This week: • Diego Garcia • Guatemala • Wood •
• Kiddie Arms • SETI • Stuff •

 

Civilisation, Western style

Of the countless heinous crimes committed by Josef Stalin, one of the worst was resettling an entire nation — Chechnya — thousands of kilometres to the east. Thousands died in the forced deportation and it would take 20 years until the Chechens returned to their homeland. Perhaps it was with this shocking incident in mind that the masterminds behind the international criminal court included article seven in its founding statute, namely describing the “deportation or forcible transfer of population… by expulsion or other coercive acts” as a crime against humanity.

Tony Blair should then be tried for his continued denial of the return of the natives of Diego Garcia to their homes.

The Chagos Islands, a cluster of atolls to the south of the Maldives, form part of the British Indian Ocean Territories. Diego Garcia, the largest island, is currently leased to the Americans and boasts an airstrip used to launch B52 bombers during the Afghan and Iraq wars. The secretive base has also been used to hold terrorist suspects. The islands — lying midway between Asia and Africa in the Indian Ocean — have been a dependency of Britain since 1814, when they were ceded from France. The Chagossians arrived in the late 19th century to set up copra plantations. Their forced expulsion in the late 1960s goes down as one of the worst episodes in Britain s imperial history — a population of about 2,000 people silently emptied from the islands in order to make way for the US military base. During the 1960s, in high secrecy, the Labour government of Harold Wilson conspired with two American administrations to “sweep” and “sanitize” the islands: the words used in American documents. Files found in the National Archives in Washington and the Public Record Office in London provide an astonishing narrative of official lying all too familiar to those who have chronicled the lies over Iraq.

As John Pilger wrote in 2004, the files ‘reveal an imperious attitude of brutality. In August 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote: “We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours. There will be no indigenous population except seagulls.” At the end of this is a handwritten note by DH Greenhill, later Baron Greenhill: “Along with the Birds go some Tarzans or Men Fridays …” Under the heading, “Maintaining the fiction”, another official urges his colleagues to reclassify the islanders as “a floating population” and to “make up the rules as we go along”’.

Another Labour administration — Tony Blair’s — has done all it can to frustrate the Chagossians return to their rightful home. In 2000, the Chagossians, financed by legal aid, won a High Court case which declared their exile unlawful and that they had a right to return to some of the outlying islands. Until then the Chagossians, now scattered between Mauritius, the Seychelles and the UK, had been prevented from even visiting their parents’ graves. The then Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, said he accepted the court’s ruling, and said that the Chagossians would be allowed to live on some of the islands — other than Diego Garcia. However, in 2004 the UK government used an Order in Council, a Royal Prerogative, to prevent the Chagossians from returning. No official reason has been given, but the Americans, in the post-September 11 climate, are known to have made it clear that they did not want the native population to return as it was a pivotal base for full spectral dominance and hundreds of deadly bombing sorties in the War on Terror™ (TWOT™).

The Chagossians challenged Order in December in the Court of Appeal and are currently awaiting the outcome. If the verdict goes their way, the government is expected to appeal further delaying the process. However, in a hugely symbolic move over last weekend more than 100 Chagossians made the 1,300 sea journey from Mauritius for the first trip back to their native land for nearly 40 years. The trip will encompass the islands of Peros Banhos, Salomon and Diego Garcia, the main islands on which the Chagossians lived, and will include visits to their former homes, churches and the graves of their ancestors.

“I have dreamed of being able to visit my native land for 38 years now. We are all very excited. Our island community has been shattered by its expulsion from our homeland,” said Olivier Bancoult before departing. He leads the Mauritius-based community of Chagossians that has lobbied for the trip. Ilana Rapaport, a spokesperson for Minority Rights Group International, which has campaigned on behalf of the islanders, said: “Their removal and the persistent excuses and legal wrangling the UK Government have undertaken to deny the islanders their land rights is shocking.”

“The Government have failed to explain why the Chagossians and the US military cannot coexist on the islands. The rights of the Chagossians, themselves British subjects, still seem to be well below the Government’s agenda of satisfying US foreign policy needs.” Ms Rapaport added: “If the High Court supports the Chagossians a second time, then this visit ought to be the start of a long-awaited resettlement.”

Check out John Pilger’s great 2004 documentary, Stealing A Nation here for more on the plight of those who were forced out of Diego Garcia.

 

 

Guatemala’s skin-deep peace

It might be ten years almost to the day since peace accords were signed in Guatemala which were meant to usher in an era of much needed peace and construction to the shattered Central American state, but state-sponsored terror continues to fuel fear across the countryside, as Amnesty International report here in a recent briefing.

Since President Óscar Berger came to office in January 2004, thousands of rural families in Guatemala have been evicted from their homes. Most of them had been occupying land to protest against violations of their labour rights or were living on land where ownership was disputed. During many evictions, security forces used excessive force, resulting in beatings and other ill-treatment, the destruction of homes and property, and, in some cases, killings. The evictions have also been marked by inadequate provision of basic safeguards, including alternative housing and food. In some cases, those being evicted also resorted to violence, resulting in deaths and injuries on both sides.

The 1996 Peace Accords that formally ended the conflict included key commitments from the government on land issues. They provided a comprehensive framework for resolving agrarian disputes and addressing the underlying causes of rural poverty, inequality in the distribution of land and the exclusion of Mayan peoples from the political process. If implemented, the Peace Accords would have constituted a significant contribution to the resolution of agrarian disputes.

However, Amnesty International believes that little progress has been made. On coming to power, President Berger symbolically relaunched the Peace Accords. More than two years into his administration, the provisions aimed at addressing the underlying causes of agrarian disputes are yet to be implemented. Deference by government authorities to the demands of landowners and impunity for human rights violations in the context of agrarian disputes has exacerbated an already desperate situation.

 

• Click here for examples of oppression and human rights violations in this desperately unequal society.

 

 

Illegal timber feeds China’s wood needs

The mounting crisis from illegally feeding Chinas timber craze

Imagine a football pitch as you’ve seen it many times. It’s a bit less than one hectare in area. Now imagine that same football pitch packed end-to-end with a pile of wood around twice the height of Mt. Everest. That’s the amount of forest that is imported into China every year, and the pile is getting higher.

The developed industrial economies of North America, Europe, Japan and South Korea are timber gluttons and consume more timber than the planet can provide in a sustainable way. That’s the bad news. The worse news is that the timber over consumption habit is beginning to rub off on the emerging mega-economy of China, reports Greenpeace A report recently released by Greenpeace called ‘Sharing the Blame’ shows that in the past 10 years, timber imports into China have increased by an enormous 4.5 fold to the double Mt. Everest sized pile mentioned above. This huge volume of extra timber isn’t all being consumed in China however, with exports of timber products from China increasing by 3.5 fold in the same time period.

Whilst demand for timber products has risen sharply in China, the demand in the world’s big industrial economies has remained at an all time high. China has become the clearinghouse for the world’s timber with every second tropical tree traded in the world being sent to China. Unfortunately, much of the merchandise is stolen goods.

The forest is felled in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, where between 76 to 90 percent of the logging is illegal, and shipped to China to be processed into plywood, furniture or paper and exported to the forest hungry economies of North America, Europe, Japan and South Korea. ‘Sharing the Blame’ isn’t only about the frightening statistics of the global timber trade; it follows the illegally logged timber from the forest to the finished product in the shops and names the companies behind the illicit trade.

After being contacted by Greenpeace and presented with the evidence, some international timber buyers have already started to address the issue of purchasing timber products made from illegal logging. Numerous companies in Europe have made commitments to stop purchasing Chinese plywood made from illegally logged timber from Papua New Guinea.

The Chinese government has also started to publicly acknowledge that consumption issues must be tackled in China. In recognition of this problem, in late March of this year, the government imposed a 5 percent consumption tax on disposable chopsticks and hardwood flooring to try to stem the tide of forest destruction.

Whilst this is a good start, the fact that so many companies internationally have been purchasing illegal timber products without knowing or caring shows that governments of the world have to get tough with the illegal logging trade and ban imports of illegal timber products.

The responsibility for ending the over-exploitation of the world’s last forests is shared equally between the producer and the consumer countries. The developed industrial economies of North America, Europe, Japan and South Korea need to dramatically reduce their consumption of timber products and China needs to find a way to develop its economy without simply following the poor example of the timber gluttons.

After all the numbers are added up and put into neat rows and columns of figures, it is easy to forget that what isn’t shown in the statistics are lives; people’s lives and the lives of the plants and animals of the forests. And, Greenpeace concludes, if you put everything back together, all the pieces combine to equal a couple of Mt. Everest’s of ancient forest disappearing before our eyes.

 

 

UK’s underage arms dealers

Britain has always exercised a holier-than-thou approach to arms trade, maintaining it really does not deal with dodgy factions, while all the time propping up corrupt dictatorships across the world with the latest armaments from the likes of BAE Systems. And even when Tony Bliar comes up with new allegedly stricter controls to ensure rogue regimes cannot deal with British arms groups, these too have been shown to be merely child s play.

A group of high school students managed to exploit loopholes in Britain’s arms controls to import torture equipment and arrange a series of arms deals with countries under embargo, it was revealed last week.

The teenagers, from Lord William’s School in Oxfordshire, imported equipment including thumb cuffs from Taiwan, wall restraints from Poland and a Chinese ‘sting stick’ — a metal bar covered with spikes — using nothing more than a letterhead, an email address, a cell phone and a small amount of money. They also managed to arrange deals to export arms to countries covered by British or other national arms embargos, including the sale of Pakistani grenade launchers to Syria, Turkish guns to Mali, and South African rifles to Israel.

The ease with which the students managed to evade Britain’s restrictions on small arms and torture equipment is exposed in a Channel Four documentary entitled After School Arms Club, broadcast last Monday. Malcolm Wicks, the government minister responsible for export controls, has asked the group for a report on how they were able to import the torture equipment, after they presented him with the Chinese sting stick outside the Houses of Parliament.

‘It should not be legal, and yet we’ve proved that children, who by law are not allowed to drink alcohol, can broker arms from countries along a trade route from Poland to China, Israel to South Africa. And many of these arms are used against — or tragically even by — children,’ said Maddy Fry, 16, a pupil at Lord Williams’s school, according to the Guardian newspaper.

George Lear, head of citizenship at the school, said: ‘We were stunned by what we could achieve. Nobody questioned us at any stage.’ Teachers at the school should be slightly on edge for fear of thumb screw retribution if they give a bad mark to a student!

 

 

Looking for help outside the box

With the Earth burning up quicker than a bad day in Fallujah, are you doing all you can to ensure mankind continues to exist? As well as cutting down on your own personal CO2 emissions, we would recommend you download the latest version of the SETI — a tool that searches for extra terrestrial life forms while your computer is doing nothing else. The more people that download this simple, non-interfering software the greater chance we have of securing an exit strategy from planet Earth in the coming decades before we all morph into sunburned amphibians as the planets temperatures continue to soar and its sea levels continue to rise.

The folk over at SETI (The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) are confident we will have our first ET moment shortly. Aliens will be talking to us within the next 20 years, according to SETI’s Dr Seth Shostak. “We’ll know we are not alone between the years 2020 and 2025,” he told The Sun last week. “This will be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, story of all time.”

His group, which is linked to the University of California, is building 350 telescopes to listen for alien, something you can help realise by donating cash on their website.

Dr Shostak believes ETs could already be listening to Earth. And he thinks alien life may have landed in clumps of bacteria cells. Speaking at a conference last week, Shostak highlighted where we are most likely to come across extra terrestrials. He pointed to a number of moons that are almost certainly covered by ice sheets many miles thick that could host frigid characters in liquid water far below the sheets. In addition, he noted NASA’s recent discovery of what appear to be geysers spewing out liquid water from Saturn’s moon Enceladus — a much more hospitable environment.

The search for life, however, will be just one part of the exploration story in the coming years. Humans may well set up shop in space stations or even plunk down on large asteroids.

“Our generation did the map, and the next generation will presumably embark on the next phase and that is colonization,” Shostak said. And when that first encounter with extra terrestrials takes place, the Russians should be in a position to help out having just opened a new UFO and Paranormal College, run by the Ufology Commission in Togliatti following a spate of crop circles in the region.

According to Tatiana Markova, chairwoman of the Commission, the school was opened in response to renewed local interest in the paranormal.

“We teach people how to spot a flying saucer, where you should go to see one and how to react if you meet an extraterrestrial.”

Markova insists she and her colleagues are qualified to teach mankind how to deal with the first encounter with an alien race.

She said: “We have studied several of the most popular flying saucer routes and filmed the phenomena we saw.

“For example we have lots of video footage featuring the type of UFOs called Belgian triangles, they are frequent visitors to our city.” She added that after students learn the theory of ‘Ufology’ they are taken out into the field to practice their skills.

“However we are not going to take crowds of amateurs to UFO sighting spots just to satisfy their curiosity. We expect newcomers to extend our UFO-sightings map.”

 

• Check out Dr Seth Shostak’s out-of-this-world radio show here.

 

 

Stuff we like

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

Breathless in HK
Hong Kong air pollution is getting worse and worse. Some is from the mainland, but as almost all of Hong Kong’s manufacturing base is also in mainland, we deserve more of the blame for that than perhaps we’d like to admit. Far more easy to change and — even more importantly — legislate over, is Hong Kong’s almost complete dependence on coal for our electricity.
The revolution is parked right next to a power station that is bigger than the town we live in, and we can attest to the dirt we get showered with from the three iconic chimneys of Lamma. So if you are a Hong Kong citizen, sign the petition below:
English: http://www.foe.org.hk/Ealert/energy/energy_eng.asp
Chinese: http://www.foe.org.hk/Ealert/energy/energy.asp

 

Scott Ritter on the US cult of militarism vs. the antiwar movement
Ritter argues the anti-war is on the verge of collapse, and offers a few tips in waging a war in this Alternet blog essay.

 

Video 30 days as a Muslim
Morgan Spurlock, he of “Supersize Me” now has his own show, which looks to be wonderfully interesting: the concept in essence is that people have their prejudices assaulted for thirty days by living with those they fear or hate. This episode on ICH, a US Christian lives with a US Muslim family for 30 days. He finds out, to his great surprise that the muslims are ordinary decent human beings just like his neighbours, not terrorists after all. Despite his paranoia about sleeper cells, he is also fairly indignant that when wearing muslim style clothing he is pulled over frisked and X-rayed at the airport.

 

Video 911 — What really happened?
A group of academics have recently posed an alternative theory to what caused the ultimate destruction of the World Trade Centre. Apparently this theory is now gaining momentum.

 

Video Inside The World Trade Center On 9/11
Information Clearing House is unclear on the source, but we presume this is footage from Jules and Gedeon Naudet, who were filming a documentary about a probationary firefighter in NYC on the day of 9/11.

 

Chavezwatch Exxon bugs out
ExxonMobil has dropped out of Venezuela, after it resisted tax increases and contract changes that will turn 32 privately run oil fields over to state control. Chavez life insurance premiums continue to skyrocket!!

 

Chavezwatch Channel 4 reworks Chavez in US’ image
Meanwhile John Pilger lambastes the UK’s Channel 4 over a news piece defining Chavez as a dictator, by their Washington (or is that Pentagon?) Correspondent, Jonathan Rugman. Particularly fatuous was the grouch of being held for 30 hours after filming a military installation: under the equivalent “civilised” UK’s laws you can be arrested and charged for walking home down a cycle path: would the real police state please stand up? And in light of the item above this, how impartial a judge of Chavez is the former president of Exxon Venezuela? Want to complain along with Mr Pilger? Email jonathan.rugman@itn.co.uk or jon.snow@itn.co.uk

 

Conspiracy of the Week
…and some advice from Castro in order to avoid assassination as well as avoiding cigar gifts and wet suits, the Cuban leader actually burns every pair of pants he wears each and every day according to Sky News.

 

Greenpeace global snapshot not a pretty picture
This page on the Greenpeace site contains some frightening maps of the state we are in with regards to the world’s forests and oceans.

 

We’re Sorry: Former US soldiers on the personal cost of war in Iraq
The BBC’s Newsnight follows a group of US veterans who have returned from Iraq deeply affected by the experience, and now protest the war.

 

Eviction: another globalised product
Not just confined to Diego Garcia, and Palestine, the nasty phenomenon that is globalised eviction is sweeping the world as reported by the folk over at GNN.

Bush’s Top 10 ‘Vietnam’ Mistakes
Normally, the comparisons to Vietnam aren’t a good fit, but there are some interesting comparisons to be had in this list:
1. Underestimating the enemy.
2. Deceiving the American public about how badly the war is going.
3. Blaming the media’s negative coverage for plunging popular support of the war.
4. Artificial statistics cannot measure progress in a counterinsurgency war.
5. Initial excessive use of force instead of a plan to win hearts and minds.
6. Failed “search and destroy” belatedly gave way to clearing and holding ground.
7. “Iraqization” of the war parallels the unsuccessful “Vietnamization” in the 1970s.
8. As in Vietnam, there has been no “date certain” for withdrawal of U.S. forces.
9. Retention of incompetent policymakers.
10. Starting a war for concocted reasons, which did not hold up under scrutiny.
Read the full article at the Guerrilla News Network.

 

Running roughshod over sweatshop footwear
Since Nike took them over, Converse have been off the little red email’s footwear options list. So we enjoyed this corporateswine.net subvert of the logo. If you still like the shoes, why not try Adbusters’ black spot shoes?

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

The Meteor-illogical Office report
This week, we ask: if the “there’s no global warming honest, no, really, we might be funded by big energy, but trust us” brigade are right, then how come the air above the Antarctic is warming faster than anywhere else?