Geopolitics around Syria

I just drew a map showing the 30 largest World powers, according to GDP (PPP), and reflecting their governments' political stand on the so-far speculative attack against Syria:

Red: imperialist camp: government declared support for attack against Syria
Blue: anti-imperialist camp: government declared opposition to attack against Syria
Yellow: unknown official stand
Black: Syria (for reference)
Circles' areas are proportional to GDP(PPP)
(IMF data 2012, except Syria: WB 2005-2012)

Notice please that the alignment of governments on this matter may and in most cases does not reflect that of the people or even the parliament. In fact in some cases (UK), the government had to step down from its hawkish stand because of parliamentary opposition. In all cases the citizenry seems very hostile to any new imperialist adventure, especially considering how poorly justified it is (obvious psy-op) and who are the beneficiaries (Islamist terrorists of the worst kind).

Personally I believe (or at least hope) that the attack will never take place and that the various imperialist governments are actually using the parliament card to get an excuse not to intervene, while at the same time using the crisis to gauge the weight of global alliances.

But, whatever the case, we do get an interesting picture of global alignments. First of all the BRICS bloc has responded unanimously against the imperialist aggression, second some important and possibly unexpected non-BRICS states like Mexico, Egypt or Indonesia stand against the intervention. Of these the most notable is probably Germany, which also opposed (along with Italy) the intervention in Libya.

One can speculate that Merkel is just being cautious because of the elections but in fact she has such a wide advantage that she could do anything. The reality is that all this classical Western imperialism (it's just like the old Entente) is hurting German interests, which has long and strong ties with states like Iran, not to mention Russia, etc.

Also very notorious is the stand of India, often ambiguous. But maybe the most interesting development is the stand of Egypt. It is not just a calculated stand to appease the populace but apparently the Egyptian military is very hostile to any intervention in Syria and would like Assad to stay in place. In fact the anti-Damascus stand of the former President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood seems to have been one of the triggers of the military coup.

Not just the military, heavily dependent on US aid, but also Tamarod flatly rejects any intervention against Syria and has called for the government to close the Suez canal to Western military ships in such event, calling traitors to anyone who supported the Western aggression. 

The ghost of Nasser, who nationalized the Suez canal and was adamant of pan-Arabism, has returned strongly to Egyptian politics. Many would like Al-Sissi to be another Nasser, although I suspect that this is quite unlikely.

In any case around the Syrian crisis a new cold war seems to be brewing. True that China, the rising superpower, is keeping a relatively low profile but it is also true that, would the crisis escalate to the Persian Gulf, as it is perfectly possible they would be extremely upset.

USA: Bush administration on trial for crimes against humankind

Well, they may be: it depends on the guts of the tribunal. From Global Research:

Plaintiff Sundus Shaker Saleh, an Iraqi single mother and refugee now living in Jordan, filed a complaint in March 2013 in San Francisco federal court alleging that the planning and waging of the war constituted a “crime of aggression” against Iraq, a legal theory that was used by the Nuremberg Tribunal to convict Nazi war criminals after World War II.

(...)

In her lawsuit, Saleh alleges that:

– Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz began planning the Iraq War in 1998 through their involvement with the “Project for the New American Century,” a Washington DC non-profit that advocated for the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

– Once they came to power, Saleh alleges that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz convinced other Bush officials to invade Iraq by using 9/11 as an excuse to mislead and scare the American public into supporting a war.

– Finally, she claims that the United States failed to obtain United Nations approval prior to the invasion, rendering the invasion illegal and an act of impermissible aggression.

The US Government has asked for immunity for the accused (George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz) on the grounds that the war falls within the legal scope of their jobs.

If so, it seems formally critical to prove that they had planned the war long before being appointed as such public officers.

Of course, We The People know that they are guilty, no matter what tribunals may say.

Syria: Lavrov warns of imminent NATO attack

Dismissing the claims of Damascus using chemical weapons as unfounded and extremely unlikely (because Assad does not need them to win a war that is almost over), Russia Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov warned that it looks like the USA and allies (France, UK, etc.) are already determined to intervene in Syria with whatever pretext. 

Source: Bloomberg.

Aboriginal "freedom flotilla" risking all for bringing solidarity to West Papuans

West Papua is occupied by Indonesia since soon after independence. While the agreement of independence of Indonesia placed West Papua still under provisional Dutch control, the newborn Malay state soon managed to annex West Papua, which has no Malay native population, just as they did with East Timor, then under Portuguese control. The USA and UN were instrumental in this undemocratic transaction.

A new imperialism replaced the old one. 

Since then low intensity guerrilla has existed in West Papua. The deposition of Suharto, that allowed East Timor to break free, saw no significant change in the conflict of West Papua, still oppressed by Indonesian imperialism, which is speeding up the colonization of the island by ethnic Malays.

Australian, Papuan and Melanesian activists, most of them Aboriginal, set sail yesterday from Cairns in what is an act of cultural-political defiance to Indonesian oppression, described as Aboriginal cultural exchange. 

Indonesia has denied visa or authorization for the boat to sail in its waters and the participants acknowledge that they could even been shot down by the Navy. More likely is that they get arrested and jailed for years. That's what happened to several Australians who entered West Papua years ago without visa. 

Source: The Guardian.

Syria & Kurdistan: three Kurds burnt alive by the Islamists, CIA appoints Syria commander

The brutal fascist inhuman and psychopathic nature of the NATO-supported Islamist militias in Syria becomes even more evident with cases like these: three Kurdish citizens were burned alive in an execution like those of Torquemada.

Video from Russia Today[es]:

Earlier this year the same fascist militia massacred 450 Kurds near Tal Abyad. 

Source: Webguerrillero[es].


CIA names General Wright as commander for Syria

An anonymous source of the FARS news agency reported that the CIA has General John Wright, 57, with experience in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, has been appointed as "commander of operations and cooperation" for the Syrian civil war.

The general already has an office in Amman, Jordan, and keeps tight contacts with the dictators of Saudi Arabia. After a meeting with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the USA provided stinger missiles to the Islamist rebels. The CIA has a training camp in Jordan where some 3000 Syrian rebels are being trained. They plan to occupy Deraa, the border town where the civil war began after infiltration of agitators and armed groups from Jordan.

Source: Webguerrillero[es].

Uyghuristan: China deploys troops in force

China deployed many troops including tanks and other armored vehicles in Ürümqi, the capital of Uyghuristan (Xinjiang-Uyghur), annexed to China but ethnically distinct.

Around 19:00 Beijing time, thousands of heavily armed soldiers of the so-called Armed Police of the Pople were deployed in the Central Asian city, occupying the central square. I have never seen anything like that before, declared a local.

The deployment ended an hour and a half later. 

It appears to be scare tactics as the 4th anniversary of the Uyghur revolt of 2009 approaches. Recently some 100 activists attacked, armed with knives, a police station in the historical city of Hotan. 35 people were killed, although it is unclear to which side they belonged to. 

Four years ago, brutal riots confronted the native Uyghurs with the Han colonists, which make up some 40% of the population, resulting in a death toll of 200, including the victims of police repression.

Source: Gara[es].

UK planned the Syrian war years ago, admitted Roland Dumas

Former French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Roland Dumas (pictured), has revealed that the government of the United Kingdom, lead by David 'Babyface' Cameron. 

In declarations to LCP TV channel (widely quoted through World media thereafter), Dumas declared that:

I was in England, for an unrelated reason, two years before the violence in Syria began. I met with high British officials who confessed that they were preparing something in Syria.

This was in Great Britain, not the United States. Great Britain was preparing a rebel invasion of Syria. They even asked me, even if I was not anymore Minister of Foreign Affairs, if I would like to take part in it.

He also implied that the violence in the West Asian country was related to the anti-Zionist stand of the government of Damascus. In this regard, he also declared that Israel had admitted that they would try to destroy every single government in the region that does not collaborate with the Apartheid Regime.

Source: Webguerrillero[es].

Basque Country: Spanish soldiers march around San Sebastian (video)

Endangering not just the social peace but also road traffic, Spanish troops have marched through the road between Donostia (San Sebastian) and Hernani with all their weaponry and ugly bully's paraphernalia.

The Basque People has shown again and again that they oppose the Spanish and any other army and that they must go home or, even better, totally dissolve for the sake of peace, freedom and civility.

Source: Berria TB[eu] (via Sare Antifaxista[es]).

Syria: Meissan warns of NATO plans to take over TV waves

Research journalist Thierry Meissan thinks that NATO will take over Syrian TV media, maybe as soon as June 15, using only electronic means. That way:

... the Syrians wanting to watch their national TV stations will see them replaced on their screens by TV programs created by the CIA. Studio-shot images will show massacres that are blamed on the Syrian Government, people demonstrating, ministers and generals resigning from their posts, President Al-Assad fleeing, the rebels gathering in the big city centers, and a new government installing itself in the presidential palace.

Source and more details: Voltaire Network.

Second enclosure plan for Africa

From Volatility:

Corporate Summit to Impose Hunger on Africa

The aptly named ”Hunger Summit” is the one year anniversary of the inaugural conference of the “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition”, the corporatist strategy for the recolonization of Africa led by Big Ag and the G8. A year ago I called the opening session a Wannsee Conference for Africa. Obama was master of ceremonies at Camp David. This year Britain’s David Cameron has the honors. The criminal conference will deliver a progress report and issue a public strategy. African farmers, tribes, consumers, environmental and civil society groups are opposing this, with support from anti-corporatists and democracy activists from all over the world. Here’s the order of battle.

(...)

The goal of the New Alliance is the corporate Gleichschaltung (coordination) of African agriculture and trade practices and policies for maximum plunder and domination. It’s the same slate of globalization and commodification practices which have already devastated much of humanity. African governments are to collaborate in dominating and exploiting the people and the land.

*A severe and rigorously enforced “intellectual property” regime, for the benefit of the GMO cartel and its patents, which were the result of piracy in the first place.

*The privatization of land. Indenture loans and distribution facilities for proprietary GMO seeds, synthetic fertilizer, industrial machinery, commodified crops bound for ethanol and industrial food processing, can’t be arranged with people farming a commons. As a prerequisite, corporate gangs who would dominate and exploit these people and their land first need government to enclose and parcel out the land. This has been a priority of the World Bank going back to the 1980s. USAid chief Rajiv Shad has emphasized that the goal is to accelerate land grabbing. As Via Campesina put it, “These policies aim to allocate title deeds to land in order to facilitate the purchase and sale of landed property. In the end, poor peasants and other rural people lose out to the benefit of those who have the means to purchase land.” (p. 14)

*The formation of economic hierarchies to centralize and integrate production, processing, storage, and distribution. All this is to be done according to corporate specifications, toward the goal of forcing most farmers off the land, and reducing the rest to indentured servitude or wage slavery within a cash-based commodification regime. Today the farmers of Africa are smallholders and commons managers producing food for their families and communities. This is what must be eradicated and replaced by industrialized corporatization.

*Open borders for corporate dumping and looting (“free trade” is the standard Orwellian term for this; a truthful term would be something like corporate command trade), where it comes to the government-approved and licensed “formal sector”. Meanwhile traditional markets and actual free trading among the people would be criminalized and repressed.

*”Free trade” zones, tax-free zones, laws licensing the total repatriation of profits by Western “investors”. The ravage of Asia is set to be reproduced in Africa.

*Impose expensive industrial infrastructure on farmers. Offer credit in order to indenture them and trap them on the cash-crop treadmill. The procedure is always the same everywhere, with only minor modifications. 1. Propaganda – you have no choice but to get on board with commodification, and you better do it fast or you’ll be left behind. 2. Enforce this with dumping and general coercion into a cash economy. 3. Offer the necessary product (GMO seeds, synthetic fertilizer, industrial herbicide and pesticide, machinery, oil) and the loan in order to buy it. 4. In this way destroy most independent farmers completely, turn the rest into indentured sharecroppers or wage slaves.

... full article at Volatility.

USA: some people still awakening to the reality of Imperial Presidential powers

From Democracy Now!:

A Pentagon official predicted Thursday the war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates could last up to 20 more years. The comment came during a Senate hearing revisiting the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, enacted by Congress days after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. At the hearing, Pentagon officials claimed the AUMF gives the president power to wage endless war anywhere in the world, including in Syria, Yemen and the Congo. "This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here," said Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine. "You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution here today." We play excerpts of Thursday’s Senate hearing and our recent interview with Jeremy Scahill, author of the new bestseller, "Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield."

→ read more or watch the video at Democracy Now!

Pakistani court rules: US drone attacks are Crimes Against Humankind

Sometimes someone has to state the obvious: drone attacks (againts usually civilian or mixed targets) are Crimes Against Humankind, and then, of course, absolutely illegal under Pakistani and International law. 

The case was brought by citizens of North Waziristan on the particular (but way too common) case of a US attack against a tribal council (jirga), which had been mustered to solve a long-standing inter-tribal conflict. Among the attendants were some 18 alleged Taliban militants but all the rest were unrelated to any conflict. 

The Peshawar High Court declares the USA and the CIA guilty of blatant violation of basic human rights and are against the UN Charter, the UN General Assembly Resolution, as well as against the Geneva Convention (war laws).

The civilian victims of this mass murder included infants/ suckling babies, women and preteen children, as well as considerable damage to properties, livestock and wildlife. 

The court rules that the USA and CIA must pay indemnities to the victims or their survivor relatives, established in dollars. It also instructs the Pakistani government to take measures so no further violations of the sovereignty of Pakistan are committed by foreign troops, having the right and obligation to strike down the drones when they enter Pakistani airspace. 

It also instructs the government to file a formal complaint against the USA and to officially investigate the matter, as well as to demand the UN to establish a War Crimes tribunal dedicated to the matter. It requires from the Pakistani and UN Security Councils to pass resolutions condemning the violations of sovereignty, asking that, if not satisfied by the USA, Pakistan must sever all ties with the aggressor power, diplomatic and logistic. 

The Pakistani Armed Forces get a yearly $26 billion bribe from the USA, what effectively makes them, as happens with Egyptian, Yemeni, Colombian and other neocolonial armed forces, a mercenary entity unwilling to defend its own population against their imperial master.

Source: The Dissenter.

Elderly US exile in Cuba officially "targetted for assassination" by Obama

Assata Shakur, 65, exiled in Cuba since 1979 and, in a case similar to that of Mumia Abu Jamal, charged with a dubious police murder, which took place in 1973 in a confusing shooting between Black Panthers and Ohio police. This old case has now been intriguingly revived with the placement of Shakur in the most wanted terrorist list of the White House, which formally allows the imperialist forces to kill her without any further reason. 

Yes, US law today allows for targeted assassination of US citizens at home or abroad, at the whim of the federal authorities who fill that list of "terrorists". 

But why now? Why such a cold, old and nearly forgotten case would be upgraded to "terrorist" category? Glen Ford at argues at BAR that the aim is to target overall the Black Liberation Movement, further criminalizing the most oppressed ethnicity of North America. However I suspect that there is another reason: to create a pretext, a casus belli for military or otherwise forceful intervention against Cuba, whose successful socialist example, where every single citizen has a home, food and free quality healthcare, is felt as a growing threat to the oligarchic rule of the increasingly class-polarized US and European societies, and also for its growing influence in general in the American continent.

Hunger strike to death in Guantanamo concentration and torture camp continues unabated

From The Independent:

Emaciated and frail, more than 100 men lie on concrete floors of freezing, solitary cells in Guantánamo, silently starving themselves to death.

Stripped of all possessions, even basics such as a sleeping mat or soap, they lie listlessly as guards periodically bang on the steel doors and shout at them to move an arm or leg to prove they are still conscious.

The notorious detention centre is in crisis, suffering a rebellion of unprecedented scale, with most of the camp on lockdown and around two-thirds of the 166 detainees on hunger strike.

This week 40 American military nurses were drafted in to try to stem a mass suicide. The last Brit inside, Shaker Aamer, has said he is prepared to strike to his death.

The US administration does its best to keep prying eyes from the unfolding tragedy but the The Independent has obtained first-hand reports.

Twice a day, the 23 most weak are taken into a room. Their wrists, arms, stomach, legs and head are strapped to a chair and repeated attempts are made to force a tube down their noses into their stomachs. It is an ugly procedure as they gag and wretch, blood dripping from their nostrils. “They won’t let us live in peace and now they won’t let us die in peace,” said detainee, Fayiz Al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti held for 11 years without charge.

Four are so ill that they lie in shackles in the hospital wing and insiders predict it is only a matter of time before one perishes.

“It is possible that I may die in here,” said Mr Aamer, 44, through his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, recently. “I hope not, but if I do die, please tell my children that I loved them above all else, but that I had to stand up for the principle that they cannot just keep holding people without a trial, especially when they have been cleared for release,” said the father of four, who remains in Camp 5 despite being approved for release more than five years ago. “Sad to say, torture and abuse continue in Guantánamo Bay and the US is throwing away yet more of its dwindling moral authority,” added Mr Stafford Smith.

The protest, which began on 6 February, has now spread through Camp 6 and Camp 5 with an estimated 100 to 130 taking part. These are not the high value detainees kept in Camp 7, the handful charged with terror offences. The hunger strikers are those who have waited a decade or more without trial, including 86 cleared for release but remain trapped because of restrictions imposed by Congress.

... continue reading at The Independent. 

Guatemala: military attacks against the People resisting Canadian mine

The state of exception (= military rule) in four municipalities opposing the silver mining project at San Rafael district, Jalapa, Guatemala, by the Canadian corporation Tahoe Resources.

A month ago the same measure was taken against Santa Cruz Barillas, Huehuetanango, whose citizens are fighting against a hydroelectric project by Spanish multinational ENDESA.

In all cases the authorities have used the pretext of alleged criminal and narco business as excuse to declare the state of exception. Armored and assault vehicles were displayed at the towns affected, causing fear.

The government of Guatemala is in the hands of General Otto Pérez Molina, accused in the process for Crimes Against Humankind against General Efraín Ríos Montt, who led the fascist repression in the 1980s.

Source: LINyM[es].

May Day: Guatemala, Honduras

In spite of the reactionary governments of these countries, the peoples of Guatemala and Honduras brought their class cry to the streets yesterday, International Day of the Working Class.

Ciudad de Guatemala

Tegucigalpa, Honduras

In Honduras especially, there was strong condemnation of the corporate ("libertarian") intervention of the USA by means of private paramilitary forces, directly owned by the capitalists, local or foreign, inside the borders of a ghost state that almost does not exist anymore. 

Source[es]: LINYM (link 1, link 2).