US imperialism
Afghanistan: Women bear the brunt under the US jackboot
By Farooq Sulehria
Russia-Georgia: Behind the war on South Ossetia
By Tony Iltis
August 16, 2008 -- On August 7, after a week of border clashes, Georgia's pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili launched a military attack against South Ossetia.
South Ossetia, while internationally recognised as part of Georgia, has been predominantly under the control of a pro-independence administration since Georgia separated from the former Soviet Union in 1991. Since a 1992 ceasefire, the South Ossetian statelet has been protected by Russian peacekeepers.
Within 24 hours, Georgian troops had taken the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, after destroying much of it with artillary. More than 30,000 refugees (out of a population of 70,000) fled across the border to the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania, which is part of the Russian Federation.
Using this, and the killing of 20 Russian peacekeepers, as pretexts, Russia intervened in full force: bombing targets throughout Georgia, driving the Georgians out of South Ossetia (including territory not previously held by the South Ossetian administration) and crossing into Georgia-proper to take the town of Gori.
Boris Kagarlitsky on the Russia-Georgia conflict
Bad habits are contagious
By Boris Kagarlitsky
August 14, 2008 -- Georgia has resolutely condemned Russia's actions in Chechnya. Russia has severely criticised NATO actions towards Serbia. Later on the Georgian authorities tried to do the same thing in South Ossetia as the Russian authorities had done in Chechnya. Moscow decided to treat Georgia in the same way as NATO had treated Serbia. Bad habits are contagious.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Worst single terror attacks in history
By Norm Dixon
August 6 and August 9 2009 mark the 64th anniversaries of the US atomic-bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima, an estimated 80,000 people were killed in a split second. Some 13 square kilometres of the city were obliterated. By December, at least another 70,000 people had died from radiation and injuries.
Three days after Hiroshima's destruction, the US dropped an A-bomb on Nagasaki, resulting in the deaths of at least 70,000 people before the year was out.
Since 1945, tens of thousands more residents of the two cities have continued to suffer and die from radiation-induced cancers, birth defects and still births.
A tiny group of US rulers met secretly in Washington and callously ordered this indiscriminate annihilation of civilian populations. They gave no explicit warnings. They rejected all alternatives, preferring to inflict the most extreme human carnage possible. They ordered and had carried out the two worst single terror acts in human history.
Serbia: The war criminal Karadzic and Western hypocrisy
By Michael Karadjis
August 2, 2008 (updated October 11, 2008) -- The new Serbian government last month finally cornered Radovan Karadzic, the former leader of the Bosnian Serb Republic (Republika Srpska), one of the two entities which make up Bosnia, during the war in 1992-5 when that statelet was created. Karadzic had been in hiding for many years from the International War Crimes Tribunal in, which in 1995 had indicted him for various war crimes including genocide.
The July 21 arrest led to a wave of hypocrisy in Western capitals, congratulating Serbia on the arrest of the vile criminal. Yet for the last seven years in Afghanistan and five years in Iraq, well upwards of a million people have been killed as a result of the US invasion and occupation of these countries. Whole countries are being destroyed; yet not only do these war crimes of climactic scale go unpunished, but these leading war criminals then see themselves as having the right to designate who is a war criminal.
SUDAN: US rolls out red carpet for Darfur's executioner
Norm Dixon
Revelations of a covert rendezvous in Washington between top CIA officials and the head of Sudan’s secret police have starkly exposed just how hollow and hypocritical are the US administration’s expressions of concern for the plight of millions of Darfuri peasants, who have been systematically targeted by Sudan’s rulers in a vicious 26-month-long campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder.
Ken Silverstein, writing in the April 29 Los Angeles Times, reported that US government officials revealed to him that, in the previous week, “the CIA sent an executive jet ... to ferry the chief of Sudan’s intelligence agency [General Salah Abdallah Gosh] to Washington for secret meetings sealing Khartoum’s sensitive and previously veiled partnership with the administration”.
Latin America's struggle for integration and independence
Caracas, July 26, 2008 -- Commenting on how much the two had in common — same age, three children, similar music tastes — Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa said to Mexican President Felipe Calderon on April 11 that “perhaps we represent the new generation of leaders in Latin America”. He added, however, that one difference still remained: Calderon had still not become a socialist. “Being right wing is out of fashion in Latin America … Join us, you are always welcome.”
The election of Fernando Lugo as Paraguayan president seems to confirm the idea of a new fashion for presidents. The former priest joins the ranks of current Latin American presidents that includes two women (Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in Argentina and Michelle Bachelet in Chile), an indigenous person (Evo Morales in Bolivia), a former militant trade unionist (Lula da Silva in Brazil), a radically minded economist (Rafael Correa in Ecuador), a doctor (Tabare Vasquez in Uruguay), a former guerrilla fighter (Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua) and a former rebel soldier (Hugo Chavez in Venezuela).
July 19, 1979: Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution remembered -- Video by John Pilger
On July 19, 1979, the Nicaraguan people led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrew the brutal US-backed dictator Somoza.
Mauritius: Britain cites Lalit's support for Chagossians to oppose their return
July 16, 2008 -- According to attorney-at-law Robin Mardemootoo, who represented the Chagos Refugee Group at the House of Lords Judicial Committee, which acts as the ultimate court of appeal in London, last week, the Mauritian revolutionary organisation Lalit was referred to during one hour of pleadings by the UK government legal representative Jonathan Crow, QC. There are not official transcripts of this kind of hearing.
Palestine in the Middle East: Opposing neoliberalism and US power
July 15, 2008 – Over the last six months, the Palestinian economy has been radically transformed under a new plan drawn up by the Palestinian Authority (PA) called the Pa
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