17 December 1998 Edition
Kurdish report launched
On Wednesday 9 December the Kurdistan Solidarity Ireland group launched a report entitled ``1988-1998. The Kurds in Iraq and Turkey. Ireland's Role & Responsibility.
KSI was formed in 1994 after the arrest and imprisonment of six Democracy Party MPs who received 17 years sentences after being accused of promoting separatism in Turkey.
The document explains the discrimination suffered by the 30m Kurdish people whose homeland is divided between Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria and outlines a series of general recommendations to be followed by the Irish government in order to force Turkey's government to respect the rights of Kurdish people.
Turkey was refused membership of the European Union because of its record of human rights violations, but the military and commercial relations between this country and EU member states are unaffected by this same record.
Anyone interested can write to Kurdistan Solidarity Ireland, 10 Upper Camden Street, Dublin 2 or e-mail [email protected]
By Mary Maguire
``The Palestinian Authority must officially and unequivocally renounce their intention to declare a Palestinian state [in May 1999]''. It was with this invitation to confrontation that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu welcomed US President Bill Clinton on his latest peacemaking mission to the Middle-East.
Some were quick to dismiss such hardline talk as a mere negotiation tactic. But it wasn't. The statement echoed Netanyahu's intransigent attitude towards the implementation of the River Wye accord as he added that Israel would not hand over ``another inch of territory unless and until such an unambiguous correction is made''.
It was against this background that Bill Clinton proceeded on his peacekeeping mission to try and rescue the land-for-security accord brokered in October.
And surface progress was made as he became the first President to visit the Gaza Strip and address a meeting of the Palestine National Council. Its delegates once again confirmed their support for changes to the PLO's charter, removing clauses calling for Israel's destruction. Symbolically, under the star-banners, there was lots to clap about. But whatever of the steps forward, there is little hope that the Israeli government will stand up to its commitment and implement its side of the agreement. Political uncertainty is shadowing the fate of Netanyahu's government and these past weeks the pattern of accord violations by the Israeli Prime Minister has set the guidelines for the future and ripped any timid confidence on the Palestinian front.
In recent weeks, Netanyahu has declared that troop withdrawals from 13% of the West Bank will be halted even if the Palestinian authorities have clamped down on determined militants as agreed. The issue of political prisoners mirrors Israeli intransigence best. The promised release of political prisoners has been overturned as the Israeli government declares that ``people with blood on their hands'' and Hamas members won't be freed.
In response, up to 2000 detainees have commenced a hunger-strike. As Palestinian demonstrators are buried they are expected to ``review their demands''.
The onus is today on the Israeli government to stand up to its promises. As the oppressor and occupant of the Palestinian homeland, Israel has kept pushing its boot harder on the Arab people's face. Arab East Jerusalem is being cornered by Jewish expanding suburbs. The West Bank is being increasingly occupied by Israelis paid to travel from the Baltic states.
Palestinian land, water, basic needs and rights are suppressed. As a leader promising peace for his people, Netanyahu and his men have to start by ending the war against the Palestinians. By turning a blind eye to the Oslo and Wye agreements, they are fuelling their death machine. Nothing has changed. But it must act now, before the political vacuum unleashes a new war.
Simon Jones looks back on a turbulent - and bloody - year for the indigenous people of Mexico
In 1998 the Mexican government continued its strategy of increasing militarisation in the south of the country, in Chiapas, in Guerrero and Oaxaca. Against a background of low intensity war, the last twelve months have seen three massacres in Chiapas and Guerrero.
The government has continued to claim it is ready to negotiate and seek a peaceful solution to the conflict, while at the same time keeping up a three-pronged (army, police and paramilitary groups) attack on the Zapatista rebels, and trying to starve them into surrender by breaking down their support bases in the communities.
On 22 December last year, in the village of Acteal in Chiapas, 45 people were murdered. Acteal is a small rural community in the north of the Chiapas Highlands. Many of its people are refugees from the violence of the government's paramilitary groups. Some of them are supporters of the EZLN, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, which launched a rebellion demanding justice for the indigenous peoples in 1994. Others belong to a pacifist, Christian group called `Las Abejas' - `The Bees'' - who share the Zapatistas' ideas about social justice, but reject the armed struggle as a means of getting there. They have been closely linked to the radical bishop of San Cristóbal, Nobel peace prize nominee Samuel Ruiz.
Both the Zapatistas and the `Abejas' are desperately poor, dependant on charity for food because the government supporters have taken their land.
It was the latter group which was attacked last December. Rumours of an attack by pro-government paramilitaries had been flying for some time, and by the 22nd some of the men from the camp had fled into the mountains.
The people left in the community had gathered in the church to pray for help. At 10.30am about sixty paramilitaries arrived in vehicles belonging to the local municipal government and the killing began. They were there for about five hours, firing high calibre weapons, but the police at a post a few hundred yards away said they heard nothing. When the police arrived, long after the paramilitaries had been driven off, they began to hide the bodies in a mass grave and to destroy the evidence of the massacre. It was only in the statements given by witnesses to human rights organisations days later that the true horror of what had happened became clear.
The 45 men, women and children killed that morning had been mutilated as they lay dying. Pregnant women were cut open and the foetuses were chopped up with machetes. The paramilitaries had obviously been well trained in the excesses of `counter-insurgency' that were developed in Central America in the 1980s by Uncle Sam and his local associates.
The government tried to distance itself from the operation, and the local mayor and over fifty men and a few boys from the area were arrested. Most are still in jail, on charges of aggravated murder and criminal association. The governor of Chiapas and the Interior Minister resigned. Justice, the government claimed, had been done. But the governor was replaced by a man even more dedicated to the government's war against the Zapatistas, Albores Guillén. He launched a series of army and police raids, not on the paramilitary groups loyal to the government, but on the Zapatistas, who had not used their guns since 1995, despite a complete breakdown in the peace talks.
January saw a spate of raids on Zapatista communities. In many cases the people fled their villages, but in others a new tactic was developed. While the men withdrew to the hills outside the villages, the women and children, armed with sticks and machetes, stayed to confront the soldiers, often driving them out of the village, as was the case in Galiana, a tiny village in the jungle which blocked a raid by over a hundred soldiers of the federal army and literally ran them out of it.
Albores Guillen declared war on the autonomous municipalities - the Zapatista parallel local governments, rebel county councils which have been springing up to replace the official local government, sometimes even pushing them out of the town hall. The success of these autonomous municipal authorities has been a major embarrassment to the government.
It was against them that Albores Guillén turned his guns, smashing the autonomous council in Taniperla in April, arresting nine people and deporting a dozen foreign human rights observers.
The weather was working overtime for the government too. The rainy season should have begun in April, but did not start until the end of May, and then only patchily. The drought led to forest fires, which in many areas of the conflict zone seem to have been deliberately started, allegedly by the army and or the paramilitaries. Crops were poor and the unspoken question in everyone's mind was how the people would feed the Zapatistas in the mountains, and the refugees. Against this background, the government struck a double blow in the second week of June.
In the state of Guerrero a group of rebels were sleeping in a local shoolhouse when they were surrounded by federal troops. In the shooting that followed nine people were killed, at least one of them unconnected with the rebels.
Three days later, Chiapas was the stage for another massacre when thousands of federal soldiers and heavily armed police stormed their way into two small villages as police in the county town of El Bosque were dragging the councillors of the autonomous municipality out of the town hall they had been occupying for the past two years.
Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, strongly criticised the Mexican government for the ``alarming deterioration'' in human rights in Chiapas, but the government shrugged this off, suggesting Robinson had her facts wrong.
The all-party committee (COCOPA) responsible for negotiating between the Zapatistas and the government said that if there were any further massacres, they would follow the example of Bishop Ruiz's CONAI (an independent mediation body), which disbanded itself in June in protest at the government's strategy.
The president and his men and women seemed to back down a little, coming in for criticism even from their allies in Washington. When the COCOPA announced that they were going on a research mission to visit the Zapatista communities in the conflict zone, the governor announced that there would be no `operations' while the politicians were in the region.
The main independent national newspaper then published evidence of official support for the paramilitaries: a secret strategy for the war in Chiapas drawn up by the Ministry of Defence in late 1994, which included provisions for setting up, training and equipping local paramilitary gangs to split the communities and target the Zapatistas.
As the year draws to a close, the wars in Chiapas and Guerrero continue, but the government is a long way from winning. Last month in Chiapas the Zapatistas returned to the discussion table, not for talks with the government, which has yet to honour the agreement it signed with them in February 1996, but with the all-party committee COCOPA. Although the first day of talks broke down, they started up again and there is a commitment to continue the dialogue.
In the New Year five thousand Zapatistas will leave their communities in Chiapas and travel to the other thirty one states in Mexico to canvass voters in an unofficial referendum.
The people of Mexico will be asked to decide whether the COCOPA proposals for amending the constitution to recognise the rights of indigenous peoples as agreed in the San Andrés Accords signed by the Zapatistas and the government almost three years ago. The proposals were rejected by the government, which claimed that the COCOPA interpretation would tear the country apart and introduced its own proposal, which reduced the Accords to lip service.
The Zapatistas will be taking an enormous risk by sending so many of their most able activists out of Chiapas all at the same time, leaving the communities open to attack, but if they can bring out enough people across the country to support the COCOPA amendments, that would be a major slap in the face for the government. If the referundum fails to attract popular support, then it is hard to see where the Zapatistas will be going in 1999. But their epitaph has been written many times, and the rebel army that calls itself the forever dead, the forgotten people, refuses to die.
The Irish Mexico Group invites everyone interested in supporting the struggle for justice, democracy and freedom in Mexico to commemorate the Acteal massacre next Tuesday, 22nd of December. This will be the first anniversary of the massacre, in which 45 women, men and children were murdered by government-backed paramilitary gangs. The commemoration will start in O'Connell Street at the GPO at 6:30pm and will leave there at 7pm sharp, finishing at the Grafton Street corner of Stephen's Green. Please wear black if possible.
By Soledad Galiana
A series of developements in the building of a new democratic era for the Basque Country point to growing confidence in the Basque peace process.
The new Basque autonomous government will be formed by the end of January, after the two Basque nationalist conservative parties, the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and Eusko Alkartasuna (EA) agreed to the creation of a minority coalition autonomous government for the Basque Country, as the pro-independence party Herri Batasuna, made clear they have no intention of participating in the Basque Autonomous government, but will support the minority coalition in exchange for the creation of a new political structure, the Federation of Basque town councils.
This new political institution will include towns and villages from Nafarroa - which was separated from the rest of the Basque Country as an autonomous political body - and the North Basque Country under the French State.
This new body will be created next summer, after the local elections in the Spanish State and its decisions will be implemented by the Basque Parliament.
Meanwhile, the Spanish government is failing to follow the peace process trend. Jose Maria Aznar, the Spanish PM, announced after the Basque elections the possibility of a ``gesture'' before Christmas - that is to bring some of the Basque political prisoners to Basque prisons - but nothing has happened yet. Last Tuesday, Aznar criticised the involvement of the Catholic Church in the peace process, after it became public that Jose Maria Setien, Bishop of San Sebastian, had organised a meeting between a Basque political prisoner, Jon Gaztelumendi, and a representative of the Catholic Church. Expalining the position of the Basque Catholic Church, Bishop Setien said, ``I am not talking of repentance, but of reconciliation and forgiveness''.
His constant petitions for an end of the dispersion policy of Basque prisoners and his support for the Basque political prisoners' relatives have been criticised by the conservative sectors of Spanish Society. The episcopate of San Sebastian has also decided to give financial help to the relatives of political prisoners who have to make long trips to Spanish prisons.
GARA (We are) is the name of the new journalistic project of the independence movement created in order to replace Egin after its closure by the Spanish government last July. GARA was launched on Sunday 30 November and itsa first issue will appear at the start of January. The new editor is Mertxe Aizpurua, former Egin journalist. ``GARA wants to be the voice of those who think that the last word about their future must be the the word of the Basque citizens,'' she said.
KSI was formed in 1994 after the arrest and imprisonment of six Democracy Party MPs who received 17 years sentences after being accused of promoting separatism in Turkey.
The document explains the discrimination suffered by the 30m Kurdish people whose homeland is divided between Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria and outlines a series of general recommendations to be followed by the Irish government in order to force Turkey's government to respect the rights of Kurdish people.
Turkey was refused membership of the European Union because of its record of human rights violations, but the military and commercial relations between this country and EU member states are unaffected by this same record.
Anyone interested can write to Kurdistan Solidarity Ireland, 10 Upper Camden Street, Dublin 2 or e-mail [email protected]
Israeli intransigence torpedoes progress towards peace
By Mary Maguire
``The Palestinian Authority must officially and unequivocally renounce their intention to declare a Palestinian state [in May 1999]''. It was with this invitation to confrontation that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu welcomed US President Bill Clinton on his latest peacemaking mission to the Middle-East.
Some were quick to dismiss such hardline talk as a mere negotiation tactic. But it wasn't. The statement echoed Netanyahu's intransigent attitude towards the implementation of the River Wye accord as he added that Israel would not hand over ``another inch of territory unless and until such an unambiguous correction is made''.
It was against this background that Bill Clinton proceeded on his peacekeeping mission to try and rescue the land-for-security accord brokered in October.
And surface progress was made as he became the first President to visit the Gaza Strip and address a meeting of the Palestine National Council. Its delegates once again confirmed their support for changes to the PLO's charter, removing clauses calling for Israel's destruction. Symbolically, under the star-banners, there was lots to clap about. But whatever of the steps forward, there is little hope that the Israeli government will stand up to its commitment and implement its side of the agreement. Political uncertainty is shadowing the fate of Netanyahu's government and these past weeks the pattern of accord violations by the Israeli Prime Minister has set the guidelines for the future and ripped any timid confidence on the Palestinian front.
In recent weeks, Netanyahu has declared that troop withdrawals from 13% of the West Bank will be halted even if the Palestinian authorities have clamped down on determined militants as agreed. The issue of political prisoners mirrors Israeli intransigence best. The promised release of political prisoners has been overturned as the Israeli government declares that ``people with blood on their hands'' and Hamas members won't be freed.
In response, up to 2000 detainees have commenced a hunger-strike. As Palestinian demonstrators are buried they are expected to ``review their demands''.
The onus is today on the Israeli government to stand up to its promises. As the oppressor and occupant of the Palestinian homeland, Israel has kept pushing its boot harder on the Arab people's face. Arab East Jerusalem is being cornered by Jewish expanding suburbs. The West Bank is being increasingly occupied by Israelis paid to travel from the Baltic states.
Palestinian land, water, basic needs and rights are suppressed. As a leader promising peace for his people, Netanyahu and his men have to start by ending the war against the Palestinians. By turning a blind eye to the Oslo and Wye agreements, they are fuelling their death machine. Nothing has changed. But it must act now, before the political vacuum unleashes a new war.
Mexican people continue the struggle
Simon Jones looks back on a turbulent - and bloody - year for the indigenous people of Mexico
In 1998 the Mexican government continued its strategy of increasing militarisation in the south of the country, in Chiapas, in Guerrero and Oaxaca. Against a background of low intensity war, the last twelve months have seen three massacres in Chiapas and Guerrero.
The government has continued to claim it is ready to negotiate and seek a peaceful solution to the conflict, while at the same time keeping up a three-pronged (army, police and paramilitary groups) attack on the Zapatista rebels, and trying to starve them into surrender by breaking down their support bases in the communities.
On 22 December last year, in the village of Acteal in Chiapas, 45 people were murdered. Acteal is a small rural community in the north of the Chiapas Highlands. Many of its people are refugees from the violence of the government's paramilitary groups. Some of them are supporters of the EZLN, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, which launched a rebellion demanding justice for the indigenous peoples in 1994. Others belong to a pacifist, Christian group called `Las Abejas' - `The Bees'' - who share the Zapatistas' ideas about social justice, but reject the armed struggle as a means of getting there. They have been closely linked to the radical bishop of San Cristóbal, Nobel peace prize nominee Samuel Ruiz.
Both the Zapatistas and the `Abejas' are desperately poor, dependant on charity for food because the government supporters have taken their land.
It was the latter group which was attacked last December. Rumours of an attack by pro-government paramilitaries had been flying for some time, and by the 22nd some of the men from the camp had fled into the mountains.
The people left in the community had gathered in the church to pray for help. At 10.30am about sixty paramilitaries arrived in vehicles belonging to the local municipal government and the killing began. They were there for about five hours, firing high calibre weapons, but the police at a post a few hundred yards away said they heard nothing. When the police arrived, long after the paramilitaries had been driven off, they began to hide the bodies in a mass grave and to destroy the evidence of the massacre. It was only in the statements given by witnesses to human rights organisations days later that the true horror of what had happened became clear.
The 45 men, women and children killed that morning had been mutilated as they lay dying. Pregnant women were cut open and the foetuses were chopped up with machetes. The paramilitaries had obviously been well trained in the excesses of `counter-insurgency' that were developed in Central America in the 1980s by Uncle Sam and his local associates.
The government tried to distance itself from the operation, and the local mayor and over fifty men and a few boys from the area were arrested. Most are still in jail, on charges of aggravated murder and criminal association. The governor of Chiapas and the Interior Minister resigned. Justice, the government claimed, had been done. But the governor was replaced by a man even more dedicated to the government's war against the Zapatistas, Albores Guillén. He launched a series of army and police raids, not on the paramilitary groups loyal to the government, but on the Zapatistas, who had not used their guns since 1995, despite a complete breakdown in the peace talks.
January saw a spate of raids on Zapatista communities. In many cases the people fled their villages, but in others a new tactic was developed. While the men withdrew to the hills outside the villages, the women and children, armed with sticks and machetes, stayed to confront the soldiers, often driving them out of the village, as was the case in Galiana, a tiny village in the jungle which blocked a raid by over a hundred soldiers of the federal army and literally ran them out of it.
Albores Guillen declared war on the autonomous municipalities - the Zapatista parallel local governments, rebel county councils which have been springing up to replace the official local government, sometimes even pushing them out of the town hall. The success of these autonomous municipal authorities has been a major embarrassment to the government.
It was against them that Albores Guillén turned his guns, smashing the autonomous council in Taniperla in April, arresting nine people and deporting a dozen foreign human rights observers.
The weather was working overtime for the government too. The rainy season should have begun in April, but did not start until the end of May, and then only patchily. The drought led to forest fires, which in many areas of the conflict zone seem to have been deliberately started, allegedly by the army and or the paramilitaries. Crops were poor and the unspoken question in everyone's mind was how the people would feed the Zapatistas in the mountains, and the refugees. Against this background, the government struck a double blow in the second week of June.
In the state of Guerrero a group of rebels were sleeping in a local shoolhouse when they were surrounded by federal troops. In the shooting that followed nine people were killed, at least one of them unconnected with the rebels.
Three days later, Chiapas was the stage for another massacre when thousands of federal soldiers and heavily armed police stormed their way into two small villages as police in the county town of El Bosque were dragging the councillors of the autonomous municipality out of the town hall they had been occupying for the past two years.
Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, strongly criticised the Mexican government for the ``alarming deterioration'' in human rights in Chiapas, but the government shrugged this off, suggesting Robinson had her facts wrong.
The all-party committee (COCOPA) responsible for negotiating between the Zapatistas and the government said that if there were any further massacres, they would follow the example of Bishop Ruiz's CONAI (an independent mediation body), which disbanded itself in June in protest at the government's strategy.
The president and his men and women seemed to back down a little, coming in for criticism even from their allies in Washington. When the COCOPA announced that they were going on a research mission to visit the Zapatista communities in the conflict zone, the governor announced that there would be no `operations' while the politicians were in the region.
The main independent national newspaper then published evidence of official support for the paramilitaries: a secret strategy for the war in Chiapas drawn up by the Ministry of Defence in late 1994, which included provisions for setting up, training and equipping local paramilitary gangs to split the communities and target the Zapatistas.
As the year draws to a close, the wars in Chiapas and Guerrero continue, but the government is a long way from winning. Last month in Chiapas the Zapatistas returned to the discussion table, not for talks with the government, which has yet to honour the agreement it signed with them in February 1996, but with the all-party committee COCOPA. Although the first day of talks broke down, they started up again and there is a commitment to continue the dialogue.
In the New Year five thousand Zapatistas will leave their communities in Chiapas and travel to the other thirty one states in Mexico to canvass voters in an unofficial referendum.
The people of Mexico will be asked to decide whether the COCOPA proposals for amending the constitution to recognise the rights of indigenous peoples as agreed in the San Andrés Accords signed by the Zapatistas and the government almost three years ago. The proposals were rejected by the government, which claimed that the COCOPA interpretation would tear the country apart and introduced its own proposal, which reduced the Accords to lip service.
The Zapatistas will be taking an enormous risk by sending so many of their most able activists out of Chiapas all at the same time, leaving the communities open to attack, but if they can bring out enough people across the country to support the COCOPA amendments, that would be a major slap in the face for the government. If the referundum fails to attract popular support, then it is hard to see where the Zapatistas will be going in 1999. But their epitaph has been written many times, and the rebel army that calls itself the forever dead, the forgotten people, refuses to die.
The Irish Mexico Group invites everyone interested in supporting the struggle for justice, democracy and freedom in Mexico to commemorate the Acteal massacre next Tuesday, 22nd of December. This will be the first anniversary of the massacre, in which 45 women, men and children were murdered by government-backed paramilitary gangs. The commemoration will start in O'Connell Street at the GPO at 6:30pm and will leave there at 7pm sharp, finishing at the Grafton Street corner of Stephen's Green. Please wear black if possible.
Basque peace process picks up pace
By Soledad Galiana
A series of developements in the building of a new democratic era for the Basque Country point to growing confidence in the Basque peace process.
The new Basque autonomous government will be formed by the end of January, after the two Basque nationalist conservative parties, the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and Eusko Alkartasuna (EA) agreed to the creation of a minority coalition autonomous government for the Basque Country, as the pro-independence party Herri Batasuna, made clear they have no intention of participating in the Basque Autonomous government, but will support the minority coalition in exchange for the creation of a new political structure, the Federation of Basque town councils.
This new political institution will include towns and villages from Nafarroa - which was separated from the rest of the Basque Country as an autonomous political body - and the North Basque Country under the French State.
This new body will be created next summer, after the local elections in the Spanish State and its decisions will be implemented by the Basque Parliament.
Meanwhile, the Spanish government is failing to follow the peace process trend. Jose Maria Aznar, the Spanish PM, announced after the Basque elections the possibility of a ``gesture'' before Christmas - that is to bring some of the Basque political prisoners to Basque prisons - but nothing has happened yet. Last Tuesday, Aznar criticised the involvement of the Catholic Church in the peace process, after it became public that Jose Maria Setien, Bishop of San Sebastian, had organised a meeting between a Basque political prisoner, Jon Gaztelumendi, and a representative of the Catholic Church. Expalining the position of the Basque Catholic Church, Bishop Setien said, ``I am not talking of repentance, but of reconciliation and forgiveness''.
His constant petitions for an end of the dispersion policy of Basque prisoners and his support for the Basque political prisoners' relatives have been criticised by the conservative sectors of Spanish Society. The episcopate of San Sebastian has also decided to give financial help to the relatives of political prisoners who have to make long trips to Spanish prisons.
GARA (We are) is the name of the new journalistic project of the independence movement created in order to replace Egin after its closure by the Spanish government last July. GARA was launched on Sunday 30 November and itsa first issue will appear at the start of January. The new editor is Mertxe Aizpurua, former Egin journalist. ``GARA wants to be the voice of those who think that the last word about their future must be the the word of the Basque citizens,'' she said.