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BARACK Obama’s greatest debut was not in Berlin before the US presidential elections, nor was it in London at the G20 summit after his victory in the elections. It was at Port au Prince in Trinidad at the summit of Americas. Here he stood with eleven Afro-Caribbean heads of state showing that change has come to the Americas, The people of Afro-West Indies have the same root as Black America has. But they were separated and divided creating mini states. They are the worst-affected poor states whose citizens always try to smuggle themselves into the United States.
   Obama standing with the heads of those eleven ‘micro-states’ was more significant than his dramatic overture to Hugo Chavez, another prophet of change. Latin America in general has welcomed Obama’s stand of change towards Cuba. But it was Anglo-America that welcomed his historic initiative against poverty and suffering of the underdeveloped regions of Americas. He wanted to include them in the global stimulus plan.
   It is said the poor are the worst enemies of the poor and the poor are the greatest enemies of the poor that led to the self-elimination of the black people in the US. In fact, more black people were taken into the US in the flow of slave trade than free white immigrants from Europe. In 1850s in some part of the US there were more black people than whites. This demographic factor led to anti-slavery forces under Abraham Lincoln to their epoch victory in the American civil war. Many among the oppressed in the US see Obama as the present-day Lincoln. That gave him the historic victory in the presidential elections. Demographically black and coloured people in the United States are rebounding. Their commanding position in the major American states made the Obama victory possible.
   Class struggle and ethnic struggle are interconnected. That is a historic reality. Here the poor and the weak, in order to survive, turn to the strong and rich. In the process they defend the interests of the strong and rich against their fellow poor and weak. But his circle comes to an end when the rich and strong erode their power in the course of events in history. Here the poor unite because they have nothing to lose. That is what Maurice Bishop, immortal leader of the Afro-Caribbean and martyred prime minister of Grenada, had asserted.
   But his forces could not face the mighty armada of the United States. But there came in Port Au Prince an American president, a black president came to tell them that the time of disunity is over. A great dawn has knocked.
   Most of the black Afro-Caribbean states were former British colonies. The French territories of Guadeloupe and Martinique are part of Metropolitan France so they were not represented. Someone joked that if Mr Sarkozy, another prophet of change, was invited there could be a historic troika of CHavez, Obama and Sarkozy. The Dutch West Indies were not represented. Today Holland is a great scene of European race politics. Abumuttalib, a Muslim and Arab, has been elected the mayor of Rotterdam, Europe’s biggest port city. Many hopes or fears that he could turn into a European Obama.
   Obviously, power relation in the world is not so simple. Mr Obama cannot make change overnight, even if he wants to. A constitutional democracy has many bindings. They have got together in many centuries of developments and value systems of both positive and negative dimension.
   One cannot ignore that first gigantic revolutions in Americas was the American war of independence. Before that there had been skirmishes between the slave traders and slaves, between the indigenous people and the colonialists. But nothing had taken a successful shape as the American war of independence in establishing a new form of state, a democracy.
   But the blacks and indigenous people were not given participation in it. That is how we get the working of correlational forces. Nothing is given free.
   The journey of Obama is not an end in itself. The American war of independence is a two-century-old saga. To many the greatest event in the Americas in the last century was the Cuban Revolution. And Cuba has single-handedly faced America for the last half a century.
   The Afro-Caribbean leaders have good relations with Cuba. Obama has promised he will open a new chapter. But most important is his promise of equal partnership and, we hope, with that door of prosperity to the US’s immediate neighbours. Though we are far away, we cannot stop to acclaim it.

THE reverberations of the Israeli war on Gaza are still felt throughout the Middle East. One could in fact speak of a silent war being waged in the region.
   Now that Israel’s clear intentions in Gaza – discrediting Hamas and ultimately ousting them from their democratically elected position – resulted in utter failure, Israelis are hoping to exploit regional conflicts to rein in Hamas and other such organisations through alternative means.
   In the past several years, Israel has suffered what may seem like insurmountable losses in their barrage of military conquests. In July and August of 2006, Israel unleashed its military fury against Lebanon for several weeks, with one major objective: to permanently ‘extract’ Hezbollah as a fighting force from South Lebanon and undermine it as a rising political movement capable of disrupting, if not overshadowing, the ‘friendly’ and ‘moderate’ political regime in Beirut.
   While the Lebanese suffered blows from which it may take years to recover, the Israeli war in South Lebanon was recognised largely as an astounding military failure, defeat even for Israel, as several thousand fairly ill-equipped Hezbollah fighters forced Israel’s multi-billion dollar military machine to retreat.
   While at the time, Hezbollah had strong backing by the poor and destitute population of Lebanon, including Palestinian refugees, support from official Lebanese institutions was, at best, lacking. But the war changed all of that. Today, Hezbollah is regarded by many as the guardians of Lebanon and enjoy an unprecedented level of moral and popular support.
   Israel repeated its costly mistake in Gaza late last year and earlier this year. True, Palestinians in the Strip haven’t suffered the human casualties of the recent Gaza massacre since 1948. Thousands lost their lives, limbs, homes, entire families, entire neighbourhoods. Concurrently, Israel and her backers were convinced that such vicious blows would certainly press a desperate population to turn on their elected government, whom Israel and the US claimed, got them into this mess in the first place.
   And what a painful lesson it was. One would think that after 60 years of constant interaction with the Palestinian people, Israel would know them better. By now on might think that their durability and integrity would have been taken into strong consideration before taking such rash actions. In spite of the overwhelming death toll resulting from Israel’s butchery, Hamas garnered even stronger support and loyalty from the people of Gaza, but more, from Palestinians everywhere, the Arab and Muslim world, indeed from many places throughout the world that could no longer remain silent. Words of encouragement, admiration and backing echoed from Latin America to South Africa to even the United States itself.
   But Israel and its allies are changing tactics. And they are getting a lot of help from their neighbours. This time, they are concentrating their efforts outside of these strongholds of resistance, and going after Hezbollah and Hamas members from remote positions. Out of the blue, this week the news was inundated with reports of ‘spies’ being apprehended in various Arab countries and other tales.
   On April 10, agencies reported that Egyptian security forces had detained 15 people over accusations that they had helped in smuggling rockets into the Gaza Strip via border tunnels, security sources claimed.
   On April 12, Palestinian security officials claimed that they had uncovered a bomb-making factory underneath a mosque in the West Bank. An interior minister claimed, ‘Many of the bombs were ready to use and many of them were of industrial grade.’
   The same day, it was reported that an Egyptian man was caught and apprehended in Sinai who was smuggling $2 million to the Hamas leadership in Gaza.
   On April 13, Israeli news interviewed Shimon Peres, who commended Egypt’s efforts at apprehending individuals active in the Iran-backed Hezbollah infrastructure in Egypt. Peres was quoted as saying, ‘Sooner or later, the world will realise that Iran wishes to take over the Middle East, and that it has colonial ambitions.’
   Imagine that; such comments coming from a leader of a nation who up until this point, refuses to define its borders with designs on swallowing up all of historic Palestine. Colonial ambitions indeed.
   The following day, on April 14, Egyptian officials accused Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah of fomenting sedition and state media branded him an ‘Iranian agent’.
   One has to wonder if these sudden discoveries are related to attempts aimed at undermining various Islamic opposition groups in the region. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement, for example, is already on the defensive, trying to shield itself from what is considered Iran-Hezbollah’s designs to ‘destabilise’ Egypt. Speaking to Al Jazeera, Abdul Munaim Abu al-Futuh, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood group’s guidance bureau stated, ‘We have no relations with any of those (arrested).’ One can only expect the situation to worsen, and could only hope such regime-induced panic doesn’t destroy the small semblance of democracy that these nations still possess.
   In Jordan, similar discoveries are also being made, Hamas members sentenced, others apprehended.
   The timing of these crackdowns, the nature of the accusations and the war of words that ensued as a result makes one question the nature of these arrests, whether they are genuine security measures, or political dealings, a new symptom of the ongoing cold war in the region.
   Following the war in Gaza, and earlier in Lebanon, the Middle East’s new conflict has been that of defining the new discourse which will ultimately dominate the region’s politics: that of resistance or ‘moderation’.
   The US, Israel and their ‘moderate’ allies in the region have clearly drawn lines in the sand, a notion that when reviewing recent developments simply cannot be denied.
   ZNet, April 25. Ramzy Baroud is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com.

Govt won’t tolerate disorder
over Khaleda house issue

Good, no mercy please! People want no trouble. All they want are water, electricity, gas and the BDR investigative report.
   Ask them to use candles for lights and fire-wood for cooking and finish their things during the day and sleep after dark.
   Do not let the BNP to use ‘new-clear weapons’ (I mean, year-round lagatar hartal and aborodh) against the Awami League Government.
   Amazing Bangladesh!!
   Mohammad Gani
   USA

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