LIVE FROM HONDURAS: US Ambassador Hugo Llorens Discloses Secrets of the Honduran Coup; Chinese Viewing Prohibited
August 15th, 2009 § 4 Comments
US Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens. (Photo 2009, US Southern Command)
While awaiting the arrival of United States Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens to a meeting at the US embassy in Tegucigalpa Friday morning, Deputy Mission Chief Simon Henshaw spoke to an American human rights delegation from Global Exchange. The meeting had been organized by Andrés Conteris, founder of Democracy Now! en Español, who had managed to get me into the embassy despite the fact that I was not on the list and that my shoes set off the metal detector.
What Hamas Should Do
August 15th, 2009 § 6 Comments
I wrote this in March 2008, before the most recent Gaza massacre, and also before the deployment of ‘morality patrols’ in Gaza. Whilst these patrols have no official authority and have usually (but not always) dispensed their advice politely, they still give off the unpleasant whiff of Saudi Arabia, and seem at best like a diversion from more pressing problems. I support Hamas unconditionally in its resistance to Zionism (and now to Wahhabi-nihilism too), but unconditional support does not need to be uncritical.
I’ve written a great deal about Israel’s crimes. Here I’ll write about what Hamas should do. I won’t criticise its choice to resist, which I see as entirely legitimate so long as there is no real peace process, and I won’t discuss its evolving methods of resistance, because I don’t think that’s my business or area of expertise. I won’t criticise the so-called ‘coup’ in which it took sole power in Gaza, because it is now common knowledge that it did this to pre-empt an American-Israeli-Dahlan coup against its democratically-elected government, and to restore some kind of order in the territory. And I’m not writing this in an attempt to be ‘objective’ or ‘balanced’; when faced by obvious injustice I see no point in equating the occupier and ethnic cleanser with the occupied and the refugees. I offer the following criticisms as advice, in the hope that it will help the resistance meet its goals.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Honduras wins soccer game against Costa Rice, TV announcers ignore opportunity to shout “GOOOOLPISTAS!”
August 15th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
In the aftermath of the June 28 military coup against President of Honduras Mel Zelaya, much attention has been devoted in the Honduran press to photographs of anti-coup protesters with bandannas over their faces. The corresponding captions often consist of warnings that the subjects of the photos are masking their identity; they often fail to address the mitigating effects that cloth over the nose and mouth can have in situations involving large amounts of tear gas.
New twists on reality occurred at the Universidad Pedagógica in Tegucigalpa yesterday, where a number of people were said to be detained and beaten following ongoing marches against the coup. When I arrived in the late afternoon the detainees were still being separated from civilian existence by military personnel with shields, who had sealed the university grounds along with a string of riot police blocking the street to vehicular traffic. Outside the university gates, a recent Honduran graduate of medical school in Cuba informed me that the current conditions were merited by the fact that the detainees possessed explosives. Given the minimal success rate of recent weapons searches by the police, however, it was conceivable that the detainees were being detained so as not to reveal that they did not possess explosives.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Peaceful march interrupted by bus on fire
August 13th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Anti-coup protest in city of San Pedro Sula.
The first piece ofinformation I received upon inserting myself into the march on Tegucigalpa yesterday morning was that sometimes it was good to cry. It turned out that this advice, delivered by a female schoolteacher from exiled Honduran President Mel Zelaya’s hometown of Catacamas, was a reference to the predilection for tear gas on the part of the Honduran police force. I thus appeared to be the only person in the vicinity who did not participate in the unanimous negative response whenever someone in the crowd shouted: “Are you scared?”
This particular march, led by Father Andrés Tamayo, had originated over 200 kilometers away in the state of Olancho and was one of a number of such anti-coup processions that had converged into eight and were currently descending upon the cities of Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. The Olancho marchers had spent the previous night at a school on the outskirts of the capital, where I had joined them for a cultural evening featuring ranchera tunes about Zelaya, traditional Garifuna dancing, musical performances by students, and poetry composed by teachers regarding a fatal bullet recently bestowed by the Honduran police on the head of professor Roger Vallejo Soriano.
Abusing Quilliam’s Name
August 13th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Abdullah Quilliam was a 19th Century British convert to Islam, the founder of a mosque in Liverpool. He was also an anti-imperialist and a supporter of the Caliphate. He argued that Muslims should not fight Muslims on behalf of European powers, citing specifically Britain’s enlistment of Muslim soldiers against the resistance in Sudan. If Quilliam were alive today he would, at very least, be kept under observation by the British intelligence services.
It is ironic, then, that this activist Muslim’s good name has been appropriated by the government-backed and funded Quilliam Foundation, established in April 2008, supposedly to counter extremism in Muslim communities.
Those who read my stuff will know that I despise Wahhabism, and still more Wahhabi-nihilism. I oppose Islamic political projects which aim to capture control of the repressive mechanisms of contemporary Muslim states. I am stunned by the stupidity of such slogans as “Islam is the solution.” I take issue with anyone who attempts to impose a dress code or an interpretation of morality on anyone else, and I loathe those puritanical ideologies which fail to recognise the value of music, art, mysticism, philosophy, and popular and local cultures in the Muslim world. It is obvious that political Islam has often been exploited for very unIslamic purposes by the American empire and its client dictators in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere. Nominally Islamic political parties bear a great weight of responsibility for diverting the Iraqi resistance into a disastrous sectarian war. The terrorist attacks on London in July 2007 were abominable crimes and a catastrophe for all British Muslims. I know all that, yet I oppose the Quilliam Foundation.
Recapping the Twilight Zone Media
August 12th, 2009 § 2 Comments
I have to admit, I’ve lost touch with the Israeli mainstream media. I’ve found so many alternative medias online that there really isn’t any point to turning on the telly, or buying a newspaper. But one must travel into the alternate universe known as Israel every so often. So I put on my goggles and nose plug and sink my hands deep into Ha’aretz’s front page, knowing this is as left as the mainstream media gets down here. What does the Israeli mind preoccupy itself with while the international boycott movement is growing and Israeli citizens are turned refugees right under its upturned nose?
USA Support
The number one obsession in Israel is US support, or rather the eating-our-cake-and-having-it-too notion of what we can get away with and still have US support.
Mahmoud Darwish’s Passing
August 11th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
A year ago, the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish passed away. At the time, I wrote this obituary for 3QuarksDaily.com and thought I would share today with PULSE readers.
It is impossible for me to express what I feel about the passing of Mahmoud Darwish. Like many Palestinians, I had grown up reading his poetry in order to express how I feel about whatever significant events happen to Palestinians. I turned to his writings to understand the periods of Palestine’s history that happened before I was born. If ever anyone in history deserved the title of a Poet Laureate, it was indeed Darwish, who spoke the mind of his people in a way I doubt anyone has ever been able to do for any other people. Today, I wake up missing my voice. The real travesty of Darwish’s death is that it revealed to me that he is no longer there to eloquently express to me how I feel about such travesties.
An often underemphasized aspect of Darwish’s life is how he truly lived every single episode of modern Palestinian history, and lived in all the significant locations and periods of Palestinian life. He was born in 1942 in Al-Birweh, Galilee, before the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine that made him a refugee in Lebanon in 1948. His father decided to return his family to Palestine in 1949, risking murder by Zionist militias that had murdered countless Palestinians who attempted to “escape home”. Somehow, Darwish succeeded in returning, and thus lived the years of his youth as a second-class Israeli citizen. He would then leave to study in the Soviet Union in the early 1970’s, joining the growing Palestinian Diaspora in Europe. His political activism lead to Israel stripping him of his second-class citizenship, and thus returned him to the ranks of Palestinian refugees and the Diaspora. He would then live in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, getting to savor the experience of the homeless Palestinians wandering across the Arab World.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Military bases back up Obama policy of noninterference
August 10th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Barack Obama and Alvaro Uribe.
The Honduran paper La Tribuna constitutes my first source of news in the morning here in Tegucigalpa, based on the fact that it is the paper that is delivered to the café that provides me with hot water for my yerba mate. I have found it simpler to stick to this café and its paper rather than to switch, for two reasons. The first is that all of the Honduran papers seem to feature the same quantity of pro-coup politics and pictures of murders; the second is that the employees at my café have already understood what yerba mate is and I thus do not have to spend any more time explaining to people that it is not a type of narcotic.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Anti-coup marchers defy media conviction that they do not exist
August 10th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Father Andrés Tamayo.
Myriad anti-coup marches en route from different parts of Honduras have merged into eight and are set to converge tomorrow, August 11, on the cities of Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. Father Andrés Tamayo, leading the march originating in the department of Olancho, speculated to me on Saturday that the planned simultaneous convergence on Honduras of a delegation from the Organization of American States would lessen the chances of the Honduran military firing on the crowd.
Chances have since returned to normal, however, with coup President Roberto Micheletti’s decision to revoke and then merely postpone the OAS invitation. These maneuvers are apparently due to the fact that OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza has insisted on including himself in the delegation and denying the spot to someone more open to reconsidering Honduras’ suspension from the organization, which was enacted when the country expatriated its legitimate president, Mel Zelaya.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Honduran cell phone company falls in love
August 9th, 2009 § 1 Comment
First published in Narco News, 8 August 2009
The other night in the Honduran coastal town of Tela, I received a text message on my mobile phone from an unknown number. The message began with an image of a helicopter, which had been designed using periods, commas, dashes, and a single asterisk as the back propeller. The appearance of the word “ALERTA” beneath the image momentarily convinced me that a Venezuelan helicopter bearing deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya may have entered Honduran airspace.
Scrolling down, however, I discovered that the featured helicopter was in fact filled with “abracitos y besitos”—hugs and kisses—and that it wanted to bombard my “corazoncito,” my heart. A suggestion as to the possible origins of the text message was offered by a restaurant employee in Tela, who claimed that Tigo, my mobile phone provider, wanted its clients to feel loved.
A less charitable interpretation of Tigo’s intentions had been put forth earlier this week by a group of coup resistance leaders in Catacamas, Zelaya’s hometown in the department of Olancho, who had entertained the idea of a public bonfire of GSM cards corresponding to pro-coup phone companies. Meanwhile, the compatibility of armaments and affection illustrated in the text message to my corazoncito has been confirmed by coup general Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, who has described the love the Honduran armed forces feel for the nation’s people.
I myself have developed a greater affection for armaments after spending a dozen hours in an Internet café in Tegucigalpa, where a guard with a gun and police baton has ensured that I am able to write emails without being repeatedly asked for hospital donations. Freedom of expression has been more restricted in other areas, such as when the Honduran coup regime cut off electricity to the country at the start of the coup, and when Tigo continued to deny phone calls to my parents.
