January 30, 2005

Growing Dissent!


“The US has been imposing patents on life around the world through trade deals. In this case [Iraq], they invaded the country first, then imposed their patents. This is both immoral and unacceptable.” Shalini Bhutani, GRAIN.


“Seeds are the software - and we have the seeds.” - Anonymous corporate seed company executive.

With agriculture providing the main source of income for two and a half billion people the effects of biotechnology are immense. Farmers across the world are being locked into a cycle of dependency on biotechnology companies, who of course just want to help them to feed the world.

read more

January 28, 2005

Iraqi women organise economic boycott of US



Along the entrance to the Women's Will organization, Maxine Nash and I saw banners saying, "The Occupation Kills Your Sons, Don't Buy from the Occupiers," "Boycott the Invaders, and "Iraqi Mothers United Against Sectarian Fighting." Inside the meeting room another more colourful banner said, "No Peace Without Justice."

We walked into a teach-in already in progress. Hana Ibrahim, coordinator of Women's Will and Dr Balkiss, member of the board, (two middle aged Muslim women) alternatively spoke to about eighteen women and five men about one way Iraqis could resist the U.S. occupation.

"We would silently defeat the occupation, not by killing, but by refusing to cooperate economically with America," said Dr. Balkiss.

"America is trying to make this a free market for itself and treating Iraq like another state. We should have our own sovereignty. Even before the tanks came in, the media war succeeded in promoting American products. Iraqis have been buying the cheaper American products, and this has undermined our economy. The invasion has brought us poverty.

" Hana went on to say that there are many things women can do. "Any mother can refuse to buy Coca Cola and other U.S. products. We know how to manage our lives here. We have our own meats, fruits and vegetables. Iran and Syria don't deal with the U.S. economically and they do all right.

" She referred to Gandhi's urging the Indian people to spin their own thread and weave their own cloth.

During the discussion, one woman told the group about her relative's wedding, where the family served American soft drinks, but the people refused to drink it. When the family brought in Iraqi soft drinks, the guests drank them. Another woman said that she knew how to make her own shampoo out of natural products. "If they put in a McDonalds in Baghdad, we will boycott it," added another.

Hana concluded the meeting, "Women should work through civil society. Working nonviolently can strengthen peaceful structures. Small actions, such as putting up posters, and large actions, like demonstrations, all add up and make a difference. Whatever it takes, we will win."
By Peggy Gish
http://www.iraq-war.ru/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=37368


January 07, 2005

A DROP IN THE OCEAN

“If the money promised to the victims of the
tsunami falls far short of the amounts required,
it is partly because of other priorities,
namely the war on Iraq.” - author and
journalist, George Monbiot.


As our sympathy goes out to the many
thousands of victims of the tsunami disaster
and people across the world dig deep
into their pockets, disgust should be thrown
in the face of governments whose ‘generosity’
is not only dwarfed by the response
of the public, but is even more miserly when
compared to their own arms spending. Consider,
for instance, the cost of one B-2
bomber - a whopping $2 billion. US aid currently
equates to only a day and a half of
the money spent occupying Iraq, which
stands at $148 billion. The UK itself has already
spent £6 billion on massacring the
Iraq people.

The groundswell of empathy from ordinary
people in the face of such tragedy
makes us wonder just how long the war in
Iraq (or any other war) would last if we had
more pictures from the ground of the destruction
of Fallujah, the birth defects
caused by depleted uranium and people
killed and maimed by the aerial bombings.
Meanwhile, corporations have been
busy marketing their own brand of global
compassion. Take Starbucks, who in 2004
had a staggering market value of almost
$15 billion made off the backs of some of
the worlds 25 million grossly underpaid
coffee farmers - including those in Indonesia.
Their donation - a microscopic dent in
profits - is loaded less with generosity than
with cynicism and exploitation.
As for Coca-Cola, the bottled water they
are shipping to the victims in itself leaves a
trail of devastation and destruction. In India,
communities around Coca-Cola bottling
plants are experiencing severe water shortages
and the land has been polluted. The
abundance of pesticides used by Coca-
Cola, which includes DDT, has rendered the
agricultural land infertile, crippling the locals’
means of subsistence.

In the worst-hit province of Aceh, thousands
have been killed in a region which
has already suffered countless deaths and
mass displacements thanks to the Indonesian
military. Aceh is rich in resources - it
supplies much of the natural gas for Japan
and South Korea while Exxon Mobil take its
oil - yet remains in poverty.

Five years ago a million Acehnese (that’s
a quarter of the population!) held a massive
peaceful demonstration calling for a referendum
for a chance to vote on independence
from Indonesia. The military decided to crush
the movement, carrying out assassinations,
‘disappearing’ leaders and raping female activists.
Jafar Siddiq Hamsa, a leading international
spokesman for the Acehnese, returned
home in 2000. He was abducted, and his body
returned wrapped in barbed wire, with multiple
stab wounds and his face sliced off.
Meanwhile Exxon has spent millions over the
past three decades, hiring Indonesian security
forces to protect company facilities in
Aceh in full knowledge that troops were committing
gross violations of human rights
against civilians.

Allan Nairn, a journalist once jailed by
the Indonesian army, spells out the future:
“We should put this in perspective. Now
the world is looking at Aceh for the first
time ever and will probably never again look
at Aceh with this intensity, but as dramatic
as this act of nature is, it’s still far less than
the death toll over just a couple of years
due to hunger and poor nutrition, diarrhoea;
deaths mainly among children who live in
poverty in Aceh. It’s also dwarfed by the
military massacres carried out by the Indonesian
military in various places. They killed
200,000 in Timor. They killed anywhere from
400,000 to a million in Indonesia itself when
they consolidated power in 1965 to 1967.
So, the concern that the world has now for
this disaster is appropriate, but we should
have that concern all the time. When people
are dying, not just from natural tsunamis,
but from military or police bullets, often
paid for by the United States, or dying from
preventable hunger. There are also thousands
of American individuals who could
sit down right now and write a check for $50
million. They could save tens of thousands
of lives, but there’s no social pressure on
them to do that, because we live in a world
where it’s assumed that it’s okay to let people
starve while the dollar that can save them
sits idly in your pocket.”
Or as author Jonathan Schell put it
“Why, we might ask, is there, alongside
armed forces in almost every country, no
established international rescue army – no
well-funded international force fully
equipped with emergency gear ready to give
prompt aid in any large-scale catastrophe?
Initial funding might be $100 billion – a mere
10 percent of the trillion or so the world
spends annually on arms. Why, when human
need is the greatest, should the human
response always be left to improvisation?
There is no reason to think that nature had
any lesson in mind, whether about the
world’s bloated, multiplying nuclear arsenals
or anything else, when it shoved one
tectonic plate beneath another, causing the
earthquake that caused the tsunami. But we
are free to draw a lesson: Leave mass destruction
to nature. Our job should be to
protect and preserve life.”
* Read the interview with Allan Nairn
ww.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/
12/29/161219
*Read George Monbiot’s article on the tsunami
aid pledge and military spending at
www.alternet.org/waroniraq/20885/



January 01, 2005

Happy New Year

Year, star date, 2005...Rose Road, you were afterall, not a place for the collection of dead caracasses of cars, nor a place to wait or swelter, but a place to live; and live well. The tree frogs told us in the night. The moon standing high in the morning reminded us of the witchcraft into which we were born; the self-possession of trees discussing what; the time of day; the time of night; the hour of changes; the once house of breezes and the silence of the year end, beginnng of another; our happiness cat waving down on us at breakfast. The road lying outstretched for your hand. Happy New Year! The stars lay outstretched like sparks and tails. Happy New Year! The waking sounds awoke us. Happy New Year! from Australia, Simon, Molly & DC ( on our way overseas)

Molly