Israeli Apartheid

The Uprising In The Amazon Is More Urgent Than Iran’s – It Will Determine The Future Of The Planet
In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world

By Johann Hari 

While the world nervously watches the uprising in Iran, an even more important uprising has been passing unnoticed – yet its outcome will shape your fate, and mine. In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies – and, for today, they have won.

Here’s the story of how it happened – and how we all need to pick up this fight.

Earlier this year, Peru’s President, Alan Garcia, sold the rights to explore, log and drill 70 percent of his country’s swathe of the Amazon to a slew of international oil companies. Garcia seems to see rainforest as a waste of good resources, saying of the Amazon’s trees: "There are millions of hectares of timber there lying idle."

There was only one pesky flaw in Garcia’s plan: the indigenous people who live in the Amazon. They are the first people of the Americas, subject to wave after wave of genocide since the arrival of the Conquistadors. They are weak. They have no guns. They barely have electricity. The government didn’t bother to consult them: what are a bunch of Indians going to do anyway?

But the indigenous people have seen what has happened elsewhere in the Amazon when the oil companies arrive. Occidental Petroleum are currently facing charges in US courts of dumping an estimated nine billion barrels of toxic waste in the regions of the Amazon where they operated from 1972 to 2000. Andres Sandi Mucushua, the spiritual leader of the area known to the oil companies as Block 1AB, said in 2007: "My people are sick and dying because of Oxy. The water in our streams is not fit to drink and we can no longer eat the fish in our rivers or the animals in our forests." The company denies liability, saying they are "aware of no credible data of negative community health impacts".

Read More »Uprising in amazon more urgent than Irans

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Tens of thousands of people gathered in the Georgian capital Tbilisi today to protest against Russia’s occupation of parts of the ex-Soviet republic.

Demonstrators gathered as EU leaders met in Brussels for an emergency summit on relations with Moscow.
Central Tbilisi was a sea of red-and-white Georgian flags as demonstrators formed a human chain stretching from central Freedom Square along the city’s main street, Rustaveli Avenue.

As the Georgian national anthem played to mark the start of the rally, demonstrators joined their hands and raised them into the air.

Protester Tengiz Katzarava told AFP "the demonstration is to show how badly Russia has been treating them for 300 years."

"We don’t count very much on the Europeans. What we are counting on is the United States," he said. "The Russians understand the weakness of countries like Germany and France."

Organisers say earlier that demonstrators were to form a human chain through the Georgian capital Tbilisi and similar actions were planned in major Georgian and European cities including Brussels, London and Vienna.

Georgia is hoping EU leaders will give a tough response to Russia’s August 8 incursion, occupation of several parts of Georgia, and recognition of independence for two Moscow-backed separatist regions.

SAPA-AFP

Read More »Tens of thousands rally in georgian capital

With or without the Goldstone Report, Israeli hegemony is nearing its end

By Hilary Wise

(source: The Journal Issue 26 )

The UN report on Israel’s assault on Gaza one year ago called the operation “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population.” It represents the most powerful international indictment yet of Israel’s policies. Despite massive pro-Israel lobbying the report was accepted by the UN Human Rights Council on 16 October by twenty-five votes to six, with eleven abstentions.

However, some cynics have greeted the report with a weary, “So what’s new?” In the past Israel has ignored dozens of resolutions calling upon it to allow the return of refugees to their homes, to cease colonising territories occupied in 1967, to dismantle the Wall being built on Palestinian land, to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, to abolish imprisonment without trial, and so on, and so on. On each occasion, Israel has given two fingers up to the international community—and gotten away with it.

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