World Anti-militarism Newswire Archive

This morning boycott Israel campaigners blockaded the gates of Cargoflora and Carmel Agrexco in Hayes, Middlesex.

Carmel Agrexco and Cargoflora's depots in Hayes Middlesex have been blockaded early this morning. Cargoflora's gates have been blocked by campaigners using D-Locks and superglue while the Agrexco blockaders have used panels of 'Hares' fencing.

Local and international activists braved foul weather conditions to demonstrate in villages up and down the West Bank yesterday. As further evidence of the popular struggle’s growing power, each protest went ahead as planned. Here’s a video round-up of what happened.

Copyleft artwork by Brazilian cartoonist Latuff.

A solidarity call with Volkan Sevinc -anarchist prisoner- who is imprisoned after a demonstration to support a conscientious objector.

As 20 million Americans struggle with unemployment and 40 million depend on food stamps, President Obama’s exhortation for “America to make painful choices” and to “live within its means”, must sound rather sickening. The president’s budget announcement calls for “austerity” in “discretionary spending” such as education and healthcare, but this frugality is not extended to the American military.

"A US military occupation of Haiti under the guise of earthquake disaster ‘relief’ would give Washington and private business interests tied to it a geopolitical prize of the first order. Prior to the January 12 quake, the US Embassy in Port-au-Prince was the fifth largest US embassy in the world, comparable to its embassies in such geopolitically strategic places as Berlin and Beijing.[17] With huge new oil finds off Cuba being exploited by Russian companies, with clear indications that Haiti contains similar vast untapped oil as well as gold, copper, uranium and iridium, with Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela as a neighbor to the south of Haiti, a return of Aristide or any popular leader committed to developing the resources for the people of Haiti, -- the poorest nation in the Americas -- would constitute a devastating blow to the world’s sole Superpower. The fact that in the aftermath of the earthquake, UN Haiti Special Envoy Bill Clinton joined forces with Aristide foe George W. Bush to create something called the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund ought to give everyone pause.

According to Marguerite Laurent ('Ezili Dantò') of the Haitian Lawyers’ Leadership Network, under the guise of emergency relief work, the US, France and Canada are engaged in a balkanization of the island for future mineral control. She reports rumors that Canada wants the North of Haiti where Canadian mining interests are already present. The US wants Port-au-Prince and the island of La Gonaive just offshore – an area identified in Aristide’s development book as having vast oil resources, and which is bitterly contested by France. She further states that China, with UN veto power over the de facto UN-occupied country, may have something to say against such a US-France-Canada carve up of the vast wealth of the nation."

There is a stark similarity between some aspects of the political atmosphere dominant over Iran today and those under Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh right before the U.S.-led coup of 1953 that resulted in the overthrow of the legitimate government of Iran and the establishment of a U.S.-puppet government of the Shah.

This is serious: environmental issues are being shamelessly manipulated by vested government and military (UK/US) interests to undermine the entire ethical position of the global environmental movement. See below for links:

"The U.S. government is an immoral enterprise -- engaged in imperial wars, propping up corrupt bankers and supersized corporations, crushing small businessmen, plundering the tax-base for corporate welfare, snooping on the private lives of citizens -- and we want no more part of it. The gods of the empire, are not the gods of Vermont."

Around twenty residents of Nabi Salah village were injured during Friday’s demonstration, directed mainly at the Hallamish settlement which occupies the village’s farmland and primary water source. Most of those injured were children not participating in the protest, tear gassed and fired upon with rubber bullets as they sheltered in a nearby house.

The American commandeering of the airport at Port au Prince and de facto seizure of sovereignty over Haiti looked exactly like an invasion and occupation – except that Haiti had already been invaded in 2004 by the U.S., which then turned over occupational duties to its servants in the United Nations. To speak of a U.S. “invasion” of Haiti is getting a little bit redundant. The Americans never left, and they and their flunkies walk all over Haiti like an old rug.

Almost 1,000 scientific professionals in the fields of architecture, engineering, and physics have now concluded that the official explanation for the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings is implausible according to laws of physics.

This conclusion should be a part of our political discourse given how much of the policy in the past eight years has been based on assumptions about 9/11.

In a free society, this type of inquiry would be a matter of civic principle, not national ridicule, which it what it has largely been when it has not been totally ignored by corporate media.

On 29 January 2003, 50 days prior to the launch of the invasion of Iraq, John Pilger wrote the article below.

Exactly seven years later, UK's former Prime Minister Tony Blair, during his testimony before the "Iraq Inquiry", made the following statement:

"The decision I took - and frankly would take again - was if there was any possibility that he could develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) we should stop him,"

(source: "I have no regrets says defiant Blair", Independent, 29 January 2010  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/blair-insists-he-was-right-to-stop-saddam-1882847.html)

"Clinton said that a “cornerstone” of European security is the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states.” She repeated U.S. calls on Russia to honor the terms of a cease-fire agreement that ended the August 2008 Russia-Georgia war and the administration’s refusal to recognize Russia’s claims of independence for the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia." Neither Cliton or the current author bother to recall for us that it was Russia that was the victum of a surprise attack from Georgia, a US "partner." I wonder why?

EDO Decommissioner Elijah Smith has recently been moved from HMP Lewes to HMP Sheppey Cluster (Elmley). He has now spent over one year on remand. Please take a moment to write to him.

In the early hours of Thursday morning, Mohammed Khatib of the Popular Struggle Co-ordination Committee was arrested in his Bi’lin home. In the latest in a series of similar arrests, Israeli soldiers stormed the house and took Khatib on charges of incitement. ‘Incitement materials’ were reportedly taken from his home. Solidarity activists were forcibly prevented from approaching the scene.

Haití Can Awaken from the Dark Night of the Boar

by Amanda Huerta

"In 1986, Duvalier Jr. was toppled by a popular uprising, that watched the continuance of the dictatorship for two more years until in 1988 Leslie Manigat was elected to the presidency of the Republic, a noble government that was toppled by General Henri Namphy who was replaced that same September by General Prosper Avril. Avril, in power until 1990, had to contend with new revolts. His resignation opened the path to elections under international control and an apparent normalization of political life.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest who had advocated for the poor, obtained a brilliant victory in December of 1990. Coups d’etat, forced exile and return to power were all part of the first Aristide term, who was succeeded by René Preval. Aristide returned to power democratically, and in 2004 a coup d’etat organized and covered by the US obligated him to resign.

In this brief summary of the history of Haiti I omitted “small details” like the economic embargos, assassinations, persecutions, etcetera. Since 2004 the Haitian people have lived, anew, under old and new military occupations at the hands of the US, a country that to this day remains in military control with the collaboration (by omission or commission) of the UN and allied countries.

This same North American occupation force is that which today controls the airport, impeding and/or delaying the arrival of aid for Haiti, as has been denounced by the government of France and an infinity of journalists and reporters in Port au Prince."

Israeli Border Police assaulted ten Palestinian labourers in the early hours of Sunday morning. The men were seized on the Palestinian side of the Al-Zaiem crossing, attempting to reach the construction site they work at in East Jerusalem.

Flashpoints coverage on the unfolding crisis in Haiti, as hundreds of thousands of people are dead following the massive earthquake; Flashpoints speak to Walter Riley, Bay Area-based civil rights attorney, just back from Port-au-Prince, also, Bill Quigley, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York talks about the large US military presence in Haiti and the undermining of relief efforts that puts more lives in danger; an interview with a medical doctor in Port-au-Prince, who has set up a makeshift hospital to treat thousands of patients; Yvon Kerizan of the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund gives his eyewitness account of the suffering; and Flashpoints’ Kevin Pina heads back to Haiti.