Of mass murderers and petty criminals

The white man will never understand the ancient wordshere in spirits roaming freebetween sky and trees.
Let Columbus scour the seas to find India,it's his right!
He can call our ghosts the names of spices,
he can call us Red Indians,
he can fiddle with his compass to correct his course,
twist all the errors of the North wind,
but outside the narrow world to his maphe can't believe that all men are born equalthe same as air and water,
the same as people in Barcelona,
except that they happen to worship Nature's God in everthingand not gold
.Columbus was free to look for a languagehe couldn't find here,
to look for gold in the skulls of our ancestors.
He took his fill from the flesh of our livingand our dead.
So why is he bent on carrying out his deadly wareven from the grave?
When we have nothing left to givebut a few ruinous trinkets, a few tiny feathers toembroider our lakes?
All told,you killed over seventy million hearts,
more than enough for you to return from slaughteras kind on the throne of a new age.
Isn't it about time,
stranger,for us to meet face to face in the same age
,both of us strangers to the same land,meeting at the tip of an abyss?
We have what is ours
andwe have what is yours of the sky.Yours air and water, such as we have.
Ours pebbles, such as we have,yours iron, such as you have.
In the shadow domain, let us share the light.
Take what you need of the nightbut leave us a few stars to bury our celestial dead.
Take what you need of the seabut leave us a few waves in which to catch our fish.
Take all the gold of the earth and sunbut leave the land of our names to us.
Then go back, stranger.Search for India once more!

This quaint poem was written by red indians for their masters .History is nothing but a biography of great men said a historian . If we can draw some parallels between us and them and between then and now , every things has changed , every body has changed .The world has been stripped from the natives and have been given special staus in their own native countires , Israel ,drawing on false historical premise , established itself as a pariah state with borders .

Where there was merchant ships looting on hapless natives , now we have multi -national corporations doing brisk business empowereing the poor in their backyard .where we had British , Spanish and Portuguese civilizing the natives now we have Americans spreading their noble vision of democracy and freedom ( no body talks of responsibilities but freedom alone ).Where we had coal now we have petroleum , where we had horses we have automobiles .
Everything has changed but everything is the same for the poor .Armed with words of disguise and lofty promises rich countries set up growth oriented democracies after sanguinary conflicts .
Those who forget history are condemed to repeat it said Satyayana . But now we people forgetting everything through consumerism.
Are we better people , more civilized and humane than our predecessors ? HAs all the goods , materials and prosperity that came with so much bloodshed making us anybetter or is everything an illusion ? Are we disillusioned about the future of humanity as a whole ?

Russia is back !

One thing is for sure. This week's operation in Georgia has displayed the failure of the west's policy of belligerence towards Vladimir Putin's Russia. The policy was meant to weaken Russia, and has strengthened it. The policy was meant to humiliate Russia with Nato encirclement, and has merely fed its neo-imperialism. The policy was meant to show that Russia "understands only firmness" and instead has shown the west as a bunch of tough-talking windbags.

Georgia, a supposed western ally and applicant to Nato, has been treated by Russia to a brutal lesson in power politics. The west has lost all leverage and can do nothing. Seldom was a policy so crashingly stupid.

Putin would die laughing if he read this week's American newspapers. The president, George Bush, declared the Russian invasion of Georgia "disproportionate and unacceptable". This is taken as a put-down to the vice-president, Dick Cheney, who declared the invasion "will not go unanswered", apparently something quite different. Bush says that great powers should not go about "toppling governments in the 21st century", as if he had never done such a thing. Cheney says that the invasion has "damaged Russia's standing in the world", as if Cheney gave a damn. The lobby for sanctions against Russia is reduced to threatening to boycott the winter Olympics. Big deal.

Every student of the Caucasus has known since the fall of the Soviet empire that this part of the world was an explosion waiting to happen. The crisscrossing fault lines of ethnicity, religion and nationalism, fuelled by gas and oil, would not long survive the removal of the Red Army and communist discipline. There were too many old scores to settle, too much territory in dispute and too much wealth at stake - rivalries brilliantly portrayed in Kurban Said's classic novel of Edwardian Azerbaijan, Ali & Nino.

In every crisis the west craves goodies and baddies. The media finds it impossible to report a modern conflict without taking sides. In Yugoslavia, where a similar clash of separatist minorities occurred in the 1990s, coverage was so biased that Kosovo is still "plucky little" and the Serbs can still do no right.

In South Ossetia both sides appear to have committed appalling atrocities, and can thus generate a sense of outrage in front of whatever camera is pointed at them. Georgia's government claimed the right to assert military control over its two dissident provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, even if they were openly in league with Russia. Equally, Russia felt justified in stopping the consequent evictions and killings of its nationals in these provinces, in which it had a humanitarian locus as "peacekeeper".

The difficulty is that entitlement and good sense are rarely in accord. Georgia may have been entitled to act, but was clearly unwise to do so. Russia may have been entitled to aid its people against an oppressor, but that is different from unleashing its notoriously inept and ruthless army, let alone bombing Georgia's capital and demanding a change in its government.

What is clear is that the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, is a poor advertisement for a Harvard education. He thought he could reoccupy South Ossetia and call Russia's bluff while Putin was away at the Olympics. He found it was not bluff. Putin was waiting for just such an invitation to humiliate a man he loathes, and to deter any other Russian border state from applying to join Nato, an organisation Russia had itself sought to join until it was rudely rebuffed.

Saakashvili thought he could call on the support of his neoconservative allies in Washington. Tbilisi is one of the few world cities in which Bush's picture is a pin-up and where an avenue is named after him. It turned out that such "support" was mere words. America is otherwise engaged in wars that bear a marked resemblance to those waged by Putin. It defended the Kurdish enclaves against Saddam Hussein. It sought regime change in Serbia and Afghanistan. As Putin's troops in South Ossetia were staging a passable imitation of the US 101st Airborne entering Iraq, Bush was studiously watching beach volleyball in Beijing.

The truth is that the world has no conceptual framework for adjudicating, let alone resolving, these timeless border conflicts. Where poverty is rife, it takes only a clan war and a ready supply of guns for hostilities to break out. The only question is how to stop them escalating.

Once such conflicts could be quarantined by the United Nations' requirement to respect national sovereignty. That has been shot to pieces by the liberal interventionism of George Bush and Tony Blair. The result has reinvigorated separatist movements across the world. Small-statism is not an evil in itself: witness its quadrennial festival at the Olympics. But the process of achieving it is usually bitter and bloody.

The west's eagerness to intervene in favour of partition, manifest in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Sudan, is more than meddling. It encouraged every oppressed people and province on earth to be "the mouse that roared", to think it could ensnare a great power in its cause.

The parallels are glaring. If we backed Kosovo against the Serbs, why not back South Ossetia against the Georgians? But if we backed the Kurds against the Iraqis, why not the Georgians against Russia? Indeed, had Nato admitted Georgia to full membership, there is no knowing what Caucasian horror might have ensued from the resulting treaty obligation. Decisions which in Washington and London may seem casual gestures of ideological solidarity can mean peace and war on the ground.

I retain an archaic belief that the old UN principle of non-interference, coupled with a realpolitik acceptance of "great power" spheres of influence, is still a roughly stable basis for international relations. It may on occasions be qualified by soft-power diplomacy and humanitarian relief. It may demand an abstinence from kneejerk gestures in favour of leaving things to sort themselves out (as in Zimbabwe). But liberal interventionism, especially when it leads to military and economic aggression, means one costly adventure after another - and usually failure.

The west has done everything to isolate Putin, as he rides the tiger of Russian emergence from everlasting dictatorship. This has encouraged him to care not a fig for world opinion. Equally the west has encouraged Saakashvili to taunt Putin beyond endurance. The policy has led to war. If ever there were a place just to leave alone, it is surely the Caucasus.

Good Bye Mahmud Darwish , Hope of an Independant Palestine Died with you

Will the American Media Cover this ?


The poet Mahmoud Darwish was the voice of the Palestinian odyssey, whose stark writing reflected the desperation and alienation of the Palestinian people. He published more than 20 collections of poetry, which have been translated into many languages (although few of them into English), and was the Arab world's best-selling poet. His poems are engraved in the hearts of millions of Palestinians and his words have been shouted by anti-occupation demonstrators in the streets of Ramallah, Damascus and Cairo. Many have been set to music, including "I yearn for my mother's bread."

They fettered his mouth with chains,
And tied his hands to the rock of the dead.
They said: You're a murderer.
They took his food, his clothes and his banners,
And threw him into the well of the dead.
They said: You're a thief.
They threw him out of every port,
And took away his young beloved.
And then they said: You're a refugee.


But his poetry also contained irony and a universal humanity. For Darwish the issue of Palestine became a prism for an internationalist feeling. The land and history of Palestine was a summation of millennia, with influences from Canaanites, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Ottoman Turks and British. Throughout all this has survived a core identity of Palestine. He was able to see the Israeli soldier as a victim of circumstances like himself. He expresses the bureaucratic absurdities of an oppressive military occupation.

I’ll beget you and you’ll beget me,
and very slowly I’ll remove the fingers of the dead from your body,
the buttons of their shirts and their birth certificates.
You’ll take the letters of your dead to Jerusalem.
We’ll wipe the blood from our glasses, my friend,
so we can reread Kafka,
and open two windows onto a street of shadows.

My outside is inside me;
don’t believe winter smoke.
Soon April will emerge from our dreams.
My outside is inside me;
pay no attention to statues.
An Iraqi girl will decorate her dress
with the first almond flowers,
and along the top edge of the arrow
drawn just above her name
she’ll write your name’s initial letter
in Iraq’s wind.

We find a lots of voices of dissent including Alexander Solzhenitsyn passing away . Is the age of reason over ?

We witnessed the death of a concupiscent Poet who fought the west , who fought for the fist-less.
We see no end in sight of the suffering of the Palestinian refugees . Should the Unpeople( to borrow a term form a British Historian ) succumb without a fight ?

The lies of Hiroshima live on, props in the war crimes of the 20th century

The 1945 attack was murder on an epic scale. In its victims' names, we must not allow a nuclear repeat in the Middle East

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.

He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.

In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.

The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".

Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus "war on terror", the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat". But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.

The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America's Defence Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.

This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.

In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country's political and military establishment, threatened "an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland". This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.

The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence"? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer

Girl who slapped the entire mankind on face

Severn Suzuki, at the age of nine, along with a group of children founded the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO), which was dedicated to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. In 1992, at the age of 12, Cullis-Suzuki raised money with members of ECO, to attend the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and gave this speech which is a Slap in the face for the entire mankind. Simply superb, it is not enough that we watch it, but we must think about it also.

The transcript of her speech is below,

Hello, I'm Severn Suzuki speaking for E.C.O. - The Environmental Children's Organisation.

We are a group of twelve and thirteen-year-olds from Canada trying to make a difference:
Vanessa Suttie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg and me. We raised all the money ourselves to come six thousand miles to tell you adults you must change your ways. Coming here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future.

Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come.

I am here to speak on behalf of the starving children around the world whose cries go unheard.

I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go. We cannot afford to be not heard.

I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in the ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it.

I used to go fishing in Vancouver with my dad until just a few years ago we found the fish full of cancers. And now we hear about animals and plants going exinct every day -- vanishing forever.

In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterfilies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.

Did you have to worry about these little things when you were my age?

All this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions. I'm only a child and I don't have all the solutions, but I want you to realise, neither do you!

• You don't know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer.
• You don't know how to bring salmon back up a dead stream.
• You don't know how to bring back an animal now extinct.
• And you can't bring back forests that once grew where there is now desert.

If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!

Here, you may be delegates of your governments, business people, organisers, reporters or poiticians - but really you are mothers and fathers, brothers and sister, aunts and uncles - and all of you are somebody's child.

I'm only a child yet I know we are all part of a family, five billion strong, in fact, 30 million species strong and we all share the same air, water and soil -- borders and governments will never change that.

I'm only a child yet I know we are all in this together and should act as one single world towards one single goal.

In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear, I am not afraid to tell the world how I feel.

In my country, we make so much waste, we buy and throw away, buy and throw away, and yet northern countries will not share with the needy. Even when we have more than enough, we are afraid to lose some of our wealth, afraid to share.

In Canada, we live the privileged life, with plenty of food, water and shelter -- we have watches, bicycles, computers and television sets.

Two days ago here in Brazil, we were shocked when we spent some time with some children living on the streets. And this is what one child told us: "I wish I was rich and if I were, I would give all the street children food, clothes, medicine, shelter and love and affection."

If a child on the street who has nothing, is willing to share, why are we who have everyting still so greedy?

I can't stop thinking that these children are my age, that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born, that I could be one of those children living in the Favellas of Rio; I could be a child starving in Somalia; a victim of war in the Middle East or a beggar in India.

I'm only a child yet I know if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this earth would be!

At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us to behave in the world. You teach us:

• not to fight with others,
• to work things out,
• to respect others,
• to clean up our mess,
• not to hurt other creatures
• to share - not be greedy.

Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do?

Do not forget why you're attending these conferences, who you're doing this for -- we are your own children. You are deciding what kind of world we will grow up in. Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying "everyting's going to be alright" , "we're doing the best we can" and "it's not the end of the world".

But I don't think you can say that to us anymore. Are we even on your list of priorities? My father always says "You are what you do, not what you say."

Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grown ups say you love us. I challenge you, please make your actions reflect your words. Thank you for listening

All work and no pay

IN India, one of the more depressing features of government policy in the social sectors is the extent to which it relies on the unpaid or underpaid labour of women.

This was evident in the functioning of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in many States. This parallel system of “education centres” (rather than proper schools) was set up using local women with eight years of schooling to teach children for a paltry “remuneration” rather than employing trained teachers at regular wages. Similarly, the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme operates on the basis of poorly paid Anganwadi workers and helpers.

While these women perform essential and demanding tasks that typically amount to full-time work, they are not given the status of regular government employees. And because their payment is so low that it would contravene minimum wage laws in many States, it is described as “honorarium”.

More recently, this tendency was taken to its logical conclusion. One of the flagship schemes of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government – the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) – relies almost entirely on unpaid female labour. Indeed, the lack of remuneration for the accredited social health activists (ASHAs), who form the backbone of the scheme, is part of its very design.

India is among the worst-performing countries when it comes to government expenditure on health. In 2004, such spending amounted to only 0.9 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). Only four or five countries in the world had ratios lower than this. The UPA government had promised to increase this ratio to 3 per cent of GDP within five years, but four years on, it is still only around 1 per cent.

However, the government at least recognised the pressing need to improve health conditions when it launched the NRHM. Its stated goal is ambitious: to provide effective health care to the entire rural population, with special focus on the 18 States that have weak public health indicators. Commentators have pointed out that despite being presented as an entirely new flagship programme, the NRHM is essentially an amalgam of existing schemes and programmes. Most of its key components, including the reliance on ASHAs, have been tried before with varying degrees of success.

These elements include the provision of an ASHA in each village; a village health plan prepared by involving a local team headed by the panchayat representative; strengthening of the rural hospital for effective curative care and making it measurable through the Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS), and accountable to the community; and local integration of the programmes and funds of the Health and Family Welfare Department.

The most significant element of the NRHM is, therefore, an ASHA, who acts as the link between the community and the government health system and becomes the first port of call for any health-related matter, especially for less-privileged groups.

The mission statement makes that clear: “The ASHA will be a health activist in the community who will create awareness on health and its social determinants and mobilise the community towards local health planning and increased utilisation and accountability of the existing health services. She would be a promoter of good health practices. She will also provide a minimum package of curative care as appropriate and feasible for that level and make timely referrals.”

Does this already sound like a lot of work? But there is more, for the NRHM explicitly requires an ASHA to do many more things. Here is a brief list of the activities that she is required to undertake:

■ Create awareness and provide information to the community on determinants of health such as nutrition, basic sanitation and hygiene, healthy living and working conditions, information on existing health services and the need for timely utilisation of health and family welfare services;

■ Counsel women on birth preparedness, the importance of safe delivery, breastfeeding and complementary feeding, immunisation, contraception and prevention of common infections (including reproductive tract infections and sexually transmitted diseases) and on the care of young children;

■ Mobilise the community and facilitate access to the health and related services provided by the government at the local level, including immunisation, antenatal and post-natal check-ups, ICDS, sanitation, and so on;

■ Arrange to escort pregnant women and children requiring treatment and/or admission to the nearest pre-identified health facility, which could be the primary health centre or the first referral unit;

■ Provide primary medical care for minor ailments such as diarrhoea and fevers and first aid for minor injuries;

■ Be a provider of the Directly Observed Treatment Short-course (DOTS) under the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme;

■ Act as a depot holder for essential health provisions such as oral rehydration therapy fluids, folic acid tablets, chloroquine for treating malaria, disposable delivery kits, oral contraceptive pills and condoms;

■ Manage and allocate to members of the community the contents of the drug kit supposedly provided to each ASHA;

■ Inform the health authorities at the primary health centre or sub-centre about births and deaths in the village and any unusual health problems or outbreak of disease in the community;

■ Promote the construction of household toilets under the Total Sanitation Campaign; and

■ Work with the Village Health and Sanitation Committee of the gram panchayat to develop a comprehensive village health plan.

Just in case these tasks are not enough to keep the ASHA occupied, the NRHM website helpfully suggests that “States can explore the possibility of graded training to her for providing newborn care and management of a range of common ailments, particularly childhood illnesses”!

All these tasks are to be performed by a woman who is to serve one village or a population of 1,000. The minimum qualification of an ASHA has been set at eight years of completed schooling. This rigid requirement has been placed even though several parts of the country, especially the tribal and underdeveloped areas, which need such intervention the most, do not have literate women, much less those who have completed elementary school.

Once chosen, an ASHA receives a total of 23 days of training in separate modules before she returns to fulfil her responsibilities. It is hard to imagine how a few weeks of “training” in a typical government format can help create all these capacities, especially when an ASHA is also expected to diagnose and treat minor ailments and recognise serious illnesses. Once she has been chosen and trained and made to perform all these complex and demanding tasks, what is her remuneration? Amazingly, nothing! The NRHM envisages that an “ASHA would be an honorary volunteer and would not receive any salary or honorarium. Her work would be so tailored that it does not interfere with her normal livelihood.”

There is some grudging acceptance that ASHAs can be compensated for the period they spend in training but only at the training venue and by day of attendance. Any other remuneration can only come in the form of the monetary incentives that are given as part of specific programmes such as immunisation. Some State governments have instituted payments to ASHAs but in no case do they exceed Rs.1,000 a month. And, usually, ASHAs get much less, only around Rs.500 a month at the most. Yet, in most cases, fulfilling all their responsibilities would require ASHAs to work for more than eight hours a day as well as at odd times, given the unexpected nature of sickness, deliveries, and so on. All this is supposed to be done out of a sense of idealism and community feeling, trading on the time-worn stereotype of caring women who serve their families and communities selflessly.

It is appalling to think that such a major and massive programme could be designed and launched by explicitly relying on the unpaid labour of so many women – nearly 500,000 ASHAs have been recruited – and now there is talk of launching an Urban Health Mission with USHAs. The bureaucrats who administer this programme are only too happy to be the beneficiaries of periodic pay commission awards that allow their salaries to rise faster than the inflation rate.

But when it comes to ensuring essential health services for the people, the women who bear almost the entire responsibility for delivery are to be deprived of minimally adequate remuneration. This combination of cynicism and miserliness does not augur well for the success of the programme. •

A letter from Iran to members of US Congress

Honorable Ladies & Gentleman!

It was with great dismay that I, and many of my fellow Iranians in Iran and abroad, learnt of the regrettably widespread support by you in the U.S Congress, for the Resolution HR 362. This resolution which imposes a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to stop all shipment of refined petroleum products from reaching Iran and to inspect all vessels approaching or leaving Iran, is an act of war waged on our country and the Iranian nation.

If passed, this resolution, would be yet another instance in a chain of flagrant violations of international law committed by the US and a war crime under the United Nations Convention on Genocide, executed against one of the most peaceful nations on earth who has not attacked any other nation, at least, for the past two and half centuries, a nation that has suffered a most brutal eight- year-long war of aggression by the ruthless dictator, Saddam Hussein, with the full political, financial, intelligence and military support of the United States, including the provision of the WMD.

Whereas the surviving victims of Saddam’s chemical attack on Halabja in the Iraqi Kurdistan and on Iran (in which thousands of innocent civilians were massacred) are still dying in agony, and the US hireling, Saddam, was conveniently disposed of as the witness and the executor of such crimes after the US “Mission” was “Accomplished” in 2003, the main perpetrators are still at large to move on from the bloodbath in Iraq to a genocide in Iran.

From a teenage admirer of the US and its culture in the early 60s who was deeply saddened by the assassination of JFK, I, and many people of my generation, have grown disillusioned and disgusted with the iron-fisted policies of your country unleashing wars of aggression, waging coups and toppling democratically-elected governments all over the world, installing ruthless regimes in developing countries and giving your full blessing to the massacres of their peaceful political opponents (1953: Iran, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh; This US-engineered coup became the blueprint for many of the future black operations. 1954: Guatemala, president Jacobo Arbenz. 1965: Indonesia, president Dr. Sukarno, with more than a million people massacred, many on the basis of execution lists supplied by the US embassy in Jakarta. 1960s: Congo, Dr. Patrice Lumumba. 1960s: Greece. 1973: Chile, Dr. Salvadore Allende. 1976: Argentina; then Panama, Haiti … just to name a few. You well know that the terror list goes on).

The recent revelations by Seymour Hersh, in the New Yorker magazine, of the US Congress secretly funding of Bush’s request for 400 million dollars to escalate major covert operations in Iran involving assassinations, abductions, fomenting and supporting ethnic unrest and terror campaigns by such despised terrorist groups as MKO, to force a regime change, is a full circle since the 1953 US overthrow of the popular and democratically -elected government of Dr. Mossadegh in Iran. Under the circumstances, it is fully understandable why the US has exempted itself from prosecution under the International Criminal Court.

Honorable ladies and Gentlemen! The United States’ deeds towards Iran and the larger Middle East, rather than “promoting democracy”, have earned it the reputation of the “The Assassin of Democracy".

We, the recipients of your terror, tie our hopes only on the conscientious efforts of the peace-loving and humane American individuals and organizations in the anti-war movement to open your eyes to the catastrophic consequences of signing on to resolutions which usher incalculable human suffering and war. The pending Resolution HR362 is a war resolution which would potentially conflagrate your manufactured conflicts in the Middle East and the chain of its uncontrollable reactions and reprisals would spread and burn the globe. Violence breeds violence, ladies and gentlemen! Learn from the history! Learn from your recent mistakes. Do not flare up an unending chain of hostilities, to then naively and cynically question: "Why do they hate us?".

Perhaps a second go at Joseph Heller's brilliant Catch 22 is a timely read. Remember Yossarion's wonder at people on the ground raising their fists and shouting when he was flying up there only to do his job of bombing!! Let us not doubt for a moment that only acting wisely and humanely on the part of US statespersons would bring back respect and admiration for what US once stood for.

If your belief and love for "Democracy" and a “Free World” is sincere and genuine, then please respect the spirit of of democracy and the rights of other nations to live with dignity, to decide their destiny free of foreign interference, and to prosper as you do. A genuine celebration of your "Independence Day" would require celebrating the spirit of independence and respecting the independence of other nations too. Only God knows how, in the 21st Century, the US would have treated the poor Tom Paine whose "Common Sense" we have translated into Farsi and is just about to reach Iranian readers. If the American public and the US Congress do not reign in this ruthless hostility towards our nation, we wonder whether those who might escape becoming your “collateral damage”, would still be interested in reading on American ideals of liberty or whether they would rather spit us (the translators) in the face for propagating American “values” and “ideals”.

I sincerely hope that your wisdom, common sense and sound judgment would prevail over the elaborate false propaganda and agitations aimed at manufacturing a most vicious consent. This consent, if given, could not only devastate our lives, but would also, ultimately, be to the great detriment of the US itself.

Yours, with hope and in anticipation,

What a Miner's Life is Worth

The only thing more predictable than the deaths of those twelve miners in the Sago coal mine on January 2, 2006 was the Bush administration’s rush to exploit a tragedy that they helped foster.

Since 2001, Big Coal has benefited as Washington regulators have turn a blind eye to their rampages across Appalachia. The cost of such official laxity is borne by decapitated mountains, buried and polluted streams, and hundreds of miners injured and killed by an industry that has been liberated from even the most basic regulations governing worker safety and environmental protection.

The Sago miners didn’t even have the minimal protections afforded by membership in a union. In the economics of coal country these days people are so desperate for a job that they will sign up for the most dangerous kind of work while asking few questions about the risks or the precautions taken by the companies. And that’s exactly the way Big Coal wants it.

Since Bush arrived in Washington, more than 230 coal miners have perished in 206 mine accidents. Hundreds of others have been injured. Thousands suffer from chronic ailments and lung diseases caused by hazardous working conditions.

The Sago mine was a death trap. In 2005 alone, the Mine Safety and Health Administration slapped the mine with 208 citations for violations, ranging from the accumulation of flammable coal dust to ceiling collapses.

The accident rate at Sago was abysmal. In 2004, Sago had an accident rate of 15.90 accidents per 200,000 man-hours worked. This rate is nearly three times more than the national average of 5.66. The next year was even worse. In 2005, Sago’s accident rate spiked to 17.04, with at least fourteen miners injured.

But these citations and accidents came without regulatory sanction. Most of them resulted only in negligible fines. In total, the mine was hit with just $24,000 worth of penalties. It’s much cheaper to pay the fine than to fix the problems, even when the conditions are lethal. For example, in 2001 Jim Walters Resources paid only $3,000 in fines for an accident that led to the deaths of thirteen miners in Alabama. That’s $230.76 per dead miner. The company earned more than $100 million that year. Other companies have paid less than $200 in fines for fatalities linked to safety violations.

And these token fines often go unpaid by the mining companies. A review of the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s records since 2000 reveals that the agency has hit the mining industry with $9.1 million in fines following fatal incidents. But the companies have paid less than 30 percent of that puny amount.

All a company has to do is appeal its fine, and it will likely be reduced. More than $5.2 million in fines have been reduced to $2.5 million following appeals. Another $2.2 million is unpaid pending appeal. The agency lists more than $1.1 million in fines as being delinquent, but most of those mines remain in operation.

Under the Bush administration, Big Coal has essentially been handed the responsibility for regulating its own behavior, with few questions asked. Even in the aftermath of the Sago disaster there were no serious calls for congressional hearings or criminal sanctions against the mine bosses and their corporate chieftains. The biggest outrage was reserved for the false report, which stated that the twelve miners had miraculously survived their ordeal in the poisonous pit, where carbon monoxide levels had reached 1,300 parts per million, more than three times the maximum safety level.

Naturally, the Democrats offer the miners almost no relief. In the 2004 presidential campaign, when the election hinged on results from the coal belt, John Kerry wrote off the mining country of southeast Ohio and West Virginia, counties burdened by the highest unemployment in country, and lost by landslide margins to Bush.

If you’re going to tie black ribbon on the gates of the White House, you might as well wrap one around a tree outside one of the Kerry-Heinz mansions, as well. Neither party gave a damn about the lives of those men.

Please dont capitalize on hunger

As the global food crisis escalates, Big Biotech (Monsanto, Novartis, Syngenta, Dupont-Pioneer, Dow et al) are capitalizing on the desperation of the hungry at runaway prices and rapidly diminishing reserves as a wedge to foist genetically modified (GMO) seeds on a reluctant Third World.

Latin America is a prime marketing target for Big Biotech's little darlings, often tagged "semillas asasinas" or "killer seeds" for their devastating impacts on local food stocks. Now the killer GMOs are suspected of literally provoking murder most foul.

Last October, Armando Villareal, a farm leader in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua, was gunned down after a farmers' meeting in Nuevo Casas Grandes. Villareal had been denouncing the illegal planting of GMO corn in the Mennonite-dominated municipalities of Cuauhtemoc and Naniquipa.

Chihuahua Mennonite communities originally migrated from Canada after a dispute with the Canadian government over education in the 1920s and were granted land by post-revolutionary president Alvaro Obregon. Over the decades, the Mennonites have successfully cultivated up to 60,000 hectares in the northeast of the state. Acutely insular with their signature dress (denim overalls for the men, prairie dresses and calico bonnets for the women) and speaking low-German as befits their European roots, the Mennonites have never integrated into the Mexican mainstream and their success as farmers - they have benefited from Mexican government irrigation projects - has created tensions in a region where aridity limits agricultural production for most farmers.

Hundreds of tractors lined up in a cortege at Villareal's October 15th funeral during which he was compared to another Chihuahua hero, Francisco Villa. Ironically, the slain farmers' leader who claimed to have evidence that the Mennonites' killer seeds had been smuggled in from Kansas, was not opposed to planting GMO corn which his "Aerodynamica" group hoped would save strapped farmers money on pesticides and power costs. His followers had even burnt tractors to demand that the Mexican government grant them permits to plant the transgenic corn.

Eight months later, Armando Villareal's murder remains unresolved.

The Chihuahua farm leader's assassination is not the only death of a militant Latin American campesino being linked to Big Biotech's encroachments. In Parana Brazil about the same time Villareal was gunned down in Chihuahua, Keno Mota, an activist of the Movement of Landless Farmers ("Movimento de Sem Terras" or MST), affiliated with the international poor farmers coalition Via Campesina, was drilled by security guards during an action on an illegal experimental station under cultivation by the Biotech giant Syngenta - the Syngenta plot, adjacent to Iguazu National Park, a protected nature reserve, violated Brazilian strictures as to where such "semillas asasinas" can be planted.

Unlike Mexico, Brazil has few restrictions on GMO crops and indeed under social democrat president Lula da Silva, has become the second-largest GMO soybean producer on the continent. Neighboring Argentina is Numero Uno. Big Argentinean growers, who have been blocking that southern cone nation's highways in a dispute over tariffs on soy exports for weeks, have announced intentions to surpass the United States as the largest grower of genetically modified maize in coming years. Argentinean corn is grown exclusively as feed for the gaucho nation's cattle industry, a cornerstone of its agrarian economy.

Mexico, where maiz was first domesticated 8000 years ago and where corn is at the core of culture as well as nutrition, has been more circumspect in embracing GMO seed. Under the banner of the "No Hay Pais Sin Maiz" ("we have no country without corn") campaign, farmers and environmentalists have joined hands to prevent GMO contamination of native species and the nation's Bio-Security Commission, initialed CYBOGEN, an inter-secretarial government body, declared a moratorium on the cultivation of genetically modified corn in the late 1990s.

Nonetheless, millions of tons of GMO maize pour into Mexican tariff-free each year from the U.S. under provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.)

Now, in the wake of the much-hyped global food crisis, Big Biotech is pressuring the Mexican government to permit experimental plantations of the semillas asasinas as the only solution to predicted shortages, a ploy that Monsanto and its ilk have successfully sprung on the European Union.

Although GMO corn remains officially proscribed in Europe, seven EU members will grow the modified maize this year. Agribiz combines like the British National Beef Association, insist that "all resistance to GMO crops must be abandoned" in light of the growing international food psychosis.

One motive for the industry's big push, according to Sylvia Ribero who keeps tabs on Big Biotech for the left daily La Jornada: patents for some of the major GMO seed brands like Monsanto's BT corn are set to expire in the next five years.

Buckling under the Biotech barrage, Mexico's CYBOGEN posted regulations this March for applicants who contemplate cultivation of "experimental" GMO corn. Now, with a 60-day countdown ticking, Mexican farmers could be legally planting genetically modified maiz by July.

Under ground rules issued by both the Agriculture and Environmental secretariats (SAGARPA and SAMARNAT), experimental patches of GMO corn must be limited to regions where native corn stocks will not be contaminated by windblown pollens from such fields.

But the Mennonite farmers who occupy huge tracts in Chihuahua apparently jumped the gun. Under the tutelage of Monsanto and Syngenta-Golden Harvest with the SAGARPA and the SAMARNAT turning a blind eye, the Mennonites have sewn GMO corn in at least two of their "camps" or agricultural stations (#102 and #305) in the municipality of Naniquipa where Villareal spotted the illegal patches last year. Decrying insufficient safeguards against windblown pollens, Chihuahua campesinos led by Victor Quintana of the "No Hay Pais" campaign, also affiliated with Via Campesina, and a deputy in the Mexican congress for the left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), have threatened to tear out the Mennonite fields before they flower in mid-summer.

Quintana's group worries that the Mennonite "experiment" will germinate five to 25 million "granos" or kernels, each of which is a potential threat to native corn.
SAGARPA regards the Mennonite "experiment" as a field test to see just how far the pollens can be spread by winds and other weather conditions.

Windblown GMO pollens are held responsible for the contamination of maiz in neighboring Sinaloa state where Greenpeace activists found traces of genetically modified corn in 96% of samples taken in nine municipalities in 2007 - Sinaloa is Mexico's top corn producing state. Aleira Lara, Greenpeace anti-GMO campaign coordinator, considers that trying to confine experimental plots to one geographical region is merely cosmetic. Last year, the Greenpeacers listed 39 instances of windblown GMO contamination in 23 countries.

Native Mexican corn was first found to have been infected by NAFTA GMO imports in 2001 when Indian campesinos in Oaxaca's Sierra of Juarez discovered that maiz from a lot introduced from Michigan and sold by a local government DICONSA grain distribution center had been inadvertently planted in the Zapotec-Chinanteco village of Calpulapan. Subsequent investigation by the National Ecology Institute, documented in a report suppressed by the Secretary of Agriculture, turned up traces of GMO contamination (some as high as 60%) in 11 out of 22 corn-growing regions in Oaxaca and Puebla. Maiz was first domesticated in the Puebla-Oaxaca altiplano eight millenniums ago.

Although the CYBOGEN has never until now licensed the production of genetically modified corn in Mexico, the semillas asasinas have almost certainly been cultivated here since the late 1990s. The International Commission for the Betterment of Corn and Wheat (CIMMYT), financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, with experimental fields in Texcoco just outside Mexico City is thought to be one source of windblown contamination. Roberto Gonzalez Barrera, the King of the Tortilla, the owner of MASECA, the world's biggest corn flour miller now a third owned by Archer Daniels Midlands, once boasted that he had thousands of hectares under GMO corn. NAFTA imports fall off DICONSA trucks on rural highways and the pollens are blown into roadside "milpas" (cornfields.)

Now GMO infestation is about to get much more acute. In a move to offset soaring prices and shrinking reserves that invariably generate social discontent, Mexican president Felipe Calderon has announced the tariff-free importation of millions of tons of basic grains (corn, wheat, soy, sorghum.) Because the Cargill Corporation, which has dominated grain distribution in Mexico ever since the government's CONASUPO system was privatized in 1999, claims it cannot separate out GMO from uncontaminated imports, the impacts on native corn and other grains will be greatly magnified - Greenpeace estimates that 60 to 70% of all corn imports are contaminated by genetically modified organisms.

My questions to Obama -Fidel Castro

It would be dishonest of me to remain silent after hearing Barack Obama's speech delivered at the Cuban American National Foundation last Friday. I feel no resentment towards him, for he is not responsible for the crimes perpetrated against Cuba and humanity. Were I to defend him, I would do his adversaries a favour. I have therefore no reservations about criticising him and expressing myself frankly.

What were Obama's statements? "Throughout my entire life, there has been injustice and repression in Cuba. Never, in my lifetime, have the people of Cuba known freedom. Never, in the lives of two generations of Cubans, have the people of Cuba known democracy ... I won't stand for this injustice ... I will maintain the embargo."

This man who is doubtless, from the social and human points of view, the most progressive candidate for the US presidency, portrays the Cuban revolution as anti-democratic and lacking in respect for freedom and human rights. It is the same argument US administrations have used again and again to justify crimes against our country. The blockade is an act of genocide. I don't want to see US children inculcated with those shameful values.

No small and blockaded country like ours would have been able to hold its ground for so long on the basis of ambition, vanity, deceit or the abuse of power, the kind of power its neighbour has. To state otherwise is an insult to the intelligence of our heroic people.

I am not questioning Obama's great intelligence, his debating skills or his work ethic. He is a talented orator and is ahead of his rivals in the electoral race. Nevertheless, I am obliged to raise a number of delicate questions. I do not expect answers; I wish only to raise them for the record.

Is it right for the president of the US to order the assassination of any one person in the world, whatever the pretext? Is it ethical for the president of the US to order the torture of other human beings? Should state terrorism be used by a country as powerful as the US as an instrument to bring peace to the planet?

Is an Adjustment Act, applied as punishment to only one country, Cuba, in order to destabilise it, good and honourable when it costs innocent children and mothers their lives? Are the brain drain and the continuous theft of the best scientific and intellectual minds in poor countries moral and justifiable?

Is it fair to stage pre-emptive attacks? Is it honourable and sane to invest millions and millions of dollars in the military-industrial complex, to produce weapons that can destroy life on earth several times over? Is that the way in which the US expresses its respect for freedom, democracy and human rights?

Before judging our country, Obama should know that Cuba - with its education, health, sports, culture and science programmes, implemented not only in its own territory but also in other poor countries around the world, and in spite of the economic and financial blockade and the aggression of his powerful country - is proof that much can be done with very little. Cuba has never subordinated cooperation with other countries to ideological requirements. We offered the US our help when hurricane Katrina lashed the city of New Orleans. Our revolution can mobilise tens of thousands of doctors and health technicians. It can mobilise an equally vast number of teachers and citizens who are willing to travel to any corner of the world to fulfil any noble purpose, not to usurp rights or take possession of raw materials.

The goodwill and determination of people constitute limitless resources that would not fit in the vault of a bank. They cannot spring from the hypocritical politics of an empire.

IMF and World Bank - Rascist organizations

The International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization promised that more trade would help to eradicate poverty and hunger. Food crops? Self-sufficiency in food? They had a better idea. Local farms would be closed down or encouraged to concentrate on exports. This would make the most, not of natural conditions which might be good for growing tomatoes in Mexico or pineapples in the Philippines, but of the fact that production costs are lower in Mexico and the Philippines than they are in Florida or California.

Farmers in Mali would rely on more highly mechanised, more productive producers in the Beauce or the Midwest for grain supplies. The farmers would pack up, move into town and get jobs in some western firm that had relocated to take advantage of cheaper labour than it could find at home. The countries on the East African seaboard would lighten their load of foreign debt by selling their fishing rights to the factory ships of wealthier countries. The Guineans would import tinned fish from Denmark or Portugal. Never mind the additional pollution generated by transporting all these goods. A life of bliss was guaranteed and so were the profits of the middlemen – wholesalers, shippers, insurers, advertisers.

The World Bank, prime promoter of this “development” model, now tells us that there may be food riots in 33 countries. And the WTO fears a resurgence of protectionism: some food-exporting countries – India, Vietnam, Egypt, Kazakhstan – have decided to reduce exports in order to feed their own people. What a nerve! The North is easily upset by other people’s selfishness. The Chinese eat too much meat, that’s why the Egyptians are short of wheat.

Some states have followed the World Bank and IMF advice and turned over their food crops. They can no longer keep their produce for themselves. Well, they will pay, that’s the law of the market. According to UN Food and Agriculture Organisation figures, their bill for grain imports has risen by a massive 56% in one year. Naturally the World Food Programme (WFP), which feeds 73 million people in 78 countries every year, is asking for a further $500m.

Someone must have decided this was excessive, as it got only half that amount. But the sum it sought was only what the war in Iraq costs every couple of hours, and a tiny fraction of what the sub-prime mortgage crisis will cost the banking sector, which has been bailed out by the state. To look at it another way, the WFP asked on behalf of millions of starving people for 13.5% of the sum earned last year by John Paulson, the astute hedge fund manager who realised that thousands of Americans are in negative equity and face ruin. No one knows how much the incipient famine will yield or who will reap the profits, but nothing is ever lost in a modern economy.

History repeats itself, one speculation after another. The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy encourages debt, first the internet bubble, now the real estate bubble. In 2006 the IMF was still saying there was “every indication the mechanisms for granting loans on the US property market were still relatively effective”. Market effective. Perhaps the two words should be welded together once and for all. The real estate bubble has burst. So the speculators are resurrecting an old eldorado: the grain markets. Purchasing contracts to deliver wheat or rice at a future date and counting on selling them at a higher price. And what ensures prices will keep on rising? Famine.

So what does the IMF do? The IMF, which has “the best economists in the world” according to its managing director, explains that “one way to solve the problem of famine is to increase international trade”. The poet Leo Ferré once said that “all you need to sell despair is the right formula”. It looks as though they’ve found it.

India's food crisis and neo-liberal conspiracy

FOOD CRISIS EXPOSES FAILINGS OF INDIA'S ECONOMIC REFORMS

The recent escalation in food prices is the latest calamity to hit the poor and marginalised communities in India. The price of food and other essentials has been rising for the last 12 weeks and the current inflation level is the highest witnessed since November 2004. Retail prices of some essential food commodities have seen a sharp increase. Retail prices of gram, sugar, mustard oil, vanaspati and onions have increased by up to 11 per cent in the national capital in last one month, pushing inflation to a 39-month high of seven per cent. (1)

"SHINING INDIA" AT THE COST OF "SUFFERING INDIA" Facing public outrage on rising food prices, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, took refuge by issuing statements that inflation is a global phenomenon. Even though it is a global phenomenon and food riots have been witnessed in more than 30 countries, the food crisis in India is primarily caused by the pro-market biased policies of the government. Indians (along with the Chinese) have been accused of eating more due to rising prosperity resulting in the global food shortages. But the per capita food consumption and calorie intake indicates that irrespective of the current inflationary trend, majority in India are facing hunger and starvation since liberalisation policies were introduced.

The irony is that though signs of the food and agriculture crisis were evident, policy makers continued with neoliberal policies to benefit corporations. The government is witness to the increasing schism between 'shining India’ and ‘suffering India’ but their mantra has always been that only the pro-capitalist, corporation driven economy can bring sustained economic growth which will trickle down to benefit the disadvantaged sections of the population. Despite looming inflation, the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India believes that robust investment growth and strong corporate performance would drive India towards prosperity. It also says that “in the current year, the strong growth in agricultural GDP has come mostly from activity other than food grain production, namely commercial crops, horticulture and animal husbandry.” (2)

This paradigm shift in foodgrain production was introduced under the World Bank direction which “required India to move away from the existing subsidy-based regime and instead, invest in building a solid foundation for a highly productive, globally competitive and diversified farm sector.” (3). The report recommended the removal of subsidies related to grain procurement and Public Distribution System (PDS), diversification of Indian agricultural development, increased space for the private sector in agriculture extension services, contract farming and for agro-industry in general. Interestingly during the recent crisis the Indian government severely criticised the World Bank for their advice to countries to shift from food crops for domestic population to cash crops for exports. (4) Addressing a special meeting of the United Nations Economic and Social Council to consider the issue of rising food prices, India’s UN Ambassador Nirupama Sen, said that the “tradition of these institutions’ advice was partly responsible for the crisis in the first place”.

The corporate led growth regime has contributed to mass displacement of mainly small and marginal farmers, leading to loss of livelihood opportunities and employment generation for the common people. The widespread farmers’ suicides, which reached 150,000 (5) in just eight years (1997-2005), is a manifestation of the ongoing corporatisation and mindless deregulation of the agricultural sector. Though India is seen as a rising economic power and it is hoped that a trickle down effect will benefit the poor and marginalized, in reality the gap between ‘Shining India’ and ‘Suffering India’ is widening: 77 percent (6) of the Indian population who survive on Rs. 20/- (half a US dollar) a day, does not figure in this ‘booming Indian economy’.

MYTH OF GLOBAL MARKET INTEGRATION Two years of wheat imports have exposed the fallacies of neoliberal policies. India, once a wheat exporting country was forced to become the largest wheat importer through a design to benefit the global food corporations. The declining procurement of locally produced wheat by the Food Corporation of India (FCI) prepared the ground for wheat imports. This was a sea change from the situation during 2001-2002 to 2004-2005, when the country exported 12.4 million tonnes of wheat. Since early 2006, the USA was pressuring India to break its tariff wall and open up for wheat imports. In March, despite predictions of a bumper wheat harvest, the US Wheat Associates (7) said India would import up to 30 lakh tonnes of wheat in that year. (lakh = 100,000). Following this, the government reduced the applied tariff on wheat from 60 per cent to zero for imports by the State Trading Corporation of India (STC) while for private traders, the duty was brought down to five per cent. This led to import of 5.5 million tonne of wheat in 2006 at prices ranging in between US $178.75 to US $228.94 (8) a tonne when the local wheat production was 69 million tonnes. In 2007 the government first scrapped a wheat import tender at an average price of $263 per tonne in June citing high prices but in July, less than 40 days later, it contracted 5.11 lakh tonne of wheat at an average price of $325.59 per tonne. Then again on September 3, it contracted 7.95 lakh tonne of wheat at an average price of $389.45 (9) but only 1.8 million tonnes of wheat finally landed on Indian ports at double the price of last year despite increase in wheat production upto 74.82 million tonnes in that year. Thus the government paid foreign traders exorbitant price upto Rs 16,000 per tonne while the MSP (market spot price) was only Rs. 8500 per tonne. And the main beneficiaries of the India’s wheat import were giant grain corporation like Glencore, Toepfer, Cargill and the Australian Wheat Board who gained at the cost of Indian farmers. However, the import of wheat at expensive rates led to the sharp increase in local wheat and wheat flour prices making it unaffordable for the poor.

The story of wheat is not different from what happened in late 1990s in the edible oil sector when under pressure from the USA, India reduced the duty on the crude edible oil to 15 per cent in August 1998. In July 1999 Oil World reported that India was set to replace China as the world's largest vegetable oil importer and projected India’s import around 3.6 million tonnes (MT) in 1998-99 oil year. In the first nine months India had imported 3 MT oil and during 1998-99 oil year, edible oil import amounted to a massive 4.4 MT, an increase of 111 per cent over the previous year's 2.08 MT. The increasing reliance on imports considerably weakened the domestic edible oil production.

In spite of the above experiences, early this year the government allowed liberalisation of imports to deal with rising inflation by reducing import duty to zero in respect of articles like pulses, edible oil and maize; withdrawal of four per cent additional duty on edible commodities; reducing import duty on refined oil and vegetable oil by 7.5 per cent; reduction of import duty on butter and ghee to 30 per cent. But does the reduction in import duties and import of food grain help in containing the domestic food prices? In June 2006 the same government had unilaterally liberalised imports to bolster the supply side of essential commodities but this couldn’t control inflation. The government’s Economic Survey 2006-07 had said that “duty free wheat imports did not help to check price rise, rather the rising global prices impacted the domestic market in a subtle way”. A billion plus population of India cannot depend on the ‘ship-to-mouth’ existence and the government needs to restore its policy to build up food grain reserves in order to serve the farmers and the consumers. Moreover there is greater threat that the unilateral trade liberalisation as a solution to inflation would soften India’s position in WTO.

PUBLIC DISTRIBUTION UNDERMINED BY CORPORATIONS The Public Distribution System (PDS) (10) has been one of the most crucial elements of food policy and food security system in the country. But the Indian government has been deliberately weakening the public distribution system under the World Bank pressure to benefit the agribusiness corporations. India witnessed a shortage of wheat in 2005-2007 because systematically the foodgrain (wheat and rice) buffer stocks were lowered through below target offtake of grains by government from the farmers.

In order to make a case for wheat import under US pressure, the government went slow on the procurement of wheat in 2005-2007 and deliberately kept the government's purchasing price low to allow multinational corporations to enter the trade. In 2006, Cargill India, the Australian Wheat Board, and two Indian based companies with a lot of foreign equity, ITC and Adani Export, procured 30 lakh tonnes of wheat. In 2003-04, government procured 16.8 million tones of wheat which went down to 14.8 million tonnes in 2004-05 and it further reduced to 11.1 million tonnes in 2005-2006 and last year it was just 9.2 million tonnes. (11) The government deliberately created a situation of food insecurity in the country by allowing multinational corporations to move into agro-business and large procurement. However in 2008 it corrected its faulty policy of reduced procurement and procured a record 20.5 million tonnes (12) till 20 May this year, which is a huge jump from a meagre 11.1 million tonnes in the entire season last year, helped by a bumper crop and higher prices. Moreover the government went a step further and Indian Railways decided to stop allocating wagons for transporting wheat from the growing areas by the private trader, impacting their wheat procurement.

The reduced procurement of food grains resulted in reduced amount of off take by the state governments for the subsidized grain distribution through a network of more than 450,000 Fair Price Shops (FPS). An analysis of data from 2005-06 onward reflects a consistent fall in allocation of wheat in the BPL (below the poverty line) category, even while there was a perceptible upward shift in demand. (13) It means that at a time when open market prices of wheat were rising, there wasn’t enough wheat in the PDS for those eligible to buy it there for less than the market prices.

COMMODITY FUTURE: TRADING ON HUNGER Besides the agribusiness, the traders engaged in future trading in commodities were beneficiaries of the declining food procurement and shrinking of buffer stocks. Infact the opposition parties in India claimed that the lowering of procurement and shrinking of buffer stocks was meant to facilitate the speculative trading of foodgrains. Reduction in government stocks is imperative for the private traders and speculators to speculate on prices of foodgrains. Mr. Sitaram Yechury representing the Community Party of India (Marxist), debating the issue of price rise in the Parliament said that, “three billion dollars a day is the speculation that is taking place in the commodity exchange market of futures and forward trading” across three national level electronic exchanges and twenty-one regional exchanges. In just two weeks, from 17 March to 31 March 2008, the total value of trading at these commodity exchanges was Rs. 2,12,465.17 crores (14). The cumulative value of trade in the last financial year, from 1 April 2007 to 31 March 2008 was to the tune of Rs. 40,65,989 crores as compared to Rs. 5,71,759 two years ago in 2004-2005. One firm calculates that the amount of speculative money in commodities futures markets, where investors do not buy or sell a physical commodity, like rice or wheat, but merely bet on price movements – has ballooned from US$5 billion in 2000 to US$175 billion to 2007 (15). The price behaviour of food over 2007 and the first three months of 2008 is more or less explained by such speculation on food products.

But the speculation and bidding in food stocks does not benefit small and marginal farmers. The Economic Survey 2007-08 clearly stated that, "Direct participation of farmers in the commodity futures market is somewhat difficult at this stage as the large lot size, daily margining and high membership fees … work as a deterrent to farmers' participation in these Markets. Farmers can directly benefit from the futures market if institutions are allowed to act as aggregators on behalf of the farmers”. Though the government has put a ban on future trading of some crops, it may be opened up anytime, therefore the government must totally ban the futures trading of food commodities as demanded by the citizens groups and left parties.

RETREATING FROM CAPITALIST ECONOMY The UPA government under the leadership of Manmohan Singh seems to concede the failure of the capitalist system (but it could be a gimmick for the election, which is due in early 2009). The inflation also made him realise the viability of the small farm essential for the survival of millions of small and marginal farmers and to deal with the food crisis. Recently the Prime Minister made a statement which is discordant with the general pro-market reforms push, including promotion of contract farming, that the UPA government has encouraged for the past four years. At the Global Agro-Industries Forum, the Prime Minister said that, "collectivization, corporatization and land consolidation through land alienation are neither possible nor socially desirable, while warning that rising food prices could hamper the country's economic growth…We cannot wish away the existence of economically unviable farms… It is particularly worrisome that the new economics of biofuels is encouraging a shift of land away from food crops”. (16) Even two of his colleagues from the cabinet showed their concern on the capitalist economic model when Mr. Kamal Nath (Union Commerce Minister) and Mr. Sharad Pawar (Union Agriculture Minister), stated that if the need arose they were ready to look at invoking the Nehru-era controls built within existing commodity regulation laws. The last few months have witnessed several steps where the UPA government have retreated from its capitalist move and brought in government regulation to check inflation. One can infer from this development that the UPA government headed by Manmohan Singh (a former World Bank governor) has lost the confidence in the neo-liberal trajectory in agricultural reforms.

SMALL-SCALE FARMERS HOLD THE KEY Given the deepening of agrarian crisis which is causing hunger and malnutrition in rural areas due to unprecedented decline in purchasing power in the rural areas, the first priority of the government should be to strengthen the agriculture sector by increasing public investment, facilitating public control over inputs and market, strictly regulating the corporate investment in agriculture as well as retreating from neoliberal reforms in agriculture.

Since India is a land of small and marginal farmers, and over 650 million of its over one billion population are directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture, there is urgent need to encourage and strengthen biodiversity based small scale agriculture which are crucial for the food security of the millions of Indians. Infact, it is the small biodiverse farm, which has higher productivity than large industrial farms. Large farmers and industrial farming has serious limitations on increasing agricultural productivity. In the face of a worsening worldwide food-price crisis, even the President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Mr. Lennart Båge feel that small farmers are now essential to ensure food security, spur economic growth and help mitigate climate change. He said that smallholder farmers are a vital global asset, a key factor for increased food production, economic growth and development, and mitigating climate change. The 2 billion people in rural areas in the developing world can be tremendously more productive. They can be part of the supply response, feeding the world, and also very much a part of the climate change agenda, both in terms of adaptation and mitigation. (17)

In India, small farm based on internal inputs are the only hope to deal with the impending food crisis and can ensure food security and food sovereignty to millions of people living off the farm. A food secure and peaceful India is in the hands of her small farmers

Beyond Munich: The UN Security Council Helps Disarm a Prospective Further Victim of U.S. Aggression

magine that when Hitler was threatening to invade Poland, after having swallowed Czechoslovakia-with the help of the Western European powers' appeasement of Hitler at Munich in September 1938-the League of Nations imposed an arms embargo on Poland, making it more difficult for the imminent victim to defend itself, and at the same time suggested that Poland was the villainous party. That didn't happen back in 1939, but in a regression from that notorious era of appeasement something quite analogous is happening now.

Here is the United States, still fighting a brutal war of conquest in Iraq, which it is now doing with UN Security Council approval, with open plans and threats to attack Iran and engage in "regime change," gathering aircraft carriers off the coast of Iran, already engaging in subversive and probing attacks on the prospective target, and the UN Security Council, instead of warning and threatening the aggressor warns, threatens and imposes sanctions on the prospective victim!

The way it works is that the United States stirs up a big fuss, proclaiming a serious threat to its own national security, and expressing its deep concern over another state's flouting of Security Council resolutions or dragging its feet on some point of order such as weapons inspections-we know how devoted the United States and its Israeli client are to the rule of law!

In the Iraq case, this noise was echoed and amplified in the media, often splashed across headlines and drummed up in editorial commentary. In turn, elite opinion in the United States and Britain coalesced around the beliefs (a) that a WMD-related crisis really existed in Baghdad and (b) that it required the Security Council's special attention. Straight through March 19-20 2003, Iraq, the prospective target of a full-scale attack, decried the absurdity of this U.S.-U.K. noise, and filed regular communiqués with the Security Council and Secretary-General documenting the U.S.-U.K. aerial strikes on its territory,[1] including the "spikes of activity" period from September 2002 onward.[2] The vast majority of the world's states and peoples also rejected the war propaganda-including the largely voiceless U.S. public, where in the weeks before the war, two-thirds of non-elite opinion stood firmly behind multilateral approaches to defuse the crisis, foremost of which was permitting the UN weapons inspections to take their course.[3] But then, as now, pretty much the entire world recognized the U.S.-U.K. hijacking of the Security Council, and its strategic misdirection away from a defense of the actual target of the threats (Iraq) onto the execution of the policy of the states making those threats while playing the role of Iraq's potential victims (the U.S. and U.K.).

So the aggression planning proceeded then and does now with the cooperation of the UN and international community. In the Iraq case, the Security Council allowed itself to be bamboozled into restarting the weapons-inspection process, accepting this as the urgent matter, rather than the war-mobilization and threat of aggression by the United States and its British ally. Although the Security Council did not vote approval of the U.S.-British attack, it helped set it up by inflating the Iraq threat and failing to confront the real threat posed by the United States and Britain. Then, within two months after "shock and awe," the Security Council voted to give the aggressor the right to stay in Iraq and manage its affairs, thereby approving a gross violation of the UN Charter after the fact.

Now, four years later, the Security Council has outdone itself. Not only has it failed to condemn the U.S. and Israeli threat to attack Iran-the threat itself a violation of the UN Charter,[4] and one made ever-more real by the U.S. invasions of neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq during this decade alone, now followed by a huge U.S. naval buildup near Iran's coast to levels not seen since the U.S. launched its war on Iraq four years ago in what the New York Times just called a "calculated show of force."[5] But even worse, the Council has aided and abetted these potential aggressors by adopting three resolutions in the past eight months under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, each of which affirms that Iran's nuclear program is a threat to international peace and security, and reserves for the Council the right to take "further appropriate measures" should Iran fail to comply-that is, should Iran not cave-in to U.S. demands on exactly the terms demanded.[6]

Since July 31, the Council has demanded that Iran "suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development"[7]-despite the fact that Iran's right to engage in these activities is guaranteed under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.[8] Since December 23, it has identified the existence of Iran's nuclear program with so-called "proliferation sensitive nuclear activities"[9]-despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency has never shown Iran's program to be engaged in any kind of activities other than peaceful ones. Indeed, in the December 23 resolution, the Council used the phrase "proliferation sensitive nuclear activities" no fewer than eight different times to describe Iran's nuclear program, the clear-and perfectly false-allegation being that for Iran to do research on and develop its indigenous nuclear fuel capabilities places Iran in violation of its NPT commitments.

But perhaps most egregious of all, the March 24 resolution prohibits Iran from selling "any arms or related material" to other states or individuals (par. 5), and calls upon all states "to exercise vigilance and restraint" in the sale or transfer of a whole list of weapons systems to Iran, "in order to prevent a destabilizing accumulation of arms…" (par. 6).[10] As the editorial voice of The Hindu immediately recognized, the first term is critical "not so much because the Islamic Republic is a major vendor of weapons even to Hamas or Hizbollah but because it gives the U.S. an excuse to intimidate or interdict all Iranian merchant shipping under the guise of 'enforcement'."[11] Likewise with the second term, which, if history is any guide, Washington will interpret as a strict prohibition on weapons sales to Iran, thus depriving the potential victim, faced with attack by one or more nuclear powers, of the right to obtain even non-nuclear means of self defense. This of course has been a standard U.S. tactic over many years, even against puny victims-Guatemala in 1954 and Nicaragua in the 1980s, among other cases. But now the United States has succeeded in getting the Security Council to help it impede the self-defense of yet another target of aggression. In this truly Kafkaesque case, the state targeted for attack (Iran) has been declared a threat to the peace by the Security Council, at the behest of a serial aggressor openly mobilizing its forces to attack the "threat."[12]

It should be recognized that the treatment of Iran's nuclear program, and the Security Council's cooperation in this treatment, is the ultimate application of a global double standard, enforced by an aggressive superpower now able to get away with both hypocrisy and murder. Only the United States and its allies may possess nuclear weapons. They alone may threaten to use nukes. They alone may improve their nukes and delivery systems. Only client states such as Israel may remain outside the NPT indefinitely and without penalty. The United States may ignore its NPT obligation to work toward nuclear disarmament. It may even renege on its promise never to use nukes against nuke-free states that joined the NPT. But no matter. By sheer fiat-power, no other state may acquire nukes without U.S. consent. Nor as the case of Iran shows may a state engage in its "inalienable right" to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes unless and until the United States approves.

We are in the midst of a crisis within the post-war international system, as a serial aggressor is now able to mobilize the Security Council, tasked with the maintenance of international peace and security, to declare the state that it threatens with war a menace to the peace and to help the aggressor disarm its target. This carries us beyond Munich.

Who Is The Greatest Rogue Of All

Most people believe that their own country is virtuous and that only others misbehave enough to qualify as international outlaws. But the United States has elevated this popular sentiment to the level of national policy, by designating certain countries, of its own choosing, as "rogue states."

The dictionary defines "rogue" as "a fierce and dangerous animal, like an elephant, that separates itself from its herd." By this standard, the United States, not the piddling tyrannies named by the State Department, is the world's number one rogue.

Since it obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945-cities, not military targets-the United States has bombed eighteen countries, and invaded still others, with no declaration of war nor any possibility of retaliation, at least until September 11, 2001.

And in the case of Afghanistan, the United States launched a unilateral war of revenge against a brutal regime of its own creation, although none of the 19 hijackers were Afghan and none of the thousands of "detainees" held in the United States and abroad have been charged with any participation in the crime. Furthermore, the alleged "mastermind," still at large, might well have been turned over to the United States through negotiations-which President Bush rejected outright from the start. PS: in case you haven't noticed, we don't negotiatee-except on our terms.

Of course all this is defended on the ground that we are "so good" (as the President has said) and always act in the world's interest. Can we explain the universally opposed embargo against Cuba as a global service? Did we support the murderous regime of Suharto in Indonesia for 32 years out of altruism-or because U.S. mining, oil and timber interests loved the "favorable climate of investment" the dictator provided for them?

In other cases too U.S. actions reflect the power of corporate interests. For example, the United States refused to participate in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development-sponsored talks in Paris in May 2001, on ways to crack down on off-shore and other tax and money laundering havens. For any other nation, this would now be highly embarrassing in the age of Enron, but such a thought would never even occur to U.S. policymakers.

Or consider President Bush's declaration in March 2001 that the Kyoto Protocol for controlling global warming was "dead," and his refusal to participate in negotiations in Marrakech (Morocco) to revise it-all because it might harm the U.S. economy. So if the world thinks controlling global warming is more important than short-term negative economic effects, Bush separates himself from the global consensus based on his reading of U.S. interests alone-and his stance coincides with that of the oil and automobile industries, not with the real interests of the American people.

Several U.S. unilateral positions have been geared to the demands of the military-industrial complex, and other parties advocating an aggressive foreign policy. Last December the United States withdrew from the 1972 Anti ballistic Missile Treaty, gutting this landmark arms control accord to the dismay of virtually every country in the world.

The United States has not ratified the Comprehensive (Nuclear) Test Ban Treaty signed by 164 nations, and under Bush opposes it. This country rejects the Land Mine Treaty, concluded in Ottawa in December 1997 and signed by 122 countries; the Pentagon finds land mines useful, outweighing the "collateral damage" they entail for thousands of civilians every year.

In February 2001 we refused to join 123 nations to ban the use and production of anti-personnel bombs and mines; flexible killing power for the Pentagon must be preserved, regardless of human cost. This country was also the only nation to oppose the UN Agreement to Curb the International Flow of Illicit Small Arms in July 2001.

The United States rejects an International Criminal Court because our personnel might become subject to its jurisdiction. In 1986, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that the United States was in violation of international law by sponsoring and supporting a Contra army to attack Nicaragua. The United States simply refused to accept the Court's jurisdiction, although it hastens to do so when the Court decides in its favor.

The United Nations is treated the same way: when the United States can get the Security Council to do what it wants, like bomb Iraq in 1991, it goes that route; when it sees it can't get UN backing, as in its invasion of Panama in 1989, it simply disregards the UN or uses its veto. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated in 1998, "the United States acts multilaterally when it can, unilaterally when it must."

In the case of Afghanistan in 2001, the Bush administration couldn't be bothered with the UN or any other international body to deal with what it declared to be a "crime against humanity": it simply bombed. As for the treatment of prisoners shipped to Guantanamo chained, blindfolded, and classified as "unlawful combatants," South African jurist Richard Goldstone points out that this is "not a term recognized by international law." If they are prisoners, they are entitled to POW treatment; if simply criminals, "under the US Constitution. they've got even better protection."

But for U.S. leaders, international law is for others, not ourselves. Whether an action involves waging war, with the devastation and death that "precision bombing" brings to a chosen country, or expanding environmental controls and reducing global warming, the United States is proclaiming, more loudly than ever, that it will "act unilaterally" whatever the cost to others-and sooner or later to its own people.

Aswin Kumar