Native Americans came in great numbers to Washington last week, partly to celebrate, partly to correct a historic injustice. The occasion was the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall – a vivid reminder of the profound cultural and symbolic legacy of America’s indigenous peoples. In the background, however, was a continuing lawsuit, whose purpose is to restore to the Indians assets and revenues that are rightfully theirs.

Specifically, the suit seeks a proper accounting of a huge trust established more than a century ago when Congress broke up reservation lands into individual allotments. The trust was intended to manage the revenues owed to individual Indians from oil leases, timber leases and other activities. Yet a century of disarray and dishonesty by the federal government, particularly the Interior Department, whose job it is to administer the trust, has shortchanged generations of Indians and threatens to shortchange some half million more – the present beneficiaries of the trust.

Many of the beneficiaries hold minutely fractionated interests in land that has been passed down from generation to generation. But no one really grasps the true dimensions of the trust because the value of those leases and royalties is unclear, and because there has never been a real accounting of the money paid into or out of it. What has become clear is that Indians were often paid far less for leases on their property than whites were for comparable property.

Those who examine the trust – including members of Congress – come away stunned by how badly and how fraudulently it has been handled.

Full Article: NY Times

Well it’s American Indian week. The mess this article describes has existed for many years. ‘Historical reckoning’? Speaking of a continuing shame, when is Black week?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – African hunter-gatherers who the Botswana government has ousted from their traditional lands brought their cause to Washington on Friday, seeking support in a battle they say revolves around diamond wealth.

Bushman elder Roy Sesana, wearing a headdress of beads and antelope horns, told a news conference the Botswana government had forced his people from their territory in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve because it wanted to make the land available for diamond mining.

“I was told this by three ministers. They told me we have to move because we cannot stay where there are mines,” Sesana said through an interpreter. “I said, ‘The diamonds are the remains of our ancestors.”’

An official of the Botswana Embassy in Washington, John Moreti, who was in the audience, took issue with Sesana. “There are certainly no plans to do a diamond mine in the area,” he said.

“My question is, how many Basarwa (Bushmen) does Roy represent? I think he represents 1 percent.”

“I represent all the Bushmen,” Sesana replied.

The Gaborone government has relocated about 2,500 Bushmen over the past 18 months from the desert game reserve, which is about the size of Switzerland, into resettlement camps where it says they can be better integrated into mainstream society.

The Bushmen are descended from the earliest inhabitants of southern Africa but have been driven from most of their original territory by black pastoral tribes — like the present rulers of Botswana — and white settlers.

Full Article: Reuters

These are the descendents of us all.

by Nicholas Kristof
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — President Bush has been searching vainly for Osama bin Laden for three years now, so I’ve decided to help him out. I’m traveling through Pakistan and Afghanistan to see whether I can find Osama, bring him back in my luggage and claim that $25 million reward.

So for the last few days, I’ve been peering into mosques and down village wells, even under mullahs’ couches. No luck so far, but I did find something almost as interesting.

I’m talking about the arrangement under which the U.S. cuts Pakistan some slack on nuclear proliferation, in exchange for President Pervez Musharraf’s joining aggressively in the hunt for Osama – in the hope of catching him by Nov. 2.

If a nuclear weapon destroys the U.S. Capitol in coming years, it will probably be based in part on Pakistani technology. The biggest challenge to civilization in recent years came not from Osama or Saddam Hussein but from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb. Dr. Khan definitely sold nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya, and, officials believe, to several more nations as well.

Full Article: NY Times

In jails and prisons across the United States, thousands of people are detained who have never been accused of crimes. The guards treat them like criminals, and the criminals they bunk with often abuse them. They are held for months, sometimes even years, but unlike the criminals, they do not know when their sentences will end. They receive this treatment because they are foreigners who arrived in the United States saying that they were fleeing persecution at home.

The United States did not always lock up the huddled masses. Until 1997, when security concerns began to rise, asylum seekers could live like normal people while awaiting their hearings. Today, thousands wait in detention. Some go to immigration centers that greatly resemble prisons, but more than half are sent to actual jails and prisons.

The Homeland Security Department, which took over immigration matters from the Immigration and Naturalization Service 18 months ago, says it detains only those who pose a security threat or who intend to disappear. But there are countless cases of asylum seekers who are detained even when they clearly pose no risk, have friends or relatives in America who will post bond, and are unlikely to skip out on their asylum hearings. They include Tibetan nuns, religious minorities from Africa, an Afghan woman persecuted by the Taliban for running a girls’ school, Ukrainian grass-roots activists and others. These people are often the most noble in their society. They come here chasing America’s promised liberty, and they end up in chains.

The rules have become harsher since Sept. 11.

…In addition, the United States seems to be using harsh detention to discourage people from fleeing to America. In the case of Haitians, this is an explicit policy. Attorney General John Ashcroft ruled that all people arriving by boat – a vast majority of them Haitians – should be detained because freeing them would encourage others to come. An exception is made for the Cubans who arrive by boat. They get parole and a green card, by law.

Full Article: NY Times

by James Glanz
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 24 – A virulent form of hepatitis that is especially lethal for pregnant women has broken out in two of Iraq’s most troubled districts, Iraqi Health Ministry officials said in interviews here this week, and they warned that a collapse of water and sewage systems in the continuing violence in the country is probably at the root of the outbreak. The disease, called hepatitis E, is caused by a virus that is often spread by sewage-contaminated drinking water. The officials said they had equipment to test only a limited number of people showing symptoms, suggesting that only a fraction of the actual cases have been firmly diagnosed. In Sadr City, a Baghdad slum that for months has been convulsed by gun battles between a local militia and American troops, the officials said as many as 155 cases had turned up.

The second outbreak is in Mahmudiya, a town 35 miles south of Baghdad that is known for its kidnappings and shootings as well as for its poverty, where there are an estimated 60 cases. At least nine pregnant women are believed to have been infected, and one has died. Five deaths have been reported over all.

“We are saying that the real number is greatly more than this, because the area is greatly underreported,” said Dr. Atta-alla Mekhlif Al-Salmani, leader of the viral hepatitis section at Health Ministry’s Center of Disease Control.

The World Health Organization is rushing hepatitis E testing kits, water purification tablets, informational brochures and other materials to Iraq, said Dr. Naeema Al-Gasseer, the W.H.O. representative for Iraq, who is now based in Amman, Jordan.

But viral hepatitis comes in many forms, and another ominous set of statistics suggests that the quality of water supplies around the country has deteriorated since the American-led war began last year, Dr. Salmani said. In 2003, 70 percent more cases of hepatitis of all types were reported across Iraq than in the year before, he said. During the first six months of 2004, as many cases were reported as in all of 2002.

Full Article: NY Times

by Mike Davis
The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond’s version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less — mainly Black — were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath.

New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded they had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the city’s poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean’s daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about the “large group…mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods” who wanted to evacuate but couldn’t.

Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain, did Mayor Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome and a few schools to desperate residents. He was reportedly worried that lower-class refugees might damage or graffiti the Superdome.

In the event, Ivan the Terrible spared New Orleans, but official callousness toward poor Black folk endures.

Over the last generation, City Hall and its entourage of powerful developers have relentlessly attempted to push the poorest segment of the population — blamed for the city’s high crime rates — across the Mississippi river. Historic Black public-housing projects have been razed to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In other housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for offenses as trivial as their children’s curfew violations. The ultimate goal seems to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans — one big Garden District — with chronic poverty hidden away in bayous, trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits.

But New Orleans isn’t the only the case-study in what Nixonians once called “the politics of benign neglect.” In Los Angeles, county supervisors have just announced the closure of the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital near Watts. The hospital, located in the epicenter of LA’s gang wars, is one of the nation’s busiest centers for the treatment of gunshot wounds. The loss of its ER, according to paramedics, could “add as much as 30 minutes in transport time to other facilities.”

The result, almost certainly, will be a spate of avoidable deaths. But then again the victims will be Black or Brown and poor.

Full Article: commondreams.org
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by Noreena Hertz
At the International Monetary Fund, only one in nine senior employees are women. At the World Bank, less than 1% of the staff work on issues relating to gender. In the world of international finance it is men in grey suits who manage world debt. But on the ground, in the world’s poorest countries, it is women who shoulder the developing world’s debt burden. Make no mistake, debt is a feminist issue.

To be eligible for loans from the World Bank and the IMF in order to repay their debts, impoverished countries are made to follow these two institutions’ narrow set of macroeconomic policies. These policies seem reasonable to the men who insist on them: the privatisation of state-owned enterprises and public utilities; a tight rein on public expenditure; the opening up of markets to foreign investors. But a compelling body of research now shows that these policies exacerbate poverty in poor countries, and harm girls and women the most.

Take the capping of public expenditure. One of the first things that governments don’t do in order to meet this particular requirement is invest in infrastructure development like water and sanitation. This disproportionately affects women because it is women in developing countries who, as a result, walk up to 15km each day to collect water; it is women who on these journeys risk their own security. The Sudanese militia, for example, has been reported to prey on the women in Darfur who have to walk long distances to find water. It is girls who become “prisoners of daylight” because of a lack of toilet facilities, fearful to go for a pee until it is dark.

The reining in of public expenditure hurts girls in other ways, too. In order to meet this requirement, almost all developing countries have adopted a policy of charging for healthcare and school fees. And when parents faced with school fees have to choose between spending their money on sending their daughters or sons to learn, guess who gets to go to school? When the state doesn’t provide healthcare, it is daughters not sons who are taken out of school to become care-givers; it is girls who become the unpaid nurses.

Guardian UK
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LAGOS (Reuters) – Multinational oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell has evacuated non-essential staff from two oilfields in Nigeria where troops are fighting a major offensive against rebel militia, a spokesman said.

The decision to withdraw 235 workers was taken as a precaution after the company noted troop movements Thursday around the Soku and Ekulama fields, about 30 miles west of the southern city of Port Harcourt, he added. Oil production was not affected.

…Companies are on a heightened state of alert after a commander of the rebel Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force (NDPVF) told Reuters Thursday that they would attack oil installations unless the military halted a two-week-old operation to flush out what it calls armed bandits from their river hideouts in the remote area of mangrove swamps and creeks.

Nigerian troops fired on an NDPVF camp using helicopter gunships last week, killing several militants.

An army spokesman said troops raided a village near the Shell oilfields, but met no resistance from suspected militants hiding there.

“Soldiers went in to continue their cordon and search operations to track down the gangsters,” the spokesman said.

“Our people recovered communications gadgets, but when the gangsters spotted the soldiers they ran away.”

Companies fear a repeat of last year’s uprising in the nearby Delta state by members of the Ijaw tribe, who are in majority in the region, which forced companies to shut 40 percent of Nigeria’s production.

GUARD KILLED

So far, the delta militants have not targeted oil facilities in Africa’s top oil producer, although a security guard at one Shell flow station was killed last month in crossfire.

“The troops are not there to protect our facilities. They are going after militants,” the Shell spokesman said.

Nigeria is the world’s seventh largest oil exporter and the fifth most important supplier to the United States. About half the nation’s 2.5 million barrels per day comes from the eastern delta around Port Harcourt.

The NDPVF has been fighting rival militias in Rivers state since last year, a conflict that observers say is linked to broader political rivalries in the state.

The army announced earlier this month that it was taking over security in Rivers state from the police to “cleanse the state of all forms of armed banditry.” Hundreds of extra troops have been moved to places that have seen regular violence.

Amnesty International estimated up to 500 people were killed in fighting in the three weeks to mid-September, but the government says the number is much smaller.

NDPVF leader Mujahid Dokubo-Asari says he is fighting for self-determination for the Niger delta, where most people live in abject poverty despite having all the nation’s oil. The government describes him as a bandit fighting for control of smuggling routes used by oil thieves.

Full Article: Reuters

by Douglass K. Daniel
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Republican National Committee acknowledged this week that it distributed campaign literature in West Virginia and Arkansas warning voters that liberals want to ban the Bible.

When reporters asked about the mailings on Sept. 17, RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie said he wasn’t aware of the material and did not confirm that it was distributed by the GOP. However, Gillespie said it “could be the work” of the party.

Contacted Friday by The Associated Press, party spokeswoman Christine Iverson said the GOP had already acknowledged it was the source of the mass mailings.

The literature claims that “the liberal agenda includes removing ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance” and shows a Bible with the word “BANNED” across it. It also shows a photo of a man, on his knees, placing a ring on the hand of another man with the word “ALLOWED,” a reference to same-sex marriage.

The mailing tells people to “vote Republican to protect our families” and defeat the “liberal agenda.”

Full Article:Guardian UK

by Thom Shanker
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 – A Pentagon-appointed panel of outside experts has concluded in a new study that the American military does not have sufficient forces to sustain current and anticipated stability operations, like the festering conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and other missions that might arise.

Portions of the study, which has not been officially released, were read into the public record on Thursday by Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a leader of Democrats who want to expand the size of the military. During testimony by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his top commanders, Senator Reed said he found the study “provocative and startling.”

Mr. Rumsfeld said the report was an “excellent piece of work,” and that he had ordered briefings on its findings for senior military and civilian officials.

Full Article: NY Times