WHEN MADNESS PREYS ON DREAMS
Yvette e-mailed that she was still in Hargeisa and was safe, which was a relief.
Only days ago, a British couple was killed inside their residence in a town in Somaliland. Before that, Annalena Tonelli, a well-loved Italian aid worker, was murdered in the tuberculosis hospital she ran in Borama, the hometown of Somaliland’s president.
No one is certain who is behind the killings but police patrols have been increased while the houses and offices of members of UN agencies and international organizations, including the NGO Yvette belongs to, were provided security by the government.
Yvette is a Filipina activist in her early 30s who has spent over a decade of her life working with poor Filipino rural communities. Married to a loving husband and mother to a beautiful daughter, Yvette floored her friends when she announced some time ago that she would be working in Somaliland with an international development organization.
In Somaliland, where the life expectancy is 47 years and where one out of five children do not live to see their fifth birthday.
Par for the course, it seems, for a soaring restless Filipina soul, who also happens to be a godmother to my five-year old son.
“There is a woman in Somalia, scraping for pearls on the roadside,” writes Yvette in her blogspot jadedafrica.dekarabaw.com, which has attracted a global audience be cause of its elegance, in sight and account of Filipino solidarity and stoicism. “There’s a force stronger than nature, keeps her will alive. This is how she’s dying, dying to survive. Don’t know what she’s made of. I would like to be that brave.”
Yvette told me when she was in the country a few months ago that anti-Western sentiments ran high among Somalilanders after the American invasion of Iraq.
Her words came back to me while I was reading about the slain British nationals, and they troubled me.
Yvette is a foreigner too, a citizen of a predominantly Catholic country with all too close ties to the US. And I thought about Abdul Jabar, who was sentenced just weeks ago in an Indonesian court to 20 years’ imprisonment for his role in the car-bombing of the Jakarta residence of then-Philippine Ambassador Leonides Caday in August 2000.
Didn’t the vile group to which Jabar belonged single out the Philippine Embassy to avenge Muslims killed in the conflict in southern Philippines? A conflict that is increasingly seen as an extension of an undeclared war against Islam.
A war perceived to be led by a Christian fundamentalist leadership in America and perpetrated by a stooge Philippine government. A not-too-wild perception fostered by a Philippine government recklessly displaying to the world its fealty to America’s imperial ambitions.
I wonder with anxiety what shape the whirlwind will take next.
And which place -- or hearth -- it will next visit.
Extremist Islam is deepening its presence in Africa.
In Somaliland, clerics calling themselves “the Authority for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” are now trying to impose draconian moral codes on Somaliland citizens.
“These people are out to eradicate our culture, our traditions, our songs, our poetry and our folklore dances,” said a Somalilander lamenting the spread of Islamic extremism. “They brand our traditional children’s stories of Diin iyo Dacawo, arrawelo and dheg-dheer as bawdy literature that has no place in the puritanical society that they aspire to build.”
In Tanzania, writes Paul Marshall in The Washington Post, “Saudi Arabia is funding new mosques . . . and fundamentalists have bombed bars and beaten women they thought were inadequately covered.” Marshall laments that the United States has done little to confront this threat “either by challenging those exporting radical Islam or by promoting democracy.”
Much truth here. There is no democracy in Occupied Iraq, and in Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai is reduced to playing the role of mayor of Kabul.
And what about Saudi Arabia, the kingdom from which 15 of the September 11 hijackers came from? The place of origin of Wahhabism -- the extremist strain of Islam that is slowly eating into Africa. The brutal kingdom formerly inhabited by a certain Osama bin Laden.
Since September 11, 2001, US bilateral trade with Saudi Arabia has surged by 61 percent.
A fine partnership -- America remains the world’s top arms exporter and a top customer of Saudi oil, and Saudi Arabia the world’s top oil exporter and the top customer of US arms exports.
An “asymmetrical interdependence,” as former US National Security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski described it, slakes the empire’s addiction to oil and secures the ever tenuous rule of the Saudi monarchy.
The fornication of oily royalty and imperialism which continues to seed the extremism that brought the war to America’s shores and, perhaps, to all those unfortunate enough to be identified with the empire’s unholy alliances.
I fear for the safety of those who may be haunted by the specters spawned by the wedding of greed with greed -- like Filipino workers in Saudi Arabia slaving away to nourish the hope of a better future for their families. Or people like Yvette, whose devotion to the lingering dream of a better world keeps her in Somaliland.
“When valor preys on reason,” said Shakespeare, “it eats the sword it fights with.”
And yet there is not even any valor here.
In America’s phony ‘war on terror,’ there is only madness, fueled by the hubris of great powers and sustained by the cowardice of the leaders of small nations who prostitute themselves in exchange for a few pieces of silver.
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Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Opinion TODAY and abs-cbnnews.com
Recent political and travel essays by Renato Redentor Constantino. Email Red at redcosmo(at)gmail(dot)com.
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Monday, October 20, 2003
KYOTO PROTOCOL: THE BALL IS WITH VILLAR
We had our chance last week. The Philippine government could have taken a break from its pom-pom waving and caused the passage of the climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol.
A ratified greenhouse accord would at least have given the Philippine government a semblance of independence. It would at least have signaled our country’s resolve in pursuing another preventive war, the genuine one, which demands to be waged.
Not the appalling “war on terror” but the campaign to prevent serious damage being inflicted on the world’s climate.
A “war” that intends to phase out the use of fossil fuels and not a flimsy oilman’s excuse to invade a sovereign country in order to grab its oil.
“Long-term security is threatened by a problem at least as dangerous as chemical, nuclear or biological weapons, or indeed international terrorism: human-induced climate change,” said Sir John Houghton, the UK’s most eminent climate scientist, in a blistering attack on Bush in July. Houghton took Bush to task for “an abdication of leadership of epic proportions.”
Climate change. It’s the greatest environmental threat facing the planet today and yet the US, the country most responsible for emitting the greatest portion of greenhouse gases that has caused the alarming warming of the planet, has gone on a trajectory that, if not changed, can only spell ruin for the entire global populace.
A trajectory de fined by America’s twin acts of aggression to secure the fossil-fuel re sources of the Middle East and Central Asia.
And, before that, its disgraceful withdrawal from the Kyoto climate treaty, which seeks, among other things, to curb the use of oil, gas and coal.
The US represents only 4 percent of the world population yet it produces 25 percent of global greenhouse gases and the US has no wish for that to change. Or maybe, more accurately, the fossil fuel interests lodged firmly in Washington does not want that to change. Companies like Enron and Exxon-Mobil didn’t lavish the Bush campaign for nothing. And high on their priorities was the gutting of the Kyoto Protocol, which requires industrialized countries to return their greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels in order to stabilize the climate.
The Protocol merely calls for the start of reductions among developed nations, and a very fractional reduction at that. Yet the Rogue State still said no, and in 2001 it rejected the Protocol.
It is a fact that our excessive burning of fossil fuels is raising our planet’s thermostat to dangerous levels, provoking “an unprecedented catalogue of weather-related disasters” like storms, floods, droughts and fires.
According to Munich Reinsurance, the lead player in a business sector considered by many as a canary in the coal mine on the issue of global warming, “[T]he insurance industry must be prepared to face quite new loss dimensions in terms of natural catastrophes because the loss trends will continue to grow worse. [W]e are still at the beginning of a truly menacing development. [T]he negative effects of climate change will become more and more pronounced, manifesting themselves, especially in the form of extreme weather situations.”
As the World Meteorological Organization propounded in July, “Recent scientific assessments indicate that, as the global temperatures continue to warm due to climate change, the number and intensity of extreme events might increase.”
It makes one think of the estimated 15,000 people who died in France in August as a result of the deadliest heat wave ever to hit the country. Or the swift collapse in March last year of Larsen B, an Antarctic ice shelf 200 meters thick with a surface area the size of a small European country.
According to Dr. Warwick Vincent, a biologist in polar eco logy, “the most recent changes are substantial and correlate with this recent increase in warming seen from the 1960s to the present. A critical threshold has been passed.”
Need it be mentioned that the Philippines, an archipelagic country, is especially vulnerable to climate change? Increases in sea levels are expected to inundate low-lying areas in Metro Manila and Metro Cebu. Irrigation waters are projected to be subject to increased salinity.
More frequent and severe storms and droughts pose grave risks to Philippine agriculture. Diseases like dengue borne by insects that thrive in warming climates are expected to become more widespread as temperatures increase and government spending for health services deteriorates.
“For the American superpower, the Philippines has renewed geopolitical importance, in the light of the global antiterrorist campaign. [T]he US presence in East Asia should increase in scale and intensity,” said Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople who, like the rest of the Arroyo administration officials, fawned over the visit of US President Bush to the Philippines on October 18.
The same Ople who said only months ago when he was still a senator that “allies of the United States frown on what they perceive to be US unilateralism. The world’s only superpower must be accountable to people outside their country because what the US does affects people outside its borders.” Ople was referring to the issue of global warming, which he said “is not a distant threat but an imminent one, especially in the Philippines.”
A global threat which the Kyoto Protocol seeks to alleviate.
Unfortunately, said Ople at the Philippine Senate, when most of his vertebrae was still intact, “the United States is the biggest single stumbling block to the implementation of the Kyoto treaty.” If the Foreign Affairs secretary can’t locate the spine that once upon a time empowered him to say this, perhaps his former colleagues at the Senate can help him in his search.There is still time for Sen. Manuel Villar, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, to teach the Arroyo and Bush administrations a lesson about leadership. A lesson that may be taught via the Senate’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.
Passage of the treaty would proclaim that if the head of the superpower and his underlings will not take the steps necessary to protect Philippine interests and the global commons, a few good men in the Philippine Senate can and will.
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Sources:
“According to World Meteorological Organization, extreme weather events might increase,” World Meteorological Organization press release (WMO-No 695), Geneva, July 2, 2003; “Climate expert accuses PM of cowardice,” Paul Brown, The Guardian, July 28, 2003; Philippine Senate Resolution “Urging the realignment of the Philippines with the European Union and the majority of the world’s countries supporting the Kyoto Treaty which seeks to curtail the emission of industrial gases that produce global warming” S.B. 137 introduced by Senator Blas F. Ople, Twelfth Congress of the Republic of the Philippines, First Regular Session.
We had our chance last week. The Philippine government could have taken a break from its pom-pom waving and caused the passage of the climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol.
A ratified greenhouse accord would at least have given the Philippine government a semblance of independence. It would at least have signaled our country’s resolve in pursuing another preventive war, the genuine one, which demands to be waged.
Not the appalling “war on terror” but the campaign to prevent serious damage being inflicted on the world’s climate.
A “war” that intends to phase out the use of fossil fuels and not a flimsy oilman’s excuse to invade a sovereign country in order to grab its oil.
“Long-term security is threatened by a problem at least as dangerous as chemical, nuclear or biological weapons, or indeed international terrorism: human-induced climate change,” said Sir John Houghton, the UK’s most eminent climate scientist, in a blistering attack on Bush in July. Houghton took Bush to task for “an abdication of leadership of epic proportions.”
Climate change. It’s the greatest environmental threat facing the planet today and yet the US, the country most responsible for emitting the greatest portion of greenhouse gases that has caused the alarming warming of the planet, has gone on a trajectory that, if not changed, can only spell ruin for the entire global populace.
A trajectory de fined by America’s twin acts of aggression to secure the fossil-fuel re sources of the Middle East and Central Asia.
And, before that, its disgraceful withdrawal from the Kyoto climate treaty, which seeks, among other things, to curb the use of oil, gas and coal.
The US represents only 4 percent of the world population yet it produces 25 percent of global greenhouse gases and the US has no wish for that to change. Or maybe, more accurately, the fossil fuel interests lodged firmly in Washington does not want that to change. Companies like Enron and Exxon-Mobil didn’t lavish the Bush campaign for nothing. And high on their priorities was the gutting of the Kyoto Protocol, which requires industrialized countries to return their greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels in order to stabilize the climate.
The Protocol merely calls for the start of reductions among developed nations, and a very fractional reduction at that. Yet the Rogue State still said no, and in 2001 it rejected the Protocol.
It is a fact that our excessive burning of fossil fuels is raising our planet’s thermostat to dangerous levels, provoking “an unprecedented catalogue of weather-related disasters” like storms, floods, droughts and fires.
According to Munich Reinsurance, the lead player in a business sector considered by many as a canary in the coal mine on the issue of global warming, “[T]he insurance industry must be prepared to face quite new loss dimensions in terms of natural catastrophes because the loss trends will continue to grow worse. [W]e are still at the beginning of a truly menacing development. [T]he negative effects of climate change will become more and more pronounced, manifesting themselves, especially in the form of extreme weather situations.”
As the World Meteorological Organization propounded in July, “Recent scientific assessments indicate that, as the global temperatures continue to warm due to climate change, the number and intensity of extreme events might increase.”
It makes one think of the estimated 15,000 people who died in France in August as a result of the deadliest heat wave ever to hit the country. Or the swift collapse in March last year of Larsen B, an Antarctic ice shelf 200 meters thick with a surface area the size of a small European country.
According to Dr. Warwick Vincent, a biologist in polar eco logy, “the most recent changes are substantial and correlate with this recent increase in warming seen from the 1960s to the present. A critical threshold has been passed.”
Need it be mentioned that the Philippines, an archipelagic country, is especially vulnerable to climate change? Increases in sea levels are expected to inundate low-lying areas in Metro Manila and Metro Cebu. Irrigation waters are projected to be subject to increased salinity.
More frequent and severe storms and droughts pose grave risks to Philippine agriculture. Diseases like dengue borne by insects that thrive in warming climates are expected to become more widespread as temperatures increase and government spending for health services deteriorates.
“For the American superpower, the Philippines has renewed geopolitical importance, in the light of the global antiterrorist campaign. [T]he US presence in East Asia should increase in scale and intensity,” said Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople who, like the rest of the Arroyo administration officials, fawned over the visit of US President Bush to the Philippines on October 18.
The same Ople who said only months ago when he was still a senator that “allies of the United States frown on what they perceive to be US unilateralism. The world’s only superpower must be accountable to people outside their country because what the US does affects people outside its borders.” Ople was referring to the issue of global warming, which he said “is not a distant threat but an imminent one, especially in the Philippines.”
A global threat which the Kyoto Protocol seeks to alleviate.
Unfortunately, said Ople at the Philippine Senate, when most of his vertebrae was still intact, “the United States is the biggest single stumbling block to the implementation of the Kyoto treaty.” If the Foreign Affairs secretary can’t locate the spine that once upon a time empowered him to say this, perhaps his former colleagues at the Senate can help him in his search.There is still time for Sen. Manuel Villar, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, to teach the Arroyo and Bush administrations a lesson about leadership. A lesson that may be taught via the Senate’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.
Passage of the treaty would proclaim that if the head of the superpower and his underlings will not take the steps necessary to protect Philippine interests and the global commons, a few good men in the Philippine Senate can and will.
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Sources:
“According to World Meteorological Organization, extreme weather events might increase,” World Meteorological Organization press release (WMO-No 695), Geneva, July 2, 2003; “Climate expert accuses PM of cowardice,” Paul Brown, The Guardian, July 28, 2003; Philippine Senate Resolution “Urging the realignment of the Philippines with the European Union and the majority of the world’s countries supporting the Kyoto Treaty which seeks to curtail the emission of industrial gases that produce global warming” S.B. 137 introduced by Senator Blas F. Ople, Twelfth Congress of the Republic of the Philippines, First Regular Session.
Monday, October 13, 2003
BLAST FROM THE PAST
Booze time at the bar or a quiet evening at home paying homage to the artists. So many things American to celebrate on October 18.
Blues giant Chuck Berry was born on this day in 1926. The same birthday as jazz great Wynton Marsalis, who was born in 1961 in New Orleans.
Unfortunately, the Philippines won’t be commemorating the birthdays of these magical artists. The Philippine government prefers the music of imperial America -- a more suitable accompaniment to the famed multiple cartwheels of its cheerleading.
We can expect the garlands to be ready by October 18, when George W. Bush arrives in the Philippines to applaud the Arroyo administration’s Bambi-eyed support to America’s “War on Terror.”
One more Filipino government shamefully displaying its utter lack of historical memory.
“[W]e acted in Iraq . . . in one of the swiftest and most humane military campaigns in history,” said George Bush on September 7, in a speech that likely caused his ratings to further plunge.
What a funny thing to say after slaughtering thousands of Iraqi civilians.
Some things apparently never change.
Gen. Arthur MacArthur also called the Philippine-American War at the turn of the last century “the most legitimate and humane war ever conducted on the face of the earth.” A war where the estimated number of Filipinos who died as a result of America’s annexation went from 250,000 to one million.
No one knows the exact figures, of course. Only dead Americans were counted by the US Army then. A practice continued by the US Army in Iraq today.
Some things never do change.
“The boys go for the enemy as if they were chasing jack-rabbits,” said Colonel Funston of the 20th Kansas Volunteers as his men slaughtered Filipinos defending the fledgling Philippine republic against the American invaders.
“I, for one, hope that Uncle Sam will apply the chastening rod, good, hard and plenty, and lay it on until [the Filipinos] come into the reservation and promise to be good ‘Injuns.’”
Here is an American pilot talking about the joys of napalm while America was attempting to “liberate” Vietnam: “We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn’t so hot -- if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene -- now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they added Willie Peter [white phosphorous] so’s to make it burn better. It’ll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.”
And here is US Gen. John Kelly articulating his desire to improve the plight of wretched Iraqis during America’s invasion of Iraq in April:
“They stand, they fight, sometimes they run when we engage them. But often they run into our machine guns and we shoot them down like the morons they are . . . They appear willing to die. We are trying our best to help them out in that endeavor.”
By such uncanny love does America inherit the world’s affections.
In 1899 the American Anti-Imperialist League crafted a platform that sought to steer the United States away from its desire to annex the Philippines. The manifesto, which opposed the annexation of the Philippines because it ran counter to America’s traditions, should be required reading today for all:
“We insist that the subjugation of any people is ‘criminal aggression’ and open disloyalty to the distinctive principles of our government . . . We demand the immediate cessation of the war . . . We propose to contribute to the defeat of any person or party that stands for the forcible subjugation of any people. We shall oppose for reelection all who in the White House or in Congress betray American liberty in pursuit of un-American ends . . . We hold with Abraham Lincoln, that “no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. When the white man governs himself, that is self-government, but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government -- that is despotism.”’
Funny that Emperor Bush is arriving in the Philippines on October 18 -- the exact same day 104 years ago that the League’s Platform was created.
----
Op-Ed TODAY and abscbnnews.com
Booze time at the bar or a quiet evening at home paying homage to the artists. So many things American to celebrate on October 18.
Blues giant Chuck Berry was born on this day in 1926. The same birthday as jazz great Wynton Marsalis, who was born in 1961 in New Orleans.
Unfortunately, the Philippines won’t be commemorating the birthdays of these magical artists. The Philippine government prefers the music of imperial America -- a more suitable accompaniment to the famed multiple cartwheels of its cheerleading.
We can expect the garlands to be ready by October 18, when George W. Bush arrives in the Philippines to applaud the Arroyo administration’s Bambi-eyed support to America’s “War on Terror.”
One more Filipino government shamefully displaying its utter lack of historical memory.
“[W]e acted in Iraq . . . in one of the swiftest and most humane military campaigns in history,” said George Bush on September 7, in a speech that likely caused his ratings to further plunge.
What a funny thing to say after slaughtering thousands of Iraqi civilians.
Some things apparently never change.
Gen. Arthur MacArthur also called the Philippine-American War at the turn of the last century “the most legitimate and humane war ever conducted on the face of the earth.” A war where the estimated number of Filipinos who died as a result of America’s annexation went from 250,000 to one million.
No one knows the exact figures, of course. Only dead Americans were counted by the US Army then. A practice continued by the US Army in Iraq today.
Some things never do change.
“The boys go for the enemy as if they were chasing jack-rabbits,” said Colonel Funston of the 20th Kansas Volunteers as his men slaughtered Filipinos defending the fledgling Philippine republic against the American invaders.
“I, for one, hope that Uncle Sam will apply the chastening rod, good, hard and plenty, and lay it on until [the Filipinos] come into the reservation and promise to be good ‘Injuns.’”
Here is an American pilot talking about the joys of napalm while America was attempting to “liberate” Vietnam: “We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn’t so hot -- if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene -- now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they added Willie Peter [white phosphorous] so’s to make it burn better. It’ll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.”
And here is US Gen. John Kelly articulating his desire to improve the plight of wretched Iraqis during America’s invasion of Iraq in April:
“They stand, they fight, sometimes they run when we engage them. But often they run into our machine guns and we shoot them down like the morons they are . . . They appear willing to die. We are trying our best to help them out in that endeavor.”
By such uncanny love does America inherit the world’s affections.
In 1899 the American Anti-Imperialist League crafted a platform that sought to steer the United States away from its desire to annex the Philippines. The manifesto, which opposed the annexation of the Philippines because it ran counter to America’s traditions, should be required reading today for all:
“We insist that the subjugation of any people is ‘criminal aggression’ and open disloyalty to the distinctive principles of our government . . . We demand the immediate cessation of the war . . . We propose to contribute to the defeat of any person or party that stands for the forcible subjugation of any people. We shall oppose for reelection all who in the White House or in Congress betray American liberty in pursuit of un-American ends . . . We hold with Abraham Lincoln, that “no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. When the white man governs himself, that is self-government, but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government -- that is despotism.”’
Funny that Emperor Bush is arriving in the Philippines on October 18 -- the exact same day 104 years ago that the League’s Platform was created.
----
Op-Ed TODAY and abscbnnews.com
Monday, October 06, 2003
ANNIVERSARY OF A WHISTLE BLOWER
Last September 30 was a day that marked many things.
It marked a day in 1955 when the rebel without a cause, James Dean, died from a car crash.
It marked the day when the magnificent Muhammad Ali collided with Smokin’ Joe Frazier for the third time. The Thrilla in Manila. September 30, 1975. Ali would survive the mighty Frazier’s threshing-blade punches and retain his heavyweight title via a 14th round TKO and claim the huge golden trophy donated by Ferdinand Marcos. The dictator was still one of America’s golden boys then.
Many things happened on September 30. On that day in 1946, 22 Nazi leaders were found guilty of war crimes in a trial which established “as a matter of international law that planning and launching an aggressive war was a criminal act.”
“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes,” said Robert Jackson, the lead US prosecutor at Nuremberg in 1946, “they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
Some anniversaries exist so that we may not forget. Like September 30, 1986, when Mordechai Vanunu was kidnapped by the Mossad in Rome. Vanunu was the world’s first independent nuclear arms inspector, and had he been Iranian, Iraqi or Korean, imperial America would still be throwing rose petals at his feet.
His only crime was to warn the world of the madness that had caused the leadership of his country, Israel, to stockpile up to 200 nuclear weapons. An act of conscience for which Vanunu would be kidnapped, drugged and shipped to Israel to be
sentenced in a secret trial to 18 years’ imprisonment.
For ‘treason’ and ‘espionage’ even “though he had received no payment and communicated with no foreign power.” A prisoner of conscience.
The first 11 years of his incarceration he would spend in complete isolation. Israel’s Justice Ministry -- a misplaced name -- would allow Vanunu to mingle with other prisoners only in 1998 -- when the ministry decided -- after 11 years -- that “extended isolation would damage his mental state.”
He will soon walk free when his abominable sentence ends on April next year -- unless the vile Sharon government comes up with another reason to keep the brave man behind bars.
According to his supporters, despite this possibility, “Vanunu’s opposition to nuclear weapons remains steadfast and his cruel punishment has not broken his spirit.” A spirit elevated by the desire for peace.
“His story reads like a tragic thriller. But it’s real life,” said Hilary Wainwright of the Guardian. Indeed.
From 1976 to 1985, Vanunu had been a technician at Dimona, Israel’s nuclear installation in the Negrev desert. It was at Dimona where he would learn of Israel’s secret production of plutonium for nuclear weapons. And it was at Dimona where he would document Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal.
The world learned of Israel’s clandestine armory when the London Sunday Times published Vanunu’s interviews and photographs as its banner story on October 5, 1986. Five days, tragically, after Vanunu was abducted by the thugs of the Mossad.
Vanunu’s photographs would reveal nuclear weapons devices, neutron bombs, deliverable warheads and “the underground plutonium separation facility where Israel was producing 40 kilograms annually.” In 1986. When America was still in bed with Saddam.
How time flies. Or does it? Who can tell?
The world is still hurtling to ward greater conflict -- courtesy of the American government’s bungling and hubris; the Bush administration is now hunting down erstwhile family friend Saddam; and, Israel remains America’s Middle East gendarme, as strong and arrogant as ever.Israel started the nuclear arms race in the Middle East, yet today it is “the only state in the Middle East region that is not party to the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.”
Israel is the world’s sixth largest nuclear power yet neither the Dimona nuclear weapons factory, which Vanunu exposed, nor Israel’s biological and chemical weapons factory in Nes Zion, are open to international inspection.
And yet America’s vaunted intelligence community continues to search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and cackles at Iran to admit it has “a nuclear weapons program.”
How much would things have changed if the world had listened to Vanunu, the ordinary technician who brings to mind John Ruskin’s words: “The highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes because of it.”
Vanunu. The man who diagnosed what was wrong with the world in a small poem he had written in Ashkelon prison: “I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don’t look left or right, don’t read the text. Don’t look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp.”
A salve and slavery Vanunu would refuse.
He refused to be a cog in the machine and chose to tell the world of the horrible secrets his country was harboring. And for his simple act people lifted him to the place of honor alongside Rigoberta Menchu, Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi. A citizen of the world.
Last September 30 was a day that marked many things.
It marked a day in 1955 when the rebel without a cause, James Dean, died from a car crash.
It marked the day when the magnificent Muhammad Ali collided with Smokin’ Joe Frazier for the third time. The Thrilla in Manila. September 30, 1975. Ali would survive the mighty Frazier’s threshing-blade punches and retain his heavyweight title via a 14th round TKO and claim the huge golden trophy donated by Ferdinand Marcos. The dictator was still one of America’s golden boys then.
Many things happened on September 30. On that day in 1946, 22 Nazi leaders were found guilty of war crimes in a trial which established “as a matter of international law that planning and launching an aggressive war was a criminal act.”
“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes,” said Robert Jackson, the lead US prosecutor at Nuremberg in 1946, “they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
Some anniversaries exist so that we may not forget. Like September 30, 1986, when Mordechai Vanunu was kidnapped by the Mossad in Rome. Vanunu was the world’s first independent nuclear arms inspector, and had he been Iranian, Iraqi or Korean, imperial America would still be throwing rose petals at his feet.
His only crime was to warn the world of the madness that had caused the leadership of his country, Israel, to stockpile up to 200 nuclear weapons. An act of conscience for which Vanunu would be kidnapped, drugged and shipped to Israel to be
sentenced in a secret trial to 18 years’ imprisonment.
For ‘treason’ and ‘espionage’ even “though he had received no payment and communicated with no foreign power.” A prisoner of conscience.
The first 11 years of his incarceration he would spend in complete isolation. Israel’s Justice Ministry -- a misplaced name -- would allow Vanunu to mingle with other prisoners only in 1998 -- when the ministry decided -- after 11 years -- that “extended isolation would damage his mental state.”
He will soon walk free when his abominable sentence ends on April next year -- unless the vile Sharon government comes up with another reason to keep the brave man behind bars.
According to his supporters, despite this possibility, “Vanunu’s opposition to nuclear weapons remains steadfast and his cruel punishment has not broken his spirit.” A spirit elevated by the desire for peace.
“His story reads like a tragic thriller. But it’s real life,” said Hilary Wainwright of the Guardian. Indeed.
From 1976 to 1985, Vanunu had been a technician at Dimona, Israel’s nuclear installation in the Negrev desert. It was at Dimona where he would learn of Israel’s secret production of plutonium for nuclear weapons. And it was at Dimona where he would document Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal.
The world learned of Israel’s clandestine armory when the London Sunday Times published Vanunu’s interviews and photographs as its banner story on October 5, 1986. Five days, tragically, after Vanunu was abducted by the thugs of the Mossad.
Vanunu’s photographs would reveal nuclear weapons devices, neutron bombs, deliverable warheads and “the underground plutonium separation facility where Israel was producing 40 kilograms annually.” In 1986. When America was still in bed with Saddam.
How time flies. Or does it? Who can tell?
The world is still hurtling to ward greater conflict -- courtesy of the American government’s bungling and hubris; the Bush administration is now hunting down erstwhile family friend Saddam; and, Israel remains America’s Middle East gendarme, as strong and arrogant as ever.Israel started the nuclear arms race in the Middle East, yet today it is “the only state in the Middle East region that is not party to the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.”
Israel is the world’s sixth largest nuclear power yet neither the Dimona nuclear weapons factory, which Vanunu exposed, nor Israel’s biological and chemical weapons factory in Nes Zion, are open to international inspection.
And yet America’s vaunted intelligence community continues to search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and cackles at Iran to admit it has “a nuclear weapons program.”
How much would things have changed if the world had listened to Vanunu, the ordinary technician who brings to mind John Ruskin’s words: “The highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes because of it.”
Vanunu. The man who diagnosed what was wrong with the world in a small poem he had written in Ashkelon prison: “I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don’t look left or right, don’t read the text. Don’t look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp.”
A salve and slavery Vanunu would refuse.
He refused to be a cog in the machine and chose to tell the world of the horrible secrets his country was harboring. And for his simple act people lifted him to the place of honor alongside Rigoberta Menchu, Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi. A citizen of the world.
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