Smashing the Silence: Community Defiance in Honduras

Demonstration in front of Clarion Hotel, Tegucigalpa. (Photo: Joseph Shansky)
Demonstration in front of Clarion Hotel, Tegucigalpa. (Photo: Joseph Shansky)

By Joseph Shansky

Since the few days of renewed excitement around the “secret” return to Honduras of democratically-elected President Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, there has been a disturbing omission of the Honduran political crisis in the international news.  It would be reasonable to think that with each passing day an exiled president was camped in a foreign embassy (as Zelaya has been in the Brazilian embassy since September 21st), tensions would rise and all eyes of the world would be on that lone building.  Instead the opposite has occurred and it appears as though the international press had lost interest without action to follow.  The subsequent collapse and renewal (and collapse again, etc.) of ongoing “negotiations” with Roberto Micheletti’s coup government did little to breathe life into this story.

Here in Tegucigalpa, life continues under subtle siege for ordinary citizens.  The city gets dark faster at night now and the people seem more frightened in general.  The curfew remains.  Small groups huddle together and glance around anxiously, couples hug closer, young girls grasp hands tighter and walk faster.  Militia is everywhere of course, made up of young, mostly uneducated kids who twirl their guns with abandon, dig their batons into the dirt and wait for a notice for action.  It can come at a whistle’s call here, and sometimes it feels as though the entire country is poised, frozen in battle.

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Peshawar: A Journey Home

Beyond Hayatabad, the sun sets over the Khyber hills which separate Peshawar from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The Pakistani Army is at present conducting a military opertion in the Khyber Agency.

Le Monde Diplomatique, 14 October 2009; Counterpunch.org, 15 October 2009

I leave Kamra (*) in Punjab at 7pm in a rickety old bus without air-conditioning. A pleasant wind rushes through the open windows: the late summer evening has mercifully sucked the humidity out of it. People who can’t afford air-conditioned transportation escape the infernal elements by travelling at night. And the passengers are mostly a destitute lot. When a man in the seat in front gets up I notice that his sādr — a cotton shawl used by Pakhtun men variously as a turban, windbreaker or bedspread — covers the long rip running down the back of his kameez. Next to that rip is an older tear crudely stitched together.

In two hours we are in Peshawar. For a third of each day the city has no electricity. It’s lights out as we arrive. I get off a stop early and decide to walk — though I have been advised against walking in western clothes outside the city centre. A pharmaceutical company salesman was killed a short while back for arriving at a hospital wearing pants, shirt and tie. But I feel safe despite my hiking outfit, backpack and sandals: I haven’t been in Peshawar long enough to think of it as anything but the city I grew up in. Wetook our safety for granted.

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Goldstone and the Kids

Illustration by Carlos Latuff
Illustration by Carlos Latuff

Anything that happens in my world, now, seems just that little bit more ironic, since Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Not that I credit the institution with too much merit, considering its list of peace-fakers, but the propaganda of this ill-executed award bothers me, nevertheless. While it’s easy to discredit Obama as an initiator of peace just for the sheer amassing of dead Afghans, this year I’d like to take it to my own little corner of the world.

Politics of Human Rights

Another action against peace, which the Obama administration has taken, is the pressure it applied in the UN to bury the Goldstone report:

Unsurprisingly, an early ally in the Israeli campaign for impunity was the Obama Administration, whose UN ambassador, Susan Rice, expressed “very serious concerns” about the report and trashed Goldstone’s mandate as “unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable.” (Rice was acting true to her word; in April she told the newspaper Politico that one of the main reasons the Obama Administration decided to join the UN Human Rights Council was to fight what she called “the anti-Israel crap.”) [Electronic Intifada]

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Nobel Prize for Public Speaking

Robert Fisk, Richard Murphy and Azzam Tamimi discuss the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama. Does he deserve the prize? And what has he achieved? Or was the award granted in the hope he would succeed in the future?

No Quarter on the Frontier

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'Everything is coming up roses in Pakistan' -- ForeignPolicy.com

The day that I arrived in Pakistan mid-September, the frontpage story on Foreign Policy magazine’s ‘Af-Pak Channel’ carried the exuberant headline ‘Everything’s coming up roses in Pakistan’. In the next four days the frontier capital of Peshawar would be hit by five rocket attacks. The week after there would be a car bombing. And things have only gotten worse since.

There was much triumphalism about the Pakistani army’s decisive action in Swat. Some were even encouraged to claim ownership of the war; it wasn’t an American war anymore, they said, it was ‘our’ war. The Pakistani liberal elite exhorted the military to press on and carry out similar actions in the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA). The militants seemed demoralized; it was was time to finish the job. It was not to be.

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Hakimullah Mehsud: US is our enemy, not Pakistan

Looks like the drone attack which purportedly eliminated the Taliban leadership killed yet more innocents. Hakimullah Mehsud is alive and well, and gave a press conference right in Srarogha.  ‘In truth we don’t want to fight the Pakistan Army’, said Mehsud, ‘Our aim is to remove the Americans from this region and to fight the Americans’.

AlJazeeraEnglish — 06 October 2009 — This week, Pakistan’s interior minister said that military operations carried out against the Taliban in the Swat valley, and North and South Waziristan had “broken the back” of the Taliban.

However, South Waziristan is home to an estimated 10,000 Taliban fighters and it was here that Hakimullah Mehsud, the new Taliban leader, ended rumours that he had been killed by a recent drone attack.

Kamal Hyder reports from Islamabad.

Bring on The Third Intifada!

After hearing that the Palestine Liberation Organization has decided to abandon a resolution requesting the Human Rights Council to forward Goldstone’s report to the UN Security Council, the thought flashed through my head that if I was Palestinian, I’d vote Hamas. What could have possibly possessed them, but a sheer disconnect from their people? One must ask, is their money that good?

Fatah Vs. Hamas
On many occasions, we that are born free (all is relative) find it hard to understand Palestinian mentality. Just this week, I’ve had exhausting debates about the safety of children, during the Bil’in weekly protest. Though I can’t defend or agree with allowing your children to be near the fence, when the army is 101% likely to fire gas grenades, I firmly believe that mindsets under occupation are something we don’t fully understand. Maybe when I’m a mother to a child that’s been snatched from his bed at night, arrested, beaten and interrogated, I’ll have a different perspective on danger.

By the same token, I believe it may be extraordinarily hard to make that fateful choice, when you’re at the voting booth. Although Hamas has been cynical towards its people during the Gaza massacre (claiming to have “won the war” and other flamboyant rhetoric), as if militaristic ego was a top priority; If I were Palestinian this latest in a long line of PLO sell-outs would seem much more cynical, to me.

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President Blair

If the Irish vote to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, Tony Blair, former British prime minister and current lecturer on faith, peace, and Palestinian submission, is expected to become the European Union’s first president. I wrote the following hymn to Blair in October 2007, when the unpleasant prospect of his presidency was first raised.

steve bell tony blairI’ve often thought that Abu Hamza al-Masri, the ex-imam of Finsbury Park mosque, must have been designed in a CIA laboratory. Not only did he – before his imprisonment – fulminate in a shower of spittle against various brands of kuffar, he also had an eye patch and a hook for a hand. You can’t imagine a more photogenic Islamist villain.

If my supposition is correct, then Tony Blair may well have been invented by the Iranian secret service, for of all the neo-cons he’s the one who most looks the part. I refer to the physiognomic combination of weakness and fury, the slight chin wobbling beneath that eye with its wild glint of certainty – the staring left eye, fixed on something the rest of us can’t see, something that makes reality irrelevant – and the teeth both fierce and mouselike, and the shininess of both forehead and suit. Most politicians wear suits, but few suits declare ‘hollow salesman’ so much as Blair’s. The voice too – the hurried speech and breathy tones of a public schoolboy approaching orgasm – that repulsive aural mix of complacency, stubbornness and privilege.

The Absurdity of the Dalai Lama

Dalai Lama: "I love President George W. Bush"
Dalai Lama: "I love President George W. Bush"

He has been quoted as saying “Sleep is the best meditation.” May I suggest his holiness wake up to the fact that the two wars started by his friend George W. Bush are the clearest violations of his own espoused principles of peace and non-violence. Really, does no one else find it absurd that the Dalai Lama has on multiple occasions since 2001 stood unopposed to the brutal, barbaric and illegal wars first in Afghanistan and later Iraq? This sought-after personality loved by celebrities, the CIA, political leaders and civilians alike restated today in Calgary that “It’s hard to tell which category the current military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq will eventually fall into.”

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Iran – The War Dance

An important interview with Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector in Iraq, on Democracy Now!, debunking some of the myths spun around Iran’s nuclear programme.

In a frightening replay of its pathological gullibility for state propaganda, the mainstream press (with honourable exceptions, as ever) has once again adopted the dominant narrative set by Western governmental officials, with journalists and other members of the intelligentsia dutifully performing their role as Gramsci’s “experts in legitimation”.

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