Rich nations are discriminating against Africa

Here comes a news brief from the AP so important it made the tiny font, "News in Brief," section on page 4 of the May 12, 2005 Boston Metro (page 2 featured an article about Macaulay Culkin taking the stand in the Michael Jackson trial with large headline): Rich nations are discriminating against Africa on desperately needed aid for humanitarian crises, resulting in meager food rations for thousands of people, no food for others and many deaths, the U.N. humanitarian chief said. Jan Egeland told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that donors are more generous if humanitarian crises happen in Europe or the Middle East than in Africa, where all the major humanitarian challenges are located and the need is the greatest.

Bush people happy with situation in Iraq? U.S. out of Afghanistan now?

Jim Ingalls notes that in Afghanistan, "If the US weakened the warlords, they’d be precipitating their own departure. I can guarantee that, if there wasn’t the warlord problem a lot fewer Afghans would support the US presence."

Ingalls's post and dialogue with Rahul Mahajan is well worth reading for Americans concerned with the proper position to take as activists in relation to our presence in Afghanistan. Based on Ingalls, it appears that calling for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country would be counter to the wishes of everyone but the warlords and reactionaries. Rather we should be supporting "the secular anti-fundamentalist democratic alternative in Afghanistan," calling for an end to U.S. support of warlords and demanding immediate and thorough implementation of their disarmament, and promoting a process of justice and reconciliation. I might add that we should also emphasize the right of Afghans to reject U.S. troop presence in favor of something less partisan like multinational troops under U.N. auspices.

On the matter of specific ways to support progressive forces in Afghanistan, RAWA lists some of their needs here and here.

Also, the Defence Committee for Malalai Joya (referring to the young female parliamentary member who spoke out against the warlords in the Loya Jirga of December 2003) that Ingalls links to asks people to express their concern for the security of Joya and her family to the following groups:

United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA)
Mr. Manoel de Almeida e Silva
Spokesman/Director of Office of Communication and Public Information
Tel. (+39-0831) 24 6123
Mobile: (+93-70) 282 168
Fax: (+39-0831) 24 6069 AND (+1-212) 963 2669
Email: spokesman-unama@un.org
Mail address: UNAMA, OCPI, PO Box 1428, Islamabad, Pakistan

ISAF (International Security Assistance Force)
Army Club, opposite Ministry of Civil Aviation, Kabul
E-mail: isafcimic@hotmail.com

Constitution Commission
Fax. 0093-20-210267
E-mail: asasiqanoon@hotmail.com

Something similar may be going on in our current target of the Orwellian War on Terror. I haven't seen anyone else suggest this so perhaps I'm going out on a limb with this but it seems to me that some of the arrogance and incompetence that seem so apparent in the way the Bush Administration is handling the occupation of Iraq could, in part, be calculated and intentional. The failure to spend reconstruction money, the horrific violence that characterizes daily life in Iraq, and the use of ethnically based militias all provide rational for the continuation of a U.S. presence in the country. The Sistani-led portions of the Shi'a seem to find the U.S. necessary to preserve their power in government. The downside for Bush is that U.S. troops dying makes for bad press but with the media apparently devoting less attention to Iraq these days and the shift towards keeping troops hunkered down in their bases more, these problems seem manageable. Worse for Bush is that the military has been tied down in Iraq ever since the invasion, limiting the administration's freedom to act elsewhere.

KBR employee benefits (or lack thereof)

It's not exactly surprising to learn that Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, can treat its Iraqi employees shabbily but Dahr Jamail's recent post about the experience of Ahlam Abt Al-Hassan carries particular poignancy. Young and in need of work to support her relatives she was a KBR employee for under 3 months when she was shot and blinded by a member of al-Sadr's Mehdi Army for being a collaborator. KBR made virtually no effort to contact her and provided her with no support of any kind despite having assured her that it was safe to come to work. Full story here.