.
"Martin Indyk, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, speaking on Israeli Public Television, noted that the President's pursuit of peace is contingent not only on Israel responding, but also on the Arab world responding (in terms of gradual normalising of relations in the spirit of the Arab peace initiative). But, stressed Indyk, the U.S. believes it impossible to convince the Arab and Muslim world to start moving without tangible action from Israel first: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must demonstrate that he is serious about peace.
"Netanyahu, though, still believes he can subvert the Obama challenge. Sidestepping a meeting with U.S. presidential envoy to the region Senator George Mitchell, planned for Friday in Paris, the Israeli leader is instead dispatching his Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, to Washington for talks at the beginning of next week. The Israeli purpose is to turn around what is being labelled by some Israeli officials as a U.S. fixation with the 'settlements first' strategy.
"During 20 years of failed peacemaking, Israel's modus operandi - and also the U.S. modus operandi - has been problematic. Even when successive Israeli governments demonstrated a genuine commitment to move peace forward, it was invariably accompanied by the creation of new realities in the West Bank. The U.S. invariably gave continued settlement expansion a nod and a wink. Inevitably, real progress towards peace was impeded. Arab confidence in the U.S. was eroded.
"Under Obama, the U.S. is less intent on challenging Arab peace intentions. Rather, by challenging the Israeli leader's unwillingness to deconstruct Israel's settlement policy, he is testing Netanyahu's recently declared acceptance of a two-state solution.
"Benjamin Netanyahu is sorely misjudging this shift in the overall thrust of U.S. policy.
"For four decades, Israel was posited as the fulcrum of any broad U.S. Middle East strategy. That could all change if Netanyahu doesn't accept the U.S. settlement demand. It would mean not the abandoning of Israel, nor the jeopardising of Israel's security, but it could very well mean the downsizing of Israel to the role of 'just one of key U.S. allies in the region' "
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