THIS CHRISTMAS OF JOYCE
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
December 6, 2004

There was of course no need for an apology but Joyce said sorry nonetheless. That really is my name, she said sheepishly.

My last name is Jimenez but aside from this, said Joyce, she had little else in common with a similarly named young Filipina actress who not too long ago had taken rapt Filipinos on trips down mammary lane.[1]

She is Joyce Jimenez, twenty eight years old, a wispy and articulate Filipina mother of four, a domestic help in Hong Kong. Or, rather, was a domestic worker in Hong Kong.

We met in the majestic Chek Lap Kok airport of Hong Kong the other week. Joyce was having trouble with the Chinese woman manning the Philippine Airlines check-in counter. The woman was insisting that Joyce pay a considerable amount because the bags she had checked-in were over the prescribed maximum weight per passenger.[2] But of course. Joyce was bringing home everything she had. She was terminated last November.

Joyce graduated from the Far Eastern University in 1997 with a degree in nursing. But she never got to take the board exams; she got pregnant, which in this fair and just world is somehow often equivalent to a career-ending development.

Hong Kong was the first overseas work of Joyce. Before that, she was a tired mother working as a pharmaceuticals saleslady in the province of Bulacan, a job which yielded little income. Before that, Joyce was a full-time tired mother struggling to make ends meet based on whatever her frequently missing husband would bring home.

One day, as many similar stories go, the ends just would not meet. Joyce decided it was time to try her luck abroad. She went to an employment agency to apply. There she was told that she had to take out an outrageous loan of 75,000 pesos from the agency itself before her papers would be processed. The loan, she was told, would be repaid through her Hong Kong salary.

"I went for the loan. I've some FEU classmates working as nurses in the US," Joyce recounted. "They told me some time ago that if I was able to accumulate eight straight months of employment as a maid in Hong Kong, they'd be able to get me a job in the States as a nursing assistant."

After only one month of work in Hong Kong, Joyce was fired.

"From the very beginning, she never liked me," said Joyce of her employer. One of her employers at least, to be fair. Joyce worked for a middle-aged Chinese couple with two girls; the husband was a kind lawyer in a prosperous Hong Kong firm. His wife worked as a secretary in a small trading company, and she despised Joyce.

"I don't know; she must have gone over my biodata," said Joyce. "Our first meeting, the wife was already angry. She pointed her finger at me and shouted that she didn't care if I was a nurse." Joyce often worked till two or three in the morning and would wake up at five but nothing Joyce did satisfied the wife.

Nursing insecurities, the wife would shower words of abuse on Joyce daily. "Except for one time when things got physical, I think I'm lucky I only received bad words," said Joyce. "That one time I was boiling water. The wife shoved me hard from the back because I didn't arrange the food in the refrigerator to her liking. I sidestepped the stove in time," Joyce said.

The feng shui of believers in Hong Kong: invite luck by choosing your domestic help well - a maid with a round lucky face or a maid born in the year of the dragon. The working class feng shui of Arroyo's Strong Republic: roll the dice; luck is a sane foreign employer.

After a day's grueling work, Joyce would confront her shadows in silence. "I hated the silence the most," she said, her youthful face framing her listless eyes. "It's when I miss my children the most."

"My employers doted on their eldest girl and they didn't hide their bias from the younger daughter," she told me at the waiting area of the airport's Gate 16. "What a shame," said Joyce. "They were both good children and we got along quickly even though the older one was starting to emulate the rudeness of her mother. Nothing I did ever pleased their mother. If I did the laundry she'd shout at me. If the girls ask for me to sit beside them so they could sleep their mother would hate it. But I resolved to endure it all just to complete my eight month employment."

After a month she was ordered to leave.

At least you will be with your kids this Christmas, I said softly but Joyce was no longer listening. "I wanted them to have something," she said more to herself.

In her first week away from her country, she said she feared her first impending Christmas away from her children. And yet now, apparently defeated and waiting for her flight, she dreaded returning from nothing with nothing.

She knew her kids looked forward to seeing her again after her absence. But she also dreamed of sending home a little more instead. Maybe a few new clothes. A little special food on the table. Perhaps some toys. A little more - just a little more - of what they haven't had.


NOTES:
[1] "A trip down mammary lane" is from the writer Jessica Zafra.
[2] It was the evening of November 25 to be exact. I was behind Joyce and I didn't have any baggage to check-in. I asked the Hong Kong airline official to just transfer the heavier bag of Joyce to my share so that she wouldn't have to pay overweight charges and to just paste the baggage claim stub on Joyce's ticket. We talked soon after and did not finish till it was time to board.

THE WELL OF VALOR
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
November 29, 2004

In a protest in London's Trafalgar Square, a feeble-bodied man stands defiantly against the war-mongers. He embraces the families of the dead and speaks a truth that so many continue to refuse to hear.

The US-led war on Iraq is based on lies, said Stephen Hawking, the most famous British scientist, who suffers from motor neurone disease. Except for the ability to move some fingers, Hawking is totally paralyzed. Yet as he spoke and led the London protest, he did not need arms or legs or speech.

"It has been a tragedy for all the families that have lost members," said Hawking during the protest, shaming the actively unconcerned. "As many as 100,000 people have died, half of them women and children. If that is not a war crime, what is?"[1]

Resistance is eternal and imperial rule ephemeral in the brief history of time. "One person with a belief," John Stuart Mill once said, "is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests." Perhaps even equal to a force ten times greater. Or more.

From the bell tower of St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem, Mordechai Vanunu gazes at the expanse below, pulls at the center bell and speaks: "Down there is where they sentenced me to 18 years in prison. This is my way of saying I am still here." [2]

While working as a technician at the Dimona nuclear plant in the Negev desert, Vanunu became disquieted by his discovery of Israel's clandestine nuclear weapons program. Despite his awareness of the risks, Vanunu took photos of the plant and smuggled them out and sought the help of media in exposing to the world Israel's illegal factories of weapons of mass destruction. A short time later, the whistle blower was kidnapped and shipped back to Israel by the Mossad - Israel's thugs - with the help of agents from the intelligence services of America, Britain and Italy.

In the first 11 years of his captivity, Vanunu was kept in solitary confinement. How did he survive? "I decided from the beginning that they could have my body in prison but my spirit, mind, brain, I would keep free, under my control; that would be my way out," said Vanunu. When he finally stepped out of Israel's prison, among Vanunu's first words were two simple declarations of fact: "They have not broken me. Israel's illegal nuclear weapons program must be shut down."

Seven months after his release, Vanunu was re-arrested, then released again. But released to what? Vanunu is forbidden to leave Israel, forbidden to approach any of Israel's borders, forbidden to associate with foreigners, forbidden to talk to journalists, forbidden to speak, forbidden to live the normal life, forbidden to spread his message.

"I want to continue to seek the abolition of nuclear weapons around the world, not only in Israel . . . I also plan to find a woman and have a family," said Vanunu in a recent interview he knows he is not allowed to have.

"I don't know what is the best way to overcome [the Israeli government's] restrictions," said Vanunu. "Is it by silence or is it by speaking? I decided it was by speaking. If I speak . . . I am teaching them that they cannot silence anyone ... If they take away your right to speak, you are not a human being any more . . . [T]hey could kill me. If they want to do something, it's not a big problem for them but I am not in fear, I am just living my life. Fear will not help me."

Fear will not help any of us either. And neither will indifference.

In the far reaches of Hong Kong, a Filipina mother toils day and night for a family she is not a member of. She sweeps their floor, cleans their toilets, takes care of their children, cooks their daily meals and wipes their tables and chairs and desks, changes their bed sheets and does their laundry and takes out their trash. Over and over without let up.

After all this, Loretta Brunio has as much time left as she has energy - very little and close to nothing. And yet somehow the mother of three finds both time and energy to attend to the needs of the Coalition for Migrant Rights (CMR), an organization she helped form in 1999 from idea to fruition while working full time as a domestic help. Along with her equally dedicated colleagues, Loretta Brunio saw to it that the first composition of CMR was not just Filipinos but included as well Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Thais, Nepalese and Indians.

Where does she find the time to do all this? Rest should take up the remainder of the day after her work: the body needs pause and the soul needs respite in order to shore up the walls that hem in the cloister of heartaches and loneliness. Yet she always finds time.[3]

The Filipina mother turns on its head the biblical adage "to whom much is given, much is expected in return." Given close to nothing, Loretta Brunio gives everything and expects nothing in return.

A man imprisoned for close to eternity whose dreams continue to travel around the world and who still longs only to find a woman to fall in love with; a totally paralyzed man whose heart has somehow surpassed the heights reached by his towering intellect; a poor woman who does battle daily with back-breaking work and isolation all the while armed with dignity.

In a world imprisoned by self-inflicted ignorance, among people sedated by affluence, inside communities immobilized by fear, the conduct of three imperfect individuals reminds us today of the essence from which springs acts that we have come to know as that glorious but seemingly unattainable thing called heroism.

We honor our heroes not merely by erecting monuments in their likeness. We celebrate them, too, by recognizing that they were not uncommon women and men but ordinary people like us who carried attributes that we, too, in truth possess: extraordinary hope, will and heart.


NOTES:
[1] "Scientist Stephen Hawking decries war," USA Today, November 3, 2004.
[2] "Long walk to freedom," Duncan Campbell, The Guardian-UK, November 15, 2004.
[3] "Loretta Brunio: Filipino," Renato Redentor Constantino, Today, January 12, 2004.

THE RHYME OF REPETITIVE REDUNDANCIES
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
November 22, 2004

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, Winston Churchill once said. Most times he will pick himself up and carry on.

"The more forces United States imperialism throws into Asia," the Chinese government paper People's Daily wrote in 1966," the more will it be bogged down there and the deeper will be the grave it digs for itself."

What's another name for Asia? Hmmm. The Middle East? Close. Use 'bog' in a sentence: "While we'll try to find every snake in the swamp," said US Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz on September 27, 2001, "the essence of the strategy is draining the swamp." Aha!

Contestant Sheikh Abdullah Janabi, use "swamp" in a sentence. Janabi: "It is only the beginning, from a military point of view . . . We have succeeded in drawing [the Americans] into the quagmire of Fallujah."[1] The Iraqi Sunni cleric's a show-off.

The enemy "cannot drive us out of Indochina," said Sen. J. William Fulbright, Chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on April 2, 1970. "But they can force on us the choice of either plunging in altogether or getting out altogether."[2] Aha.

What's another word for Iraq? Shiites in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City were writing it on their walls last June: "Vietnam Street." "This is called Vietnam Street," the Shiites explained, "because this is where we kill Americans."[3]

No, no, no! said Bush the Elder, who exulted at the time of the first American Gulf War: "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome!" Really, Daddykins.

"We're certainly encountering very similar insurgency practices, methods, techniques, tactics, a mind-set that we did see in Indochina," said Michael Ware, the Baghdad bureau chief of Time Magazine. "Something that resonates with me to this day is interviews I've done with senior insurgent leaders, the upper echelons. And they talk to me about reading Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general. They talk to me about reading Che Guevara, Mao Zedong . . . They're bringing it straight from the Vietnam and the broader insurgency playbook."[4]

Jim Krane of the Associated Press: "The ominous thumping of American helicopters roaring over Baghdad's rooftops is becoming as emblematic of this war as it was of Vietnam."[5]

But it isn't all verbatim Indochina; nothing is always exactly the same.

"In Vietnam, the Americans destroyed the village to save it. In Iraq we destroy the city to save it," wrote Simon Jenkins of the British Sunday Times in reference to America's second assault on Fallujah.[6] "The occupying force is entombed in bases it can barely defend or supply. Occasional patrols are target practice for terrorists. Iraq is a desert in which the Americans and British rule nothing but their forts, like the French Foreign Legion in the Sahara."

Here's Hannah Allam of Knight Ridder Newspapers writing from Iraq: "The hotel has become a prison, and every foray outside its fortified gates is tinged with anxiety about returning in one piece. Baghdad has never been tougher for journalists . . . Even a jaunt to the grocery store is a meticulously planned affair. Do you have a radio? A flak vest? A second car to watch for kidnappers?"[7]

"The United States is bringing 'democracy' to Iraq on the same terms that the Russians imposed its federal mandate on Chechnya, a region which has Iraq's future written in its rubble," wrote US intellectual Alexander Cockburn.[8] Accurate words, as far as US Capt. Joe Jasper, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Brigade, is concerned. "The only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind," said Capt. Jasper after America's failed attack on Fallujah in April, "would be to kill the entire population."[9]

And the outcome of the second Fallujah assault? The Iraqi Red Crescent Society, which is supported by the Red Cross and UNICEF, called the situation in Fallujah "a big disaster."

"No one can say how many of the 1,200 'rebels' U.S. forces claim to have killed inside Fallujah are civilians, or whether the death toll is higher," reported Dahr Jamail from Iraq on November 15.[10] The next day, Jamail wrote: "The [US] military stopped the Red Crescent at the gates of the city and are not allowing them in. They allowed some bodies to be buried, but others are being eaten by dogs and cats in the streets."[11]

All this for what? The attack on Fallujah, wrote Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post, will "clear the way" for elections to take place in Iraq. Great.

Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant, said Tacitus once upon a time. They made a wasteland and called it peace. In Iraq, the esteemed author Jonathan Schell reminds us, "it was left to the United States to update the formula: They made a wasteland and called it democracy."[12]

NOTES:
[1] "Troops move to quell insurgency in Mosul," Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, November 16, 2004. Many thanks again to Tom Engelhardt for the recent series of pieces on Iraq in tomdispatch.com that said more and bled more. Tom's site remains a top go-to site for the latest news and keen analysis.
[2] From "The war spreads," Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, Monthly Review, May 1970, quoted in "Is Iraq another Vietnam?" The Editors, Monthly Review, Vol. 56, No. 2, June 2004.
[3] "Draining the swamp," Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com, November 19, 2004.
[4] Transcript of Michael Ware interview, in Hardball with Chris Matthews, MSNBC TV, November 16, 2004.
[5] Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, on the eve of the invasion of Falluja, Tom Engelhardt, tomdispatch.com, November 7, 2004.
[6] "A wrecked nation, a desert, a ghost town. And this will be called victory," Simon Jenkins, The Sunday Times-UK, November 17, 2004.
[7] "Draining the swamp," Tom Engelhardt.
[8] "Let them drink sand," Alexander Cockburn, counterpunch.org, November 13/14, 2004.
[9] "Sovereignty: 'If they want it that bad, they can have it!'" Tom Engelhardt, tomdispatch.com, July 25, 2004.
[10] "The other face of U.S. 'success' in Fallujah," Dahr Jamail, Znet, November 15, 2004.
[11] "Dogs eating bodies in Fallujah," Dahr Jamail, November 16, 2004, ZNet.
[12] "What Happened to hearts?" Jonathan Schell, tomdispatch.com, November 17, 2004.

DISPATCHES FROM THE WEATHER FRONT
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
November 1, 2004

"We sometimes get the feeling they are going to let us die," said Enele Soponga the other year. Soponga is the ambassador to the UN of Tuvalu, an island nation with a population of 12,000 that is projected to be the first island state to go under water. Tuvalu's main island has already been inundated three times in 2003; vegetable plots were washed away along with the island's drinking water.[i]

Soponga, who is also the chairperson of the Association of Small Island States, is not alone in his sentiment.

Climate change is not a smart bomb. Like weapons of mass destruction, human-induced climate change will hit the environment and smash people's lives indiscriminately, punishing the vulnerable and the weak the hardest. The warning signs are everywhere.

The three hottest years in recorded history - 1998, 2002 and 2003 - all occurred in the last six years. The 1990s remain the warmest decade on record.[ii]

Weeks ago Japan suffered from its fourth major storm since late August. It was reportedly "the most powerful to hit Okinawa since 1972."

In March, a hurricane hit the Brazilian coast - the first ever recorded in the South Atlantic. The Brazilian weather service, with no established naming sequence, had no idea what to call it. The agency eventually settled on Catarina, after the state where the hurricane made landfall.

According to a recent scientific study, because of increasing global temperatures, "hurricanes will grow stronger and wetter as a result of global warming."[iii] The study, said Dr. Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "is by far and away the most comprehensive effort" to assess the problem. The study "clinches the issue," Emanuel said, concerning the link between the warming of tropical oceans and storm intensity.[iv]

Other scientists agree. According to Tom Knutson and Bob Tuleya, tropical climate modelers at the Princeton, New Jersey-based Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, large parts of the world "can expect a 20 percent increase in rainfall, and damage due to increased wind speeds might rise as much as 10 percent. That 10 or 20 percent may not sound like much, but add it to a top-ranked Category 5 monster headed for Mobile, Alabama and you've got a major disaster in the making . . . [In addition,] a greenhouse gas-induced warming may lead to a gradually increasing risk in the occurrence of highly-destructive Category 5 storms."[v]

Warming temperatures have resulted in massive ice loss. On the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory floats the 3,000-year old tens of meters thick Ward Hunt Ice Shelf.[vi] The reporter Jane George recounted last year that "when the British Arctic Expedition traveled there in 1875 and Robert E. Peary explored the area in 1907, the shelf of land-fast ice was still intact, but, by 1982, 90 per cent of the shelf had been lost." Changes in the ice shelf have also drained the 30-km-by-5-km Lake Disraeli of its fresh water.[vii]

In the Pyrenees, glacier surface has decreased from 1779 hectares in 1894 to 290 hectares in 2001. Glacial mass in the region shrunk by 52 percent from 1980-2001.[viii] The European Environment Agency has recently issued a report estimating that three-quarters of glaciers in the Swiss Alps are likely to disappear by 2050.

According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the rapid melting of the world's highest ice fields is "driving up sea levels, increasing floods and turning verdant mountain slopes into deserts." The Chinese scientists recently published the most detailed study ever undertaken of China's glaciers, which are said to account for 15 percent of the planet's ice. The study, the Glacier Inventory, was approved for publication last week after a quarter of a century of exploration in China and Tibet.

In the past 24 years, the Chinese scientists have measured glacier loss "equivalent to more than 3,000 sq km." Among the most marked changes has been the 500metre retreat of the glacier at the source of the Yangtze on the Tibet-Qinghai plateau. If the climate continued to change at the current pace, scientists predict that two-thirds of China's glaciers would disappear by the end of the 2050s

The consequences for ecosystems and humans are nothing short of ominous.

"In the short term," said Yao Tandong, who led 50 scientists in studying the decline of the Himalayan glaciers, "the water from the ice would fill reservoirs and lead to more flooding - as was already the case in Nepal and downstream areas of China." Yao predicted that in the future, "the end of the glaciers would deprive the mountain ecology of its main life source and hasten the desertification that threatens western China, particularly in Gansu and Xinjiang provinces." Once the mountain ice disappears, "rivers would start to dry up and ocean levels would rise, threatening coastal cities."

The Chinese study confirmed earlier studies of Everest, "which showed the world's tallest peak more than 1.3 meters shorter than in 1953, when it was first scaled by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay."[ix]

Climate change, said the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is "a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power that it radically alters human existence."

It's time for the world to wean itself away from fossil fuels such as oil and coal, the burning of which releases massive amounts of C02, the greenhouse gas mainly responsible for global warming. It's high time that we embrace the solution to the problem - a solution that is by no means difficult to embrace.

The European Renewable Energy Council has shown that with the right support policies from government, renewable energy from wind, geothermal, small hydro, modern biomass and solar power can provide 50 percent of global energy supply by 2040.

Traditional energy economists say that renewable energy is too expensive and that we can't afford to develop it. The truth is, wrote a young environmentalist in the South China Morning Post recently, "we cannot afford not to.[x]

NOTES:

[i] "Sinking islands battle for climate aid cash," The Sun-Herald, December 14, 2003.
[ii] "Global warnings," Greenpeace International, September 17, 2004.
[iii] The study was published online on Tuesday by The Journal of Climate and can be found at www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/bibliography/2004/tk0401.pdf
[iv] "Global Warming Is Expected to Raise Hurricane Intensity," Andrew Revkin, The New York Times, September 30, 2004.
[v] "Warning in the Winds," Mark Lynas, The Washington Post, September 19, 2004
[vi] "Arctic ice shelf splits," BBC News World Edition, September 23, 2003.
[vii] Ellesmere Island's ice shelf broken into pieces: Changes may mark rapid global warming," Jane George, Nunatsiaq News, July 30, 2004.
[viii] More interesting multimedia information in the climate pages of Greenpeace International
[ix] Highest icefields will not last 100 years, study finds; China's glacier research warns of deserts and floods due to warming," Jonathan Watts, The Guardian-UK, September 24, 2004.
[x] "How to blow away China's pollution," Gloria Chang, South China Morning Post, September 18, 2004.

THE TWENTY FIFTH OF OCTOBER
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
October 25, 2004

Twenty four hours of forever just for today: let us confer immortality on the twenty fifth of October.

On this day in 1881, Pablo Ruiz came into the world. An obstinate man of many temperaments, he chose many names for himself as he cascaded through his conjured worlds. Once he called himself 'P.R.'; another time he named himself 'Pau.' In the end he settled for Picasso.

In the Polish city of Wroclaw at a world congress of intellectuals for peace in 1948, for the first and only time in his life, Pablo Picasso makes a speech: "I have a friend who ought to be here." He is "the greatest poet of the Spanish language and one of the greatest poets on earth, who has always taken the side of the unfortunate: Pablo Neruda, persecuted by the police in Chile, cornered like a dog," the famed painter declaims as the thunder of verse and canvas intersect.[i]

On this day in 1898 in Malolos, Philippines, the Filipino Military Academy was established. The school was set up to train officers in the revolutionary army of the Filipino Republic but it does not prosper: America invades the first republic in Asia three months later. It takes America over a decade before it finally crushes armed Filipino resistance. At least 250,000 Filipinos perish in the war between the US and the Philippines.[ii]

The regiment of Marvin B. Russell arrived in Manila Bay on October 25, 1900. Russell was a veteran of the Spanish-American War who rejoined the US army to take part in America's occupation of the nascent Philippine Republic. "[A]s we struggled through the jungles pursuing our elusive foe," wrote Russell in a letter to his homeland, "we grew to hate everyone, and sometimes we took our frustrations out by abusing hapless civilians who got in the Army's way."[iii]

On this day in 1929, American newspapers, bankers and businessmen spend the day and the entire weekend trying to assure the public that the US financial industry is stable and secure. On the same day the US stock market was lurching terminally, The Casa Loma Orchestra conducted by Glen Gray records "Happy Days Are Here Again."[iv]

From October 25 to October 26 in 1944, "the greatest naval battle in history" blazed and boomed across Surigao Strait in the Philippines.[v] Across the roiling waters the fleets of America and Japan lock horns. America emerges victorious and humbles the imperial Japanese forces. Years later, after extorting economic and military basing concessions from the Philippines in exchange for Philippine independence, the US rehabilitates the economy of Japan.[vi]

The child Sadako Sasaki, died on this day in 1955 at the age of twelve. Sadako was two when the atom bomb was dropped on her hometown of Hiroshima. She was 11 when she was diagnosed with what her city called "the atom bomb disease" - leukemia.

While hospitalized, Sadako's closest friend told her of a Japanese legend - if she folded a thousand paper cranes, the gods might grant her wish to be well again. Sadako folded medicine paper, newspapers, magazines and other scraps of paper her family and friends brought her. She folded and folded hundreds of cranes even as she watched friends and other people die in the hospital alongside her. One day Sadako realized her wish had changed. She no longer wished for her own health. "I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world," Sadako whispered to her cranes as she wished for a world without bombs and wars.

Sadako manages to fold only 644 cranes before she dies, but friends, classmates, and family fold for her the remaining 356 cranes. The message of Sadako is lifted by other cranes: a statue of Sadako is unveiled at Hiroshima Peace Park; another is erected in Seattle. Thousands upon thousands of paper cranes fly over from all over the world, the manifold wishes of children and adults soaring across borders and time.[vii]

On October 25, 1960, Lady Liberty pays a visit to Decatur, Georgia, USA. Martin Luther King, Jr. is held over on old traffic ticket charges and jailed. He is denied bail and sentenced to four months of hard labor the next day.

American author John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature on this day in 1962. "Literature," said Steinbeck in his acceptance speech, "was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tin-horn mendicants of low calorie despair . . . Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed . . . The ancient commission of the writer has not changed."[viii]

On this day in 1966 the Black Panther Party was founded. America is shaken. At a massive anti-war demonstration in Manhattan six months after it's founding, prominent Black Panther member Stokely Carmichael denounces the Vietnam war draft as "white people sending black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend land they stole from red people."[ix]

On October 25, 1981 150,000 participate in an anti-nuke protest in London. Across borders and time Sadako's paper cranes continue to fly.

On this day in 1983, America - the protector of the weak and foe of oppression - invades Grenada, a country whose population numbered only around 100,000.

"There is something of mortality about the smell of musty books," said Pablo Neruda. "It assaults the nostrils and strikes the rugged terrain of the soul, because it is the odor of oblivion, or buried memory."[x]

To live is to remember. To keep away the mildew from memory's manuscripts - this is the urgent task at hand.


NOTES:

[i] Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire: Century of the Wind, W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
[ii] "Keeping the Spirit of 1896 Alive," Onofre D. Corpuz, in Hector Santos, ed., Philippine Centennial Series, October 10, 1996. Adapted for the internet from a speech delivered by Corpuz on June 14, 1996 to the U.P. Alumni Council.
[iii] Letter of Marvin B. Russell Late member of Co. I, Thirty fourth, United States Volunteers. See The Arkansas News
[iv] From The Daily Bleed - a website that is often, as it self-description states, "a wake-up call that is better than boiled coffee." The site is managed by Bleedmeister David Brown and is freely produced by Recollection Used Books.
[v] From the Depart of Tourism website of the government of the Philippines.
[vi] "The narratives of friendship," Renato Redentor Constantino, Today, October 18, 2004.
[vii] Visit these two valuable sites for more information and for new ways to contribute world disarmament and peace: http://www.sadako.org/ and http://www.sadako.com/.
[viii] The Portable Steinbeck (Revised and Enlarged Edition), ed. Pascal Covici, Jr., Penguin Books, 1985.
[ix] Quoted by Arundhati Roy, in "Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy, Buy One Get One Free," transcript of audio address in New York, May 13, 2003.
[x] "Odors of Homecoming," Pablo Neruda, Novedades, 1952, in Pablo Neruda, Passions and Impressions, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1984.

THE MERCIES OF CHOICE
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
October 11, 2004

"We know," wrote George Steiner in 1963, "that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning." And what if history turned out differently and someone - or many - managed to hide the horror of the Holocaust? Who would have been the greater criminal? The perpetrators or those who covered up the deed? Good question.

America already had in its possession all the proof it needed to convict Japanese war criminals of waging biological warfare in the tribunals held in Tokyo just after the Second World War. Yet not one individual was charged in the trials with biological warfare crimes. [1]

It was called Japan's "Secret of Secrets" - a nightmare program of human experimentation that known to some as Unit 731, the name of the program's central headquarters near the city of Harbin in China.

From 1932 to 1945, Unit 731 carried out its ghastly work - mostly on Chinese peoples but also on Russians, Mongolians, Koreans, and prisoners of war from Britain, Australia and the US. Fortunately, Japan's inhuman warfare program was brought to a close when Japan was defeated. Sort of.

Led by the head of the Allied occupation forces in Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur himself, the American military gathered after the war a grisly river of evidence that showed in detail the work of Unit 731. After America's officials - led by MacArthur - promised the veterans of Unit 731 immunity from the Tokyo war crimes trial, an ocean of evidence flowed.

America acquired documents. US military personnel interviewing and interrogating Unit 731 members "received a flood of information," wrote the scholar Daniel Barenblatt. The information included "autopsy reports of Chinese and Russian vivisection victims, and thousands of slide samples of human tissues and germ warfare pathogens." Said Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders, a microbiologist working for the US army and a member of MacArthur's Unit 731 investigative team, "The data came in waves. We could hardly keep up with it."[2]

America received testimonies. An April 29, 1946 affidavit submitted to American lawyers of the IPS titled "Certificate of Crimes of the Japanese Army" written by Hasane Hari, a Unit 731 program veteran: "the epidemic prevention unit outwardly maintained the health of soldiers as its mission, but actually manufactured germs of cholera, typhoid, bubonic plague [and] dysentery to be used to attack Chinese soldiers and civilians."

America received more and covered up more. Why? As MacArthur advised Washington: "Request for exemption [from prosecution] of Unit 731 members. Information about vivisection useful."

Inside Unit 731 laboratories, Japanese doctors prepared plague-infected people to be cut up alive "so that the unit could study the progress and potency of their biological weapons. Samples removed from the prisoners were used to produce more bacteria."

"The first time, my legs were shaking so badly I could hardly stand up," recounted Yoshio Shinozuka of his first live vivisection. Shinozuka knew the person on the operating table. "I'd seen him a few times," he said. "He seemed like an intellectual. He wasn't even 30. But by the time he was brought in to the dissection room, he was so black with the plague that he looked like a different person. He was clearly on the verge of death."[3]

Another man used a stethoscope to make sure the victim was still alive and then assisted a third man, who quickly but methodically cut the victim open and removed his organs.

"We were told, said Shinozuka, "that it was crucial to extract the specimens before putrefaction had time to set in and contaminate our research . . . We called [our] victims 'logs.' We didn't want to think of them as people. We didn't want to admit that we were taking lives. So we convinced ourselves that what we were doing was like cutting down a tree.

The consequences of America's choice of silence of course meant a different fate for many. "In a just and rational world," Barenblatt tells us in his book, The Plague of Humanity - a work of immense pain and impeccable scholarship - "one would expect the physicians of Unit 731 to serve prison terms or be executed for their genocidal atrocities, as were many of the Nazi criminals. Yet in the years after 1945, they headed not for a courtroom dock to face their victims, or a jail cell, but instead for plush, influential positions in the dean's offices of major universities or the corporate boardrooms of pharmaceutical companies."[4]

But not all Unit 731 veterans chose the nourishments of delusion and forgetting. Some preferred the oblivion of suicide. A few, like Yoshio Shinozuka, chose to devote the remainder of their days to making amends, despite knowing that he "will never be forgiven."

Shinozuka has testified on behalf of his Chinese victims and has written a book for schoolchildren. In 1998, he tried to speak at peace conferences in the United States and Canada - but immigration inspectors turned him away as a war criminal. It is a label he accepts.

"It took me a long time to get beyond the excuse that I was just following orders," Shinozuka tells those who wish to listen. "I was doing what I was told. And I might very well have been killed had I disobeyed. But what we did was so terrible that I should have refused, even if that meant my own death. But I didn't do that."

Shinozuka has visited China often in recent years and has been back to Unit 731's former headquarters, which is now a museum. "The Chinese have been very generous with me," said Shinozuka. "They tell me that I, too, am a victim."

Shinozuka has not granted himself the clemency of forgetfulness. And perhaps because of this his fate is no longer indentured to the evil he once nurtured in his heart. An evil he now feeds daily with two poison pills called memory and conscience.


NOTES:

[1] "The past as prologue," Renato Redentor Constantino, Today, October 4, 2004. Can be considered the first part of this article but was really written separately. Both delve on different themes.
[2] A plague upon humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ warfare Operation, Daniel Barenblatt, 2004, HarperCollins. Really as I described the book - a painful read, tremendously interesting, written with impeccable scholarship.
[3] "Horrors of war haunt old soldier," China Daily, September 18, 2004.
[4] There was another more public trial, Barenblatt tells us, held in 1949 in the Soviet city of Khabarovsk - one which actually bore results. According to Barenblatt, "twelve Japanese bio-war complicit officials were convicted" in proceedings that could not be considered mere show trials. In the same year, when the Soviet newspaper Izvestia reported the guilty verdicts of the Khabarovsk tribunal and called for the leader of Unit 731, Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, "to be apprehended and tried by US occupation forces in Japan as the ringleader of the secret Japanese program," Gen. MacArthur's office in Tokyo "denounced both the Khabarovsk trial and Izvestia's charges of Japanese biological warfare and a U.S. cover-up as false communist propaganda."

THE PAST AS PROLOGUE
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnnews.com
October 4, 2004

So many good wars launched. So many wars-to-end-all-wars concluded. And yet.

When will respite come? Where will it come from? Difficult to say.

Dr. Shiro Ishii was born in 1892 to a wealthy family of landed aristocrats in Chiyoda Mura, a farming village near Tokyo. Charismatic and driven, Dr. Ishii towered over most people. He was five feet, ten inches tall, had a booming voice and possessed "soaring intelligence."

Ishii was the architect and leader of Imperial Japan's biological and germ warfare program. A program known to a few today as Unit 731 - the name of the nightmare's central headquarters near the city of Harbin in Manchuria.

Unit 731 was his government's "Secret of Secrets," as Ishii himself described the program - one under which many of the best and brightest doctors of Japan's medical and biological research community applied their considerable talents. Talents employed in running an assembly line of human experimentation "in the pursuit of scientific goals completely untethered to morality."

From 1932 to 1945, Japan carried out its biological warfare program with the same horrific efficiency that marked the work of German Nazi doctors. Unit 731 sought to determine the efficacy of the germ and biological arsenal that Japan was developing, using humans as lab rats.

Ishii and his doctors administered tainted vaccine injections to children in selected villages; poisoned food was handed out to hungry people by smiling Japanese soldiers and physicians. Different strains of pathogenic germs such as cholera, dysentery and typhoid were bred and tested on humans alongside the development of tools with which the disease microbes could be let loose.

Virulent strains of malaria "were injected into [captured] Americans suffering from beri-beri and tuberculosis patients were injected with strange concoctions of acid mixed with dextrose, ether, or blood plasma." The objective, recounts the scholar Daniel Barenblatt, in his soul-searing work, The Plague of Humanity, "was to develop medicinal treatments, using Americans as expendable guinea pigs." Australian and British prisoners of war were also subjected to unspeakable pain. Of course, many did not make it.

While Unit 731's ghastly experimentation smote as well the peoples of Russia, Mongolia and Korea, it was the Chinese who suffered the brunt of the madness. Millions of bubonic plague-infected fleas were raised and released aerially on unsuspecting Chinese villages. Feathers contaminated with anthrax were released over population centers by Japanese air squadrons while on the ground, disease-carrying horses, dogs, rats and birds were dispersed and made to mingle with livestock and humans.

And on the doctors of Unit 731 diligently worked, tallying the effects of their creations by performing vivisections on prisoners, recording deformities, and putting together a macabre roster of distress, torment and death.

Non-germ warfare tests were also performed on Unit 731's prisoners: animal-to-human blood transfusions, for instance. And frostbite experiments where limbs of live humans were exposed to extreme frost, struck with a stick and broken off and reattached to places where they were originally attached - and other places.

It is estimated by scholars that at least 20,000 people were killed inside Unit 731's human experiment prisons in China. And outside, well, it was the same hell.

May 1942: a cholera epidemic created by Unit 731 in Yunnan province kills over 200,000 people. Three months later, another 200,000 die in Shandong province as a result of Unit 731's germ warfare. In the Zhekiang province city of Quzhou alone, over 50,000 perish from bubonic plague and cholera. And so on and so on and so on.

How did it all end? As typical stories go, the good side eventually prevails over the butchers and the malevolent: Japan's imperial drive is defeated and Unit 731's designs are discovered and trounced - its army of ghoulish doctors and the infamous Shiro Ishii captured, tried and executed. That should be a nice story but reality is not typical and the story of Unit 731 is not a typical story. "Few," said Goethe, "have the imagination for reality."

Within months after World War II ended US army officials - acting upon the instructions of the very head of the Allied occupation forces in Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur - were already in Japan meeting - over dinner - with Shiro Ishii and other veterans of Unit 731. The Americans desired the knowledge possessed by Ishii and his colleagues. Ishii promised the Americans the full set of keys to his secret kingdom if ...

In return for immunity "for myself, my superiors, and subordinates," Ishii replied explicitly in one of the meetings, "I would like to be hired by the U.S. as a biological warfare expert. In the preparation for the war with Russia, I can give [America] the advantage of my 20 years research and experience."

In a radio message to Washington on May 6, 1947, MacArthur urged the combined US military and State Department group which supervised occupation policy in Japan to give - in writing - immunity to Ishii and all others involved the Japanese military's germ warfare and human experiments program.

"Additional data possibly including some statements from Ishii," said MacArthur, "probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'war crimes evidence' ... complete story to include plans and theories of Ishii and superiors, probably can be obtained by documentary immunity to Ishii and associate."

MacArthur advised Washington: "Request for exemption [from prosecution] of Unit 731 members. Information about vivisection useful."

On December 27, 1949 - against the mountain of evidence that American forces had gathered since the surrender of Japan - evidence in the form of reports, documents, photographs and testimonies from victims who lived through the ordeal and confessions of captured Japanese soldiers and physicians - MacArthur's headquarters announced to the world "that the Japanese had done some experimentation with animals but that there was no evidence they ever had used human beings."[1]

At the Tokyo war crimes trial, which the press had dubbed "the Nuremberg Trial of the East," the Americans suppressed evidence concerning the atrocities of Unit 731 and "not one individual was charged in the Japan hearings with biological or chemical warfare crimes." Thus did thousands of Unit 731 doctors enjoy the rest of their lives - some more prosperous than others, some heading Japan's leading universities; others leading Japanese conglomerates.

Crimes against humanity on top of genocidal deeds. Crimes that allowed the US government to use Ishii's secrets against its enemies, such as the "systematic spreading of smallpox, cholera and plague germs over North Korea" which, during the period in which it was unleashed, "shocked and horrified the entire world."[2]

Where else has the American government used Ishii's secrets? And who else has had access? Fifty years is a long time. Did not America invade Iraq to protect the world "from the potential horror of Saddam Hussein's supposed germ warfare capability?"[3] Stuff happens, said Donald Rumsfeld. Will Ishii's weapons ever be used again? Where? By who?

Hard to answer these things. Painful to contemplate. Yesterday may have already brought whatever it is that tomorrow was never meant to bring.


NOTES:
[1] A plague upon humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ warfare Operation, Daniel Barenblatt, 2004, HarperCollins.
[2] The quote is from US journalist John W. Powell who covered the Korean War and who was later charged with thirteen counts of sedition by the US government for publishing his reports of the American military's germ warfare us in Korea. In Barenblatt's Plague Upon Humanity.
[3] "Japan's Genocide: Review of Daniel Barenblatt's A Plague Upon Humanity," Richard Garrett, Asian Review of Books, March 3, 2004.

HARVEST TIME AGAIN FOR RC
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
September 15, 2004

He retired first in his mid-thirties - a successful businessman whose goal was to achieve financial independence early so he could serve his country and family and live the way he wanted to.

The next retirement came when he already had three grandchildren, a quadruple bypass, and the kind of public prominence that could only be bestowed by the singularly belligerent, mordant, street-smart brand of activism he wielded against the Philippine government.

Twice he has retired and both instances he met on his own terms: he desired it, he looked forward to it, he willed it; and one day it was in place. He lived the words of the English novelist John Galsworthy, who said that "if you do not think about the future, you cannot have one."

For friend and foe alike, his surliness was legendary. On the occasion of the State of the Nation presidential address almost a decade ago and marching towards the Batasang Pambansa at the helm of a demonstration numbering a hundred thousand, he was warned by the Secretary of Justice in a live radio news program that though they were free to march, freedom of expression and assembly had limits. The warning he took as an incentive.

He thanked the secretary rather politely on the air and once off the air he proceeded to march with his group through five menacing police barricades each manned by water cannons and fully armored, truncheon-wielding crowd dispersal police units. At the last barricade, bruised and bloodied, he went straight to the line of shields, thrust his head right in front of the helmeted police and pulled the truncheon of a policeman and dared the policeman to hit him on the head as other policemen had done in the barricades they had just passed. The policeman stared at him, completely befuddled by the activist's impudence, and refused to use his truncheon. No other truncheon was used again that day.

Another time, just days after his heart surgery and still weak and recovering in his hospital room, he asked to be transferred to another area after the cooling system in the intensive care ward conked out.

Over an hour later and after many unheeded requests, still in the same room and already sweating and worried he may develop pneumonia - but actually more infuriated that his requests had been ignored - the patient whose chest was cut open just days ago goes up a flight of stairs, walks straight to the admitting section in his hospital gown, lifts and hurls a couple of computers to the floor and tells the shocked personnel politely "Do I have your attention? I need a place where the aircon works otherwise my health may deteriorate." He refuses to leave the room, which he found quite cool. Orderlies swiftly bring in a hospital bed and he tucks himself in and in a minute is snoring in the admitting section.

Of the many vital moments in his life, the battles with the powers that be he enjoyed the most; the higher they were, the more he relished the political skirmishes. He always said this to his only son - always respect your opponents - a stance he combined with trademark savvy, contagious optimism, maddening meticulousness, moral purpose and epic stubbornness.

National Security Adviser Joe Almonte and President Fidel Ramos disrespected him once by underestimating him and they paid dearly for it when they attempted to ban the Asia Pacific Conference on East Timor (APCET) he had led in organizing in 1994 - a watershed assembly, it would later turn out, which amplified the plight and cause of East Timor globally and helped accelerate the independence of the newest country in Asia today.

He was alone mostly in his doggedness - more so when signals from the Philippine government that they disapproved of APCET and did not wish to upset Jakarta and the despotic ASEAN consensus of silence became more ominous and increasingly threatening - signals which finally led to the Ramos administration announcing their intention to ban the East Timor conference. "Well, we will defy the ban," the activist replied publicly.

When sections of the Philippine media came out in support of the Ramos ban and condemned the activist's hard-headedness, the activist became even more determined to hold the conference. And thus earned the respect of some in the media, including a national daily by the name of TODAY, which had just begun to publish that year.

That Filipino journalists "should join the jubilation over the . . . ban on the APCET conference only shows we do not deserve the freedom and rights that groups like APCET helped to give us," wrote TODAY in its May 14, 2004 editorial titled "Constantino correct".

"What RC Constantino and the other APCET organizers put together was the sort of conference that all decent and intelligent men and women, and all honest writers, should support," the editorial continued. "The obligation of every journalist is to stand alongside RC Constantino in exposing and denouncing a brutality that cannot - unless you are an animal - find any justification or mitigation in reasons of state . . . the moral rationale for the conference is unimpeachable."

But the ban remained. And so did RC Constantino's defiance of the ban. As the East Timor meet neared its end and it was clear they had been outflanked, Ramos administration officials threw in the towel. By June 5, on the front page of the Manila Times - similar to the front pages of other newspapers - a photo above the front page story reporting the successful conclusion of the APCET meet showed a beaming RC carrying his first grandchild, Ia, on his left arm and holding in his right hand the gavel that would end the conference.

RC Constantino turns 60 today - a warrior in retirement (try as he might, he cannot shed his warrior ways) and an accomplished full-time lolo (grandfather), the chairman of the board of a prestigious language school and a generous adviser to the many who continue to seek his counsel - through text messages, phone calls, lunches and dinners and, as before, through visits to Panay Avenue.

"Old age, to the unlearned, is winter," a Yiddish proverb goes, and "to the learned, it is harvest time." RC continues to harvest what life has to offer, at 60 years of age, even as he continues to play Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo each noon on his Mac with his six-year old grandson Rio Renato, merienda frenzies with his other grandchildren, the rambunctious affections of his children, the unfettered love of his mother, the graceful Letizia, and the extraordinary love of Dudi - nurturing mother, woman, wife, nationalist and writer, whose dreams RC passionately shares.

Happy birthday, Pa, from a grateful son. An American, President Theodore Roosevelt, captured best the example you have so generously shared to so many:

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again because there is no effort without error and shortcomings, who knows the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the high achievement of triumph and who, at worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows his place shall never be with the timid and cold souls who know neither victory or defeat."[i]

NOTES:
[i] Isyu, August 14, 1996.

NARRATIVES OF FOLLY
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
September 13, 2004

We continue to live in interesting times where "the young," wrote Decoly, "delude themselves about their future; the old folks about their past."

Last May 6, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution "which, in effect, authorized a 'pre-emptive' attack on Iran. The vote was 376-3. Undeterred by the accelerating disaster in Iraq, Republicans and Democrats, wrote one commentator, 'once again joined hands to assert the responsibilities of American power.'"[1]

It is unthinkable for the superpower - and its believers - to leave Iranians to decide their own fate. The ignorant are taken in by tacitly racist reasoning: an oppressed people cannot liberate themselves without the help of the empire's humanitarian weapons of mass destruction. The learned espouse imperial intervention for convictions they secretly harbor. Convictions nakedly expressed by one of the greatest tribunes of Western civilization.

Referring to Palestinians before the Peel Commission of Inquiry in 1937 - at the height of the British colonial offensive which eventually crushed the first Palestinian intifada - Winston Churchill declared: "I do not agree that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right, I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."[2]

Iran wasn't always ruled by an anti-American, virulently fundamentalist theocracy. Once upon a time, Iran had a parliament - and a real prime minister who was actually chosen and embraced by his people. Physically frail due to his advanced age, Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was nonetheless a giant of a man who insisted to Iranians - and the world - that democracy can and should serve, feed, educate and clothe one's people.

He was a charismatic and driven man. At the pinnacle of his popularity, the name Mossadegh stood for moral purpose, independence and Iranian dignity. But dignity, moral purpose and independence are words that imperial powers do not always look upon with favor. Especially when the leader who lives the words leads a country overflowing with oil. And so the dignified man had to go.

"Neither by trusteeship nor by contract will we turn over to foreigners the right to exploit our natural oil resources," Mossadegh once wrote in a speech delivered to the UN Security Council in 1951, the year he was chosen by Time magazine - over Harry Truman, Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower - as its Man of the Year. A full year almost to the day before Mossadegh expelled the last citizens of Britain - the erstwhile colonial tormentor of Iran - and less than two years before Mossadegh himself was ousted by a coup d'état sponsored by the US government, which despised Mossadegh's independence and craved Iran's oil, a coup supported by a humiliated British government, the erstwhile colonial tormentor of Iran.

Days after Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated in January 1953, the American ambassador to Tehran, Loy Henderson, "began contacting Iranians he thought might be interested in working to overthrow Mossadegh." The goal: to foment unrest in the streets of Tehran, destabilize the Mossadegh government and establish the pretext for a coup, which came close to exactly what took place in Iran.

The mob that "was decisive in the overthrow [of Mossadegh] was a mercenary mob," said Richard Cottam, who was on the Operation Ajax staff in Washington. "It had no ideology, and that mob was paid with American dollars."[3] Dollars that totaled, depending on which expenses are counted, "anywhere between $100,000 to $20 million."

After the coup, an international oil consortium was set up to ransack Iran's main resource. Five American companies took up 40 percent of the consortium, with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (which would later change its name to British Petroleum, or BP) - the company with which Britain previously plundered Iran's wealth - comprising another 40 percent. Lesser vultures Royal Dutch/Shell and Compagnie Française de Petroles formed the remainder of the consortium, which "agreed to share its profits with Iran on a fifty-fifty basis but not to open its books to Iranian auditors or to allow Iranians onto its board of directors."

Operation Ajax bought the American government 25 years of stable relations - with the Iranian potentate of Mohammad Reza Shah. On the 25th year of the Shah's brutal reign, outrage spilled over and forced the despised Iranian monarch to flee. Straight into the waiting arms of the United States government.

No one else then thought this conclusion possible - except, of course, the people of Iran.

In 1977, two years before the Shah was overthrown, the celebrated war reporter Robert Fisk and Ed Cody of the Associated Press had driven into a Shia village in war-torn Lebanon "to find the usual tea-drinking Palestinians sitting in a field beside the main road, their officer lecturing them about the need to move their mortar positions every 24 hours." Lebanon was then the prime battleground between the Israeli army and Palestinian fighters.

The journalists noticed a gunman in the group who seemed different from the others. The gunman "wore a coal-black scarf - not a kuffiah - around his neck. And he appeared to speak no Arabic. His English, however, was almost perfect. The gunman asked Fisk and Cody to translate what his officer was saying to him. Cody, Fisk recounted, asked the gunman why he spoke no Arabic. "Because I am not an Arab. I am from Iran," said the gunman, who grinned at Fisk and Cody. "I am from the opposition in Iran. I have come to learn here how to fight. We understand a common cause with our Palestinian brothers. With their help, we can learn to destroy the Shah." Fisk and Cody held back their laughter. An Iranian training in Lebanon to overthrow (what was then) the most formidable dictatorship in the Middle East? Yeah right, thought the journalists. "And, of course," Fisk would later recount in his soul-searing book, Pity the Nation, "we were wrong."[4]

But no one, not even Iranians, would be able to predict the events set in motion by the overthrow of the Shah. Such as the 1979 hostage-taking of Americans at the US embassy by panic-stricken Iranians who feared the Shah would be re-installed by the US government; the takeover by fundamentalist Islamic clerics of the Iranian revolution; Iraq's invasion of Iran; the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan; and "the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."

All arguably connected and traceable, according to Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men, the gripping account of the US-engineered overthrow of Mossadegh, to Operation Ajax.

The blood of hundreds of thousands spilled; an immeasurable number of lives lost - and for what? So that a has-been empire and a hyper-empire could slake its thirst for power and oil?


NOTES:
[1] "The warlords of America," John Pilger, The New Statesman, September 8, 2004.
[2] The clash of fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, Tariq Ali, 2002, Verso.
[3] All the Shah's men: An American coup and the roots of Middle East Terror, Stephen Kinzer, 2003, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
[4] Pity the Nation: the abduction of Lebanon, Robert Fisk, 2002, Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books.

NOTHING NEW IN THE WORLD
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY, abs/cbnNEWS.com
September 6, 2004

"Memory says, 'I did that,'" Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote. "Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields."

Three years ago in America, on September 11, airplanes fell from the sky and thousands died. Countless numbers mourned the mass murder. Countless mourn still. On the same day 31 years ago, the sky fell in Chile when the democratically-elected Allende government was overthrown in a bloody coup staged by the American government. Who mourns the Chilean sky?

Remembering is a political act, wrote Boston Globe columnist James Carroll. "Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny."[1]

In 1953, the United States engineered a coup in Iran which ousted the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh - an Iranian colossus who happened to live in a frail old man's body.

The Iranian giant's commitment to social reform was unrivaled in his country's history while his towering presence in the international arena as a voice of poor countries presaged the era of giants such as Kwame Nkrumah, Sukarno and Patrice Lumumba.

During Mossadegh's time, Iranian peasants were freed from forced labor in their landlords' estates, factory owners were ordered to pay benefits to sick and injured workers, and unemployment compensation was established. The giant caused twenty percent of the money landlords received in rent to be placed in a fund to pay for development projects like pest control, rural housing, and public baths.

The giant supported women's rights and defended religious freedom and allowed courts and universities to function freely. In addition, the colossus was known even by his enemies, as "scrupulously honest and impervious to the corruption that pervaded Iranian politics."

But above all, the giant was independent. Too independent. Mossadegh had thrown out the British, nationalized the Iranian oil industry in order that Iranians may benefit first from their own resources, and was intent on implementing further sweeping social reforms. And so one day in 1953 - when America still enjoyed the affections of the Iranian people - the US government decided that Mossadegh should not rule for long. And it schemed and schemed and schemed.

Code-named Operation Ajax and designed, hatched and led by Kermit Roosevelt, a key CIA operative and a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, the American-orchestrated coup toppled Mossadegh and forever "reshaped the history of Iran, the Middle East and the world. [The coup] restored Mohammad Reza Shah to the Peacock Throne," allowing the monarch to impose a murderous 25-year tyranny which claimed the lives of thousands of Iranians.

The US agents who had assembled in the American embassy compound in Tehran as soon as the success of the coup was ensured were "full of jubilation, celebration, and occasional whacks on the back as one or the other of us was suddenly overcome with enthusiasm," recalled Kermit Roosevelt in his book Countercoup: The struggle for the control of Iran - a book which came out ironically in 1979, the year of the American hostage crisis in Iran.

Jubilation and celebration. Maybe it's all about perspective. Maybe not.

Where the US government "saw a glorious day," exiled Iranian intellectual Sasan Fayazmanesh would write 50 years later, "we saw a day of infamy." Where American officials "wished the day had never ended, we wished it had never begun." Where the United States "saw a dazzling picture of his majesty's restoration to power, we saw grotesque pictures of a brutal dictatorship, informants, dungeons, torture, executions."[2]

"My only crime," Mossadegh would recall after his ouster, "is that I nationalized the Iranian oil industry and removed from this land the network of colonialism and the political and economic influence of the greatest empire on earth" - referring to Iran's former tormentor, Britain. But Mossadegh had also committed another 'crime' - one with far more grave consequences: he took no notice of the fact that America had already overtaken Britain in the global imperial race - an America ruled by a government that despised his independence even as it coveted his country's oil.[3]

But what goes around comes around. There is always a day of reckoning.

"It is a reasonable argument," argued an American foreign policy journal, "that but for the coup, Iran would be a mature democracy. So traumatic was the coup's legacy that when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the U.S. embassy." Hostages were taken by panic-stricken Iranians who feared the Shah would be re-installed by the US.

"In the back of everybody's mind hung the suspicion that, with the admission of the Shah to the United States, the countdown for another coup d'etat had begun," one of the hostage-takers would recall years after the incident. "Such was to be our fate again, we were convinced, and it would be irreversible. We now had to reverse the irreversible."

The hostage crisis, asserts New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer in his book All the Shah's Men - a brilliant reconstruction of the American coup - precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran and helped consolidate the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein "while the [Islamic] revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. A lot of history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran . . . Can anybody say the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was inevitable? Or did it only become so once the aspirations of the Iranian people were temporarily expunged in 1953?"

"It is not far-fetched," states Kinzer, "to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's oppressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."

Outrageous? Not entirely, so long as pride yields to memory.

"There is nothing new in the world," said Harry Truman, "except the history you do not know."


NOTES:

[1] "The Bush Crusade," James Carroll, tomdispatch.com, September 3, 2004.
[2] "The coup, 50 years after: what Kermit didn't say: in memory of August 19, 1953," Sasan Fayazmanesh, Counterpunch, August 15, 2003.
[3] All the Shah's men: An American coup and the roots of Middle East Terror, Stephen Kinzer, 2003, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003.
[4] The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad and Modernity, Tariq Ali, Verso, 2002.

LESSONS FROM VENEZUELA
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
August 23, 2004

The result of the August 15 referendum, said Jose Clavijo, the affable and articulate Charge de Affaires of the Venezuelan Embassy in the Philippines, "was not totally unexpected, even though the margin of victory was larger than what many predicted." [1]

The question posed by the Venezuelan referendum was simple enough and answerable either by a 'yes' or a 'no': should the mandate of the Chavez administration be revoked? Of the 14 million registered voters, 8.6 million turned out to cast their vote. The final tally: a 59-percent embrace of the Chavez government and its radical social program.

There can be no doubt, asserted Clavijo, a furtive smile forming on his face. "The mandate of President Hugo Chavez has been unequivocally affirmed." Likewise, the Venezuelan brand of participatory democracy, where the ballot seems only to be a first step.

Elected in 1998 and re-elected under the new constitution in 2000 to serve till 2007, Chavez knew that the referendum was but the latest in a long list of schemes hatched by the alliance between the Venezuelan oligarchy and the U.S. government to overthrow him. According to the new Venezuelan Constitution that was re-written in 1999 at the behest of Chavez, and which created the possibility of activating a recall referendum for elected officials, if 'yes' had prevailed elections would have been held 30 days after the referendum.

But Chavez had abundant confidence in direct democracy: he put his trust in the people by empowering them. "And they responded generously."

"I am pleased to be the first president to submit himself to the people's judgment halfway through his term and to be ratified" in office," said a triumphant President Chavez after the result was announced. Taunting the Bush administration, which had openly backed a failed coup against him in 2002, and using terminology from baseball, his country's national sport, Chavez likened his win to a homerun. "[T]he ball must have fallen right in the middle of the White House," said Chavez. "It's a present for Bush." [2]

Rather than unseat or weaken Chavez, which was the intention of the opposition parties driven by the Venezuelan elite - which enjoys a near monopoly ownership of the country's media, the referendum fortified the standing of Chavez and the possibilities of sweeping social change that his government signifies within and far beyond the Bolivarian Republic.

For many, the nature of the change that Chavez is driving has become the central reason behind the sustained attempts to undermine the Chavez government. The disparity of agendas is glaring. The opposition continues to promise, for instance, a return to free market economic policies, a platform welcomed by international financial leaders and institutions like the International Monetary Fund; Chavez is opposed to it.[3]

"We are building an economy at the service of human beings," said Nora Castaneda, the president of Banca Mujer (Women's Development Bank), of the Chavez administration's goals, "not human beings at the service of the economy."

For the first time in Venezuela's history, government authority has been established decisively over how the Venezuelan oil industry - the fifth largest exporter in the world - is to be run and for whose benefit. Oil money is now re-channeled towards financing immeasurable employment, health, education and literacy missions throughout the country for the destitute of Venezuela, specifically for women.

At least 65 percent of Venezuelan households are headed by women and the Chavez government during the drafting of the 2000 constitution ensured that this fact was reflected in Venezuela's framing document. Among it's progressive provisions, the constitution recognizes women's unwaged caring work as economically productive, entitling housewives to social security.

It was no surprise, Selma James noted, that in 2002 women of African and indigenous descent led the masses who descended from the hills to reverse the elite-sponsored and U.S.-backed putsch which briefly ousted Chavez, "thereby saving their constitution, their president, their democracy, their revolution."[4]

Over 250,000 children now have access to secondary education - children "whose social status excluded them from this privilege during the ancien regime." In poor districts, 11,000 neighborhood clinics have been established, the health budget has tripled and 10,000 Cuban doctors have been fielded to boost health care services in impoverished areas. There is also an ongoing campaign to provide citizenship to thousands of long-term immigrants.

"Chavez has based himself on the pueblo protagonico - the grassroots as protagonists," James adds. The iconoclastic Chavez "knows that the changes he was elected to make can only be achieved with, and protected by, popular participation."

And yet, despite his belligerent attitude towards the Bush administration, despite his glaring differences with the U.S. government concerning Latin American hemispheric economic integration, despite his government's openly expressed dissenting position on geopolitical issues such as the war on Iraq, the U.S. government continues to do business with the Chavez government and import 14 percent of its oil - equivalent to 1.5 million barrels per day, which was the average even before the election of Chavez - from Venezuela.

Once perceived by his neighbors as "a bit of an oddball," Chavez "now appears more like a Latin American statesman. Up and down the continent he has become the man to watch."[5]

"I don't believe in the dogmatic postulates of Marxist revolution. I don't accept that we are living in a period of proletarian revolutions. All that must be revised. Reality is telling us that everyday," said Pres. Chavez in an interview with the eminent intellectual Tariq Ali.[6]

"Are we aiming in Venezuela today for the abolition of private property or a classless society?" Chavez continued. "I don't think so. But if I'm told that because of that reality you can't do anything to help the poor . . . then I say 'We part company'. I will never accept that there can be no redistribution of wealth in society. Our upper classes don't even like paying taxes. That's one reason why they hate me. We said 'You must pay your taxes'. I believe it's better to die in battle, rather than hold aloft a very revolutionary and very pure banner, and do nothing . . . That position often strikes me as very convenient, a good excuse . . . Try and make your revolution, go into combat, advance a little, even if it's only a millimeter, in the right direction, instead of dreaming about utopias."

That is why he won, Tariq Ali concludes.

Obviously so.


NOTES:
[1] Interview by the author with Jose Clavijo, Charge de Affaires, Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Makati City, Philippines, August 19, 2004.
[2] "International observers ratify Chavez's triumph in referendum," Humberto Marquez, IPS, August 16, 2004.
[3] "Opposition unveils 'free market' program," Roberto Jorquera, Green Left Weekly, July 21, 2004.
[4] "An antidote to apathy," Selma James, The Guardian, August 13, 2004.
[5] "Why Hugo Chavez is heading for a stunning victory," Richard Gott, The Guardian-UK, August 7, 2004.
[6] "The importance of Hugo Chavez: why he crushed the oligarchs," Tariq Ali, Counterpunch.org, August 16, 2004.

ANTIDOTE TO DESPAIR
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
August 2, 2004

Individually embattled, they swayed and danced together and celebrated.

In truth, the July 26 gathering was a menagerie of disquiet. Each Filipino who arrived that fine evening at the Quezon City watering hole called Conspiracy carried a roster of personal concerns in their hearts. But as is often the case, when called upon, the heart finds a way to expand beyond breaking point in order to embrace a few more causes.

Answering the call that night were businesspeople alarmed at the steep decline of the country's economy and workers facing mass lay-offs; feminists outraged over the assault of the Arroyo administration on the reproductive rights of women and couples, and artists, intellectuals and activists threatened by hectares of social ills.

In reality, the occasion chosen for the activity that night was for most Filipinos an arcane event, esoteric even for many of those who attended the activity: the 51st anniversary of the attack on the Moncada Barracks - an armed push by a determined band of Cubans that launched the six year struggle which overthrew the US-backed government of Fulgencio Batista, the dictator of Cuba.

But those who showed up did not exactly join the event to commemorate the Moncada Barracks assault and some did not exactly go there to register their agreement with Cuba's efforts to construct socialism.

The only thing on display that evening was the mambo of camaraderie - the extension of support by crisis-ridden Filipinos to Cuba - a small sister nation reeling from the hooliganism of imperial America. An extension of moral and financial sustenance by citizens of an economically distraught country to the people of Cuba who have accomplished much despite the inhuman 45-year economic blockade which the US government continues to impose. Illiteracy was eradicated a long time ago in Cuba, where the net primary school enrollment for girls and boys reached 100 percent in 1997, where the ratio of primary school pupils for every Cuban teacher ranks as high as Sweden, where the ratio of 5.3 doctors per 1,000 people ranks the highest in the world, where enough anti-retroviral medicines are produced, according to the BBC, to supply the country's AIDS patients, and where infant mortality rates are lower than US rates.[1] To cite a few trifling examples.

On through the night they swayed and danced in a celebration of defiance, with male democrats and activists doing most of the swaying, perhaps intimidated by the graceful feminist souls dancing to the fever-inducing music of Bo Razon's band. So much is freely offered, a saying goes, to anyone with eyes to see.

Zelda Zablan, spry icon of the University of the Philippines Population Institute and the spirited Mercy Fabros of Woman Health Philippines were on the dance floor the longest, followed by the graceful poet Mara Llanot, dance instructor and part-time Philippine history luminary Maris Diokno, and Princess Nemenzo, who danced a bit but applauded the loudest and smiled the widest. Young souls all.

The garden place Conspiracy was a jam-packed house and its main serving never came close to running out: solidarity, the antidote to adversity and despair.

The same spirit of generosity that drove a hundred animated citizens of East Timor - the world's newest nation, one still reeling from the genocidal Suharto-instigated occupation - to take part in the international day of protest against the war on Iraq on February 15, 2003.[2]

"There is no moral principle in [the] current desire to overthrow Saddam Hussein when [the governments of the US, the UK and Australia] felt no compulsion to overthrow Suharto, who was at least as bloody and brutal as Hussein," said the statement read in Tetum and English at the embassies of the US, the UK and Australia by East Timorese demonstrators marching with drums and music peacefully through the capital Dili.

"Suharto's dictatorship was eventually ousted by the Indonesian people, who accomplished 'regime change' through largely peaceful means. The people of East Timor made our own 'regime change' through the Popular Consultation," the East Timorese protesters implored. "The Indonesian invasion of this country resulted in massive civilian casualties and destruction. Yet, during 24 years of illegal occupation, neither East Timor's resistance nor any foreign government advocated invading Indonesia or attacking Indonesian civilians. The Indonesian people, like the East Timorese, were victims of Suharto, not to be punished for his crimes."

"After 25 years of war, the people of East Timor want peace not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. East Timor is a small and new nation, but we know quite a lot about the death and destruction that come with war, and we don't want to see similar destruction anywhere . . . Human life is too precious to be wasted for political or economic profit."[3]

"No War, No Racism!", "Keta Ataka Iraq" (Don't attack Iraq), "No blood for oil!" said their placards. For the survivors of genocide, the blows to Iraq were blows to East Timor as well. And so they swayed and danced as they marched through Dili and distributed solidarity, the antidote to war.

We must begin to live together as brothers and sisters, Martin Luther King, Jr. once said. Or we can perish together as fools.


NOTES:
[1] "Learn from Cuba, says World Bank," Jim Lobe, IPS, Washington, April 30, 2001. "Cuba leads the way in HIV fight," BBC News Online, February 17, 2003. "Vaccine May Open Window in US Blockade," 29 Jul 1999, IGC News Desk, Patricia Grogg, IPS, July 28, 1999.
[2] "East Timorese People Demonstrate Against Impending War in Iraq; World’s newest nation participates in global protest for peace," February 15, 2003.
[3] Statement by East Timorese and Indonesia citizens organizations presented to the embassies of the United States, United Kingdom and Australian in Dili, East Timor, on the occasion of the International Day Against the War in Iraq, February 15, 2003.