Main Page «
Front Page «
Metro «
Business «
International «
Sports «
National «
Editorial «
Home «
Timeout «
Letters «

Archive «
Launch Supplement «
Special Supplements «

COLOMBO: The weekend press had photographs of the post office system becoming deluged with parcels of food being mailed to Jaffna. People living outside of Jaffna are resorting to direct mailing to supply their relations. Packets of powdered milk head the list of items being sent, not only infant milk for children but also regular milk for adults. The price of milk increased to Rs 600, four fold compared to what it is in Colombo. The price of sugar, flour and dried sprats that come from outside Jaffna are also multiples of the prices in Colombo.
   The government’s efforts to deny the existence of a humanitarian crisis in the north-east have not been convincing. Although the government came out with various statistics to show that the Jaffna area had an adequate stock of foodstuffs, which it had also replenished, the situation on the ground gave the lie to this claim. The government’s emergency airlifting of several thousand tons of essential foodstuffs to Jaffna, including children’s milk, is to be welcomed, but it points to the dire shortage that has prompted such an expensive exercise.
   The most recent government strategy to deal with the humanitarian crisis in Jaffna has been to arrange for direct shipments of essential supplies from India to Jaffna. But whether this option is practical remains to be seen. It would require the Indian government to provide security guarantees, or it would require brave merchant sailors to brave the LTTE gauntlet of suicide attack craft. On the other hand, what is important is that the government is now willing to acknowledge that there is a crisis that requires extraordinary measures.
   Prior to taking this step the government was denying the existence of any such humanitarian crisis in Jaffna or elsewhere in the north-east. They also blamed non-governmental organisations of exaggerating the crisis and giving out false information in order to cash in on more foreign aid. At least the government is now tacitly acknowledging the existence of a humanitarian crisis by taking this novel step to import goods direct to Jaffna.
   The humanitarian crisis is not only of the government’s making. The LTTE has insisted on the A9 land route to Jaffna as the one and only way to supply Jaffna. The LTTE has also refused to give their consent to the International Committee of the Red Cross and to the UN office in Colombo to send humanitarian relief by sea to Jaffna. They based their refusal on the argument that the Ceasefire Agreement did not recognise sea rights for them, and so they cannot give a security guarantee. As both the ICRC and
   UN require the mutual consent of the belligerent parties, the sea route to Jaffna is not one they can use at this point of time. While the government has indicated its readiness to accept this offer, the LTTE has not.
   
   War strategies
   At the unsuccessful Geneva talks the LTTE refused to budge from their insistence that opening the A9 highway to Jaffna had to take place if the peace process was to move forward. They based their argument on the dire humanitarian crisis in Jaffna with respect to the availability of essential supplies. But this seems only to have been an argument and not an indication of their genuine concern for the plight of the people. If the LTTE were genuinely concerned about the plight of the people, they would cooperate in the provision of humanitarian supplies. Instead there are credible reports from Jaffna itself that the LTTE is purposely obstructing the efforts of the government to distribute food through the cooperative societies.
   The government’s determination to keep the A9 highway closed can be considered to be a part of its military strategy to isolate the LTTE from the Tamil people as much as possible. There is the likelihood of the opening of the A9 highway leading to increased access to Jaffna for pro-LTTE activists who fled to the Wanni with the outbreak of fighting in Jaffna between the government and LTTE. Their departure may have made it easier for the government to control the restive population even though they are angry and frustrated at the situation they are living in. The government would prefer to keep them out of Jaffna for the time being.
   The closure of the A9 highway is also a means by which the government has denied the LTTE a considerable amount of economic resources. When the highway was open the LTTE taxed vehicles carrying goods as well as passengers. There are estimates that as much as Rs 300 million were collected each month as a result. The loss of these revenues would bear heavily on the LTTE, especially at a time when its sources of income from western countries has also been drying up due to the multiplicity of international bans placed on it.
   The LTTE’s insistence on the opening of the A9 highway to the exclusion of all other options to resolve the humanitarian crisis in Jaffna has to be seen as part of its strategy. From the time of the opening of the A9 highway in 2002 to the time of its closure in August of this year, the A9 highway was a cash cow to the LTTE due to the heavy taxation that took place on its course. It is also the gateway to Jaffna for the LTTE.
   
   Best interests
   The government has so far been determined not to give in to the LTTE demand to open the A9 highway, although the people of Jaffna want it opened. The Bishop of Jaffna is one among many leading civil society personalities who have appealed for the road to be opened by the government. It is tragic that the misery of the people should become a part of the war strategy of the government and LTTE to be used by them for their own purposes.
   But from the people’s point of view, what matters most is that their basic needs for security and essential goods should be met as the foundation of their lives. This is precisely what the government and LTTE have failed to do by focusing on strategies aimed against each other, rather than on strategies meant for the betterment of the people. They are too much focused on their military strategies to the detriment of the best interests of the people. The failure of the Geneva talks was an inevitable outcome of their military-centred approaches having no meeting point.
   After the Geneva talks the situation in Sri Lanka has once again become uncertain and fluid. The military attacks taking place between the government forces and the LTTE after the talks shows that the relationship between these two parties remains extremely hostile. All over the north-east, and also in Colombo, the Tamil people live in difficult circumstances, facing a lack of adequate supplies, displacement from their homes, and fearing abduction and killings. Neither the government nor LTTE can control the actions of each other. But both of them can control their own military forces and their bureaucracies. What they both need is a people-centred approach where the common meeting place is the best interests of the people.
   It is not always a good strategy to oppose what one’s opponent wants. The present humanitarian crisis is costing the government the trust of the Tamil people and the goodwill of the international community. Surely the government can find a way to open the A9 highway at least for humanitarian purposes, and negotiate with the LTTE about the issues that concern it. As these matters concern the humanitarian interests of the Tamil people, the LTTE will also be motivated to cooperate. The opening of the A9 highway could be the first step to opening the door to peace and the opening of the A9 to negotiations on the core principles of the final solution.
   Jehan Perera is media director of the National Peace Council in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
   He can be reached at: Jehan Perera jehanp@yahoo.com

Today, the United States presides over a burgeoning empire –– not only the ‘empire of bases’ first described by Chalmers Johnson, but a far-flung new network of maximum security penitentiaries, detention centres, jail cells, cages, and razor wire-topped pens. From supermax-type isolation prisons in 40 of the 50 states to shadowy ghost jails at remote sites across the globe, this new network of detention facilities is quite unlike the gulags, concentration-camps, or prison nations of the past.
   Even with a couple million prisoners under its control, the US prison network lacks the infrastructure or manpower of the Soviet gulag or the orderly planning of the Nazi concentration-camp system. However, where it bests both, and breaks new incarceration ground, is in its planet-ranging scope, with sites scattered the world over –– from Europe to Asia, the Middle East to the Caribbean. Unlike colonial prison systems of the past, the new US prison network seems to have floated almost free of surrounding colonies. Right now, it has only four major centres –– the ‘homeland,’ Afghanistan, Iraq, and a postage-stamp-sized parcel of Cuba. As such, it already hovers at the edge of its own imperial existence, bringing to mind the unprecedented possibility of a prison planet. In a remarkably few years, the Bush administration has been able to construct a global detention system, already of near epic proportions, both on the fly and on the cheap.
   
   Sizing up a prison planet
   Soon after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the US began the process of creating what has been termed ‘an offshore archipelago of injustice.’ According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Bush administration detained people from around the world in sweeps, imprisoned them without charges and kept them incommunicado at US detention facilities at a CIA prison outside Kabul, Afghanistan (code-named the ‘Salt Pit), at Bagram military airbase in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba, among other sites.
   Since it was set up in 2002, the detainment complex at Guantanamo Bay has been the public face of the Bush administration’s semi-secret foreign prison network –– a collection of camps, cells, and cages that today holds 437 prisoners. But ‘Gitmo’ has always been the tiny showpiece, the jewel in a very dark crown, for a much larger, less visible foreign network of military detention facilities, CIA ‘black’ sites, and outsourced foreign prisons.
   We may never know how many secret prisons exist (or, for a time, existed) in the shape-shifting American mini-gulag, but according to the Washington Post, some locations for these black sites include itinerant CIA detention centres ‘on ships at sea,’ a site in Thailand, and another on ‘Britain’s Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean.’ Uzbekistan has been reported as one possible location, Algeria another. Denials were issued about ghost jails being located in Russia and Bulgaria. The British Guardian named ‘a US airbase in the Gulf state of Qatar’ as another suspected site. And while proposed prisons on ‘virtually unvisited islands in Lake Kariba in Zambia’ were evidently nixed, various black sites located in ‘several democracies in Eastern Europe’ apparently did come into being.
   ABC News reported that the ‘CIA established secret prisons in Romania and Poland in 2002-2003’ before shutting them down in early 2006 and moving the disappeared prisoners on to ‘a facility in North Africa.’ Following this report, Tomdispatch contacted Major General Timothy Ghormley, then the commander of the Combined Task Force Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) for US Central Command, to inquire about the prisoner transfer. Ghormley stated: ‘There are no other US bases in the Horn of Africa besides Camp Lemonier [in Djibouti].’ He went on to assert, ‘There are no prisons under CJTF-HOA’s command, and Camp Lemonier does not do prisoner transfers.’ When asked about CIA operations at the camp, he said he was barred from talking about ‘any security operations worldwide’ and could not speak for the CIA. It is, however, worth noting that Amnesty International reported earlier this year on a Yemeni man who was ‘disappeared’ and ‘flown on a small US plane to a site probably in Djibouti, where he was questioned by officials who told him they were from the FBI.’
   While these illegal sites, mainly run by the CIA, were intermittently identified in the US or foreign press, it was only this September that President George W Bush finally acknowledged the existence of the CIA’s secret prisons. Still, it’s unknown how many CIA black sites are still active and how many clandestine military prisons are still in operation.
   What little we do know, however, indicates that the ‘archipelago of injustice’ has grown to world-spanning proportions. For example, in an investigative article in the British Guardian in March 2005, Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark reported that a network of over 20 US prisons was believed to exist in Afghanistan, including ‘an official US detention centre in Kandahar, where the tough regime has been nicknamed ‘Camp Slappy’ by former prisoners.’ Just recently, Trevor Paglen and AC Thompson, authors of Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights, confirmed this, reporting that ‘the US military has erected some 20 detention centres [in Afghanistan]… which all operate in near total secrecy. These are facilities that the UN, the Afghan government, journalists, and human rights groups can’t get into.’
   We know as well that suspects, swept up around the world, have been outsourced to the prisons and torture chambers of third countries in ‘extraordinary rendition’ operations. The number of prisons operated by other countries is shadowy, but certainly geographically wide-ranging. Foreign facilities available for Bush administration use evidently have included the al-Tamara interrogation centre, located in ‘a forest five miles outside [Morocco’s] capital, Rabat’; sites in Jordan including ‘prisons in the capital, Amman, and in desert locations in the east of the country’; facilities in Saudi Arabia; ‘a series of jails in Damascus,’ Syria; ‘the interrogation centre in the general intelligence directorate in Lazoughli and in Mulhaq al-Mazra prison’ in Egypt; ‘facilities in Baku, Azerbaijan’; and ‘unidentified locations in Thailand,’ among others.
   
   Operation Iraqi Freedom?
   The war in Iraq boosted the profile of the American prison planet immeasurably, especially after the Abu Ghraib prison revelations burst into public view in the spring of 2004. At that time, approximately 20,000 Iraqis were imprisoned by US forces, including –– a report that year disclosed –– more than 100 children as young as 10 years of age.
   Over two years later, there are still many thousands of Iraqis held by US forces in that country –– including about 3,550 in a brand new ‘$60-million state-of-the-art detention centre’ at Camp Cropper near Baghdad’s airport and another almost 9,500 in somewhat more primitive prison conditions at Camp Bucca in the south and Fort Suse in the Kurdish north.
   Meanwhile, the number of prisoners and detainees held by the US-backed Iraqi government and allied militias and death squads is murky at best, but probably sizeable. Secret prisons –– where the grimmest kinds of torture are performed, often with power drills –– are reputed to be scattered around Baghdad, the capital. By June of this year, it was reported that the Iraqi Interior Ministry was still holding 1,797 prisoners; the Defence Ministry a smaller undisclosed number; and the Justice Ministry, at least 7,426.
   
   Lockdown, USA
   The offshore archipelago of injustice garners the headlines, but it’s the homeland prison network that locks up far more people and provides at least one possible model for what the foreign network could morph into given the time and funds to expand and harden into a permanent supermax system. Comprised of federal and state prisons, territorial prisons, local jails, ‘facilities operated by or exclusively for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement,’ military prisons, ‘jails in Indian country,’ and juvenile detention facilities, the homeland prison system is a truly massive apparatus.
   Just as the global network has expanded in the years since 9/11, so has incarceration in the US In fact, it has climbed steadily in recent years. Today, the US stands preeminent among all nations in treating people like caged animals. According to statistics provided to the BBC by the International Centre for Prison Studies, 724 people per 100,000 are imprisoned in the US, overwhelmingly trumping even increasingly authoritarian Russia, the world’s second-ranked prison power, who’s rate of caging humans is only 581 per 100,000.
   All told, the US now has 2,135,901 prisoners in domestic detention facilities, alone –– several hundred thousand more than are imprisoned in both China and India, the world’s two most populous countries, combined. Of these people, 192,198 are imprisoned in federal facilities –– though just 5.3% of them for the violent crimes of most people’s nightmares: homicide, aggravated assault, kidnapping, and sex offences. Instead, most –– 53.6 % –– are locked up on (often small-time) drug charges.
   Of the federal prison population, the government classifies about 0.1 % (100 people) as having committed ‘national security’ offences. There’s no category in the US system for political prisoners, which doesn’t mean they don’t exist. According to a 2002 Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal article by J Soffiyah Elijah, there were, prior to September 11, 2001, ‘nearly 100 political prisoners and prisoners of war incarcerated in the United States’ –– many of them the surviving victims of Vietnam-era government campaigns against activists.
   There is also another group of political prisoners of indeterminate number not listed on the rolls –– war resisters. Just recently Iraq-War-veteran-turned-resister Kevin Benderman was released from a military prison where he had been held for over a year for refusing to redeploy to Iraq due to his conscientious objection to the war. While Army Lieutenant Ehren Watada is currently facing an eight-year prison sentence, if convicted, for similar opposition to Iraq. One website lists 27 war resisters ‘presently in legal jeopardy, or currently incarcerated’ who have gone public with their stories.
   Additionally, in the immediate wake of 9/11, the government conducted sweeps of Muslim immigrants (and Muslim-Americans) reminiscent of the detentions of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II, ‘locking up large numbers of Middle Eastern men, using whatever legal tools they can.’ There was never any full accounting of these mass roundups, codenamed PENTTBOM, or what happened to all the people who were rousted from beds or yanked out of places of work by federal agents. What little is known suggests that ‘762 of the 1,200 PENTTBOM arrestees were charged with immigration violations at the behest of the FBI because agents thought they might be associated with terrorism... [but] almost every one was either deported or released within a few months.’ Only a small percentage of the 1,200 are thought to have even been processed through the federal criminal justice system.
   
   Preemptive incarceration
   From time to time, certain people in the US also find themselves tossed into special kinds of detention facilities. For example, during the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York City, protesters (and also bystanders) swept up in indiscriminate mass arrests or illegal acts of preemptive incarceration were temporarily locked up in ‘Marine and Aviation Pier 57,’ a filthy facility of razor-wire topped chain-link cages that was soon dubbed ‘Guantanamo on the Hudson.’ While being imprisoned in New York City’s own Gitmo didn’t begin to compare to being tossed in the real McCoy or any other secret offshore site, there was one striking similarity. US intelligence officials estimated that 70-90% of prisoners detained in Iraq ‘had been arrested by mistake.’ That was also 2004. The next year, it was revealed that, of the large majority of RNC arrest cases that had run their course, 91% of the arrests were dismissed or ended in acquittals.
   On the American prison planet, not only has the principle of habeas corpus been formally abolished and torture proudly added to the mix, but that crucial tenet of the legal system, the presumption of innocence, has been cast aside. Whether at home or abroad, the solution for US security forces is a simple one, identify the likely suspects, conduct sweeps, and preemptively lock them up.
   
   Concentration camp, USA?
   According to recent statements by the Department Homeland Security ‘s Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, some time in the future undocumented economic migrants may be imprisoned on ‘old cruise ships.’ Other illegals may even find themselves in a KBR concentration camp.
   Earlier this year, news broke that Halliburton subsidiary, KBR –– the firm infamous for building prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay and for scandals stemming from work in the Iraq war zone –– received a $385 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to build detention centres, according to the New York Times, ‘for an unexpected influx of immigrants’ or ‘new programmes that require additional detention space.’ For anyone who remembers the First World War-era proposal by four state governors to imprison members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for the duration of the conflict, or the 1939 Hobbs (‘Concentration Camp’) Bill that sought the detention of aliens, or the forcible relocation and imprisonment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the 1950 McCarran Act’s provisions for setting up concentration camps for subversives, or the Vietnam-era plans to round up and jail radicals in the event of a national emergency and conduct mass detentions in the face of possible urban insurrections, the announcement may have seemed less than startling. But thought of in the context of prison-planet planning, it nonetheless strikes an ominous note indeed.
   One Vietnam-era radical, former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg, grasped the implications immediately. ‘Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters,’ he said. ‘They’ve already done this on a smaller scale, with the ‘special registration’ detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo.’
   
   Fear of a prison planet
   In 2005, Irene Khan, Amnesty International’s general secretary, described Guantanamo Bay as ‘the gulag of our time.’ But the American gulag is so much more than Guantanamo and so much worse. The combination of US ‘homeland’ prisons, where ‘one in 140 Americans, or as many people as live in Namibia, or nearly five Luxembourgs’ are locked away, the offshore imperial detention facilities, the shadowy CIA black sites, and the ever-shifting outsourced detention facilities operated by other nations adds up to something new in history –– the makings of a veritable American prison planet.
   TomDispatch.com, November 2, 2006. Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com.

The most corrupt? Not anymore!

If one has three nails in his shoes pricking his feet, it matters little if he is making a world record with three nails or someone else is making a record with four nails. To reduce pain one needs to flatten the nails. When and if all the nails are flattened it matters little if one is champion or not. It is needless to judge the level of comfort. So is with corruption in Bangladesh. The position is only an indicator that the corruption is pricking everywhere. Unless someone takes a vow to flatten them one by one, it is needless to count. The gap between the rich and the poor will continue to rise.
   Akhter Ahmed
   On e-mail
   

Darrel Hair should have been sacked a long ago, it took too long to take a simple decision as it was Hair who in fact created the mess with the Pakistan team and only he is to blame for it.
   Nasir
   On e-mail

I bet Zidane will never get such a warm reception anywhere else in the world like here in Bangladesh. Welcome Zidane!
   Aftab Rahman
   Queen Mary University of London

The verdict is creating more hatred against the coalition forces and the leaders of the coalition countries. Most of the ruling leaders have killed more people than Saddam. The ‘big butchers’ should be tried and hanged before hanging a small fish like Saddam.
   Addul Toiob
   Dhaka
   

Next on Quick Comments

a. Democrats seize control of House: The Democratic Party has won control of the House of Representatives in the US mid-term elections (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/americas/6127216.stm). b. Khaleda comes down hard on advisers: Warns of tit-for-tat agitations (New Age, Front Page, November 8) c. Hasina hints at indefinite blockade (New Age, Front Page, November 8)