Author: mopress

By Greg Moses

IndyMedia Austin / CounterPunch

With the storefront door opened to crisp air and curious people, Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo is for now seated near friends who ask for an autograph of her 2001 book, ‘Histories and Stories from Chiapas.’ Turning back the cover, she points to a full-page photo of a white stelae, explaining how borders are marked the traditional way, not with walls.

“It’s a symbolic border,” she smiles, showing how the marker sits upon an island in the middle of a lake. From her position not quite in the center of a gathering crowd at MonkeyWrench Books in Austin, Texas, the legendary anthropologist is glowing with words, ideas, projects, and stories. It is time, says an organizer, to get the program started.

In her latest collaboration, ‘Dissident Women,’ published the week before Thanksgiving, Hernández is one of several editors and writers who offer fresh studies about the ongoing indigenous women’s revolutions of Southern Mexico, including a first-time-in-English publication of the 1994 Mayan document, ‘Women’s Rights in our Traditions and Customs.’

As co-editor Shannon Speed explains to Monday night’s tightly-packed audience, the women of Southern Mexico are working out terms of struggle that allow them to organize within “cultural spaces” connected to indigenous traditions, even as they assert their rights to reform those traditions.

“It is better that we women put down on paper that there are some customs that do not respect us and we want them changed,” reads the Mayan document of 1994. “Violence—battering and rape—is not right. We don’t want to be traded for money.”

Yet, as Mayan women make frank complaints against patriarchy at home, they insist equally that “we don’t want a paternalistic state coming in to handle this for us,” says Speed. The words provoke memories of rapes and beatings committed by police this past May, in an assault upon indigenous flower merchants; an attack that Hernández has described as “some of the saddest and most violent days in the modern history of San Salvador Atenco, on the outskirts of the Mexico City megalopolis.”

Hearing these words from the Mexican states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, or Tlaxcala, my mind leaps to Afghanistan and Iraq, where steel-tipped outbursts of masculine temper have been propagandized as women’s liberation. Compared to the knowledge that Hernández and Speed bring from Southern Mexico, what do we yet know about all those women who now live under our bombs?

Against the deafening violence of gluttonous states, indigenous women of the Americas continue their 500-year struggle for cultural sovereignty. The gathering of Mayan women who produced ‘Women’s Rights in our Traditions and Customs’ was prompted in part by a government official who one day informed Hernández that indigenous women are not interested in politics. Likewise, among academic officials, prevailing attitudes assume that indigenous women don’t really think.

“We are tired of seeing indigenous women reserved for the appendix of scholarly books,” explains Hernández, to an audience that sits at the margins of the University of Texas community. “Indigenous women also struggle with theoretical issues.” Although scholars will use narratives of ‘native peoples’ for source materials, any ‘theory’ to be heard from those voices will likely be dis-credited. And to tell the truth about it, attitudes about ‘women’s knowledge’ can infect the women themselves.

Doctoral candidate Melissa M Forbis, tonight’s third and last speaker, has been working for a decade in Southern Mexico, “because what I was reading about Chiapas didn’t match what I was experiencing.” She helps us to remember that health care was one issue that provoked the Zapatista uprising. The indigenous peoples of Chiapas were dying in high numbers from curable diseases, and women were dying at high rates from childbirth. So one of the first tasks facing the indigenous movement was recovery of their own health. That recovery required theory and knowledge.

On the road to their own definition of health, the women of Chiapas worked collectively to recover their knowledge of indigenous herbs, and to remember themselves as the healers who had given care to their communities for tens of thousands of years. To do this, they shook off 500 years of persecution as ‘brujos’ or witches. And against proximate threats of violence, they traveled in pairs. Yet again, they re-became ‘promotoras de salud’–promoters of health.

“Health is the well-being of the people and the individual, who have the capacity and motivation for all types of activities whether social or political,” declared the Zapatista community Moisés Gandhi in 1997. “Health is living without humiliation; being able to develop ourselves as women and men; it is being able to struggle for a new country where the poor and particularly the indigenous peoples can make decisions autonomously. Poverty, militarization and war destroy health.”

Surely on Thanksgiving Day, these are words any true pilgrim would be thankful to digest.

Note: Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas. Edited by Shannon Speed, R. Aída Hernández Castillo, and Lynn M. Stephen. Book Fourteen in the Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series: Books about women and families, and their changing role in society. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / DissidentVoice / FFFEmailUpdate

The principle of habeas corpus is a demand that free people make toward state power. If free people are going to respect a state’s power to lock people up, then that state must respect a free people’s demand to see the causes and the evidence for any arrest.

So it is chilling to read the section on Habeas Corpus Matters included in the recently passed Military Commissions Act of 2006:

“No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.”

What this section says is that in the eyes of the United States, aliens are not to be granted the rights of a free people. And this makes the United States a threat to free people everywhere.

There are so-called conservatives who say that the United States does not owe the right of habeas corpus to aliens. They argue that habeas corpus is a Constitutional Right and therefore a right that belongs exclusively to the people of the United States.

But the right of habeas corpus was not invented by the United States Constitution, and it cannot be trademarked as territorial property, made by, or exclusively for citizens of the USA. The Right of habeas corpus was written into the United States Constitution because it was already in the 18^th Century a time-honored principle for free people anywhere.

A state that revokes its own obligations to habeas corpus is a state that declares itself infallible. And an infallible state is either exceptionally wise or exceptionally dangerous. But if the American people believe that their leadership is exceptionally wise, shouldn’t they revoke habeas corpus for themselves, first?

It’s scandalous enough that Congress would revoke habeas corpus, but when Congress does it just a month before it goes up for re-election, the timing suggests that we have become a nation of vicious people who would cheer the unfreedom of others in the name of freedom for ourselves.

In the Military Commissions Act of 2006 we find a mirror to show us what we have become in the name of the twin towers massacre of Sept. 11. Just a little ways down the page from the sentence that revokes habeas corpus for alien enemy combatants is another sentence that makes the new rules retroactive to Sept. 11, 2001.

But I hear some listeners asking: what’s wrong with locking up a terrorist and throwing away the key? To which I answer, maybe nothing. But when a state gets to declare in advance who the terrorist is and never is obliged to respect that person’s rights to due process, then we have made a state which can declare its own infallibility. And what free people can applaud the idea of an infallible state that can lock people up and throw away the key.

In our coming electoral response to the Congress of the United States we will choose between those who voted for an infallible state and those who voted against it. And in our choices at the ballot box, we will tell the rest of the world whether the people of the United States stand with them or against them when it comes to supporting the traditions of free people wherever they happen to be born.

[Written for Touchstone Radio – scheduled air date Oct. 12]

By Susan Van Haitsma 

On Friday, September 15, the film, “The Ground Truth,” opened in selected cities around the country, including Austin. The riveting documentary directed by Patricia Foulkrod is scheduled to run for one week at the Dobie Theatre. The film gives voice to young veterans of the Iraq war, who speak candidly about the successive phases of their military experience: recruitment, basic training, combat, re-entry into civilian society, physical and psychological war injuries and the consequent realization that their country is unprepared for the levels of support they really need. Yellow car magnets and heroes’ welcomes don’t cut it.

“The Ground Truth” is rated “R for disturbing violent content, and language,” according to its listing in the Austin American-Statesman. Most of the disturbing violent content and language is contained in footage from basic training and from the Iraq war. Drill instructors are shown dehumanizing recruits as part of the process of training them to dehumanize the adversary. Rare video footage from Iraq, accompanied by first-hand accounts from soldiers featured in the film, reveal the ways their training to “Kill, kill” leads them to target Iraqi civilians.

A film review of “The Ground Truth” in the Austin Chronicle includes the reviewer’s suggestion, “It would be a good idea to show Foulkrod’s movie nationwide on high school career days.” As it happened, I attended a local high school career fair the evening before the film opened. Counseling staff at the school had invited Nonmilitary Options for Youth to participate with a literature table along with the many college and occupational trade representatives who were present. My colleague and I set up our table near the Army and Marine recruiters who came with their chin-up bar and give-away items.

One of the points made by the veterans interviewed in “The Ground Truth” (including a former Marine recruiter) is that recruiters do not tend to use the word “kill” when they talk to young people about enlistment. The military recruiters I observed at the career fair encouraged students under age 18 to display their physical strength on the chin-up bar and to fill out cards with their contact information. The students weren’t told that the primary purpose of the military is to harness their youthful energy for killing.

Materials at our Nonmilitary Options table did address killing and the human costs of war. We invited students to consider signing cards that read in bold letters, “I Will Not Kill.” The postcards are part of a youth-organized campaign sponsored by the international organization, Fellowship of Reconciliation. The ‘I Will Not Kill’ campaign (www.iwillnotkill.org) gives young people a way to document their beliefs about killing in war, not only in case of a draft, but to encourage them to explore their own moral values as they enter adulthood.

If “The Ground Truth” could have been shown as part of that high school career night, the truths offered by the young veterans in the film would have done much more than we could at our table to inform and enlighten both students and recruiters about the realities of enlistment. Unfortunately, the film is not likely to be shown in the school, partly because of its ‘R’ rating, which is due precisely to the film’s candid revelation of the disturbing violence and language that is required to make students into soldiers.

Included in AISD school regulations is the following statement: “Students shall be informed that physical violence and threats of physical violence as a means of addressing interpersonal conflict and discipline or control are inappropriate and destructive.” At the same time, military recruitment in schools means that students are sought to join an institution that relies on physical violence and threats of violence as a means of addressing conflict, discipline and control. If military training and combat is described accurately, those descriptions may be considered too violent for minors to access, yet access to minors is what military recruitment is all about. Such layers of cognitive dissonance become part of the soldier’s psychological burden described so honestly by the young veterans in the film.

Students are deceived if ground truths about military training, war and inadequate veteran care are withheld from them. And if images of real war are inappropriate to display to young people, then it is inappropriate to recruit young people to fight. The veterans who speak in “The Ground Truth,” several of whom are only a few years out of high school themselves, have undertaken a truth-telling mission. Supporting the troops means listening to what they have to say.

Van Haitsma is active with Nonmilitary Options for Youth and can be reached at jeffjweb@sbcglobal.net

By Susan Van Haitsma

Austin American-Statesman / DissidentVoice / CommonDreams

Freedom. It’s the word used over and over by George W. Bush to defend military offensives initiated by his administration. Freedom, he says, is being protected and expanded through the sacrifices of US soldiers ordered into Iraq and Afghanistan.

First Amendment rights to speak, assemble, publish, practice religion and petition the government are essential freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution soldiers swear to defend. But are soldiers themselves accorded the rights they are ordered to protect? Is it possible for First Amendment freedoms to be advanced by an institution that suppresses those freedoms?

On June 7, 2006, 3-year Army officer, Lt. Ehren Watada, stationed at Ft. Lewis, WA spoke publicly in opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq and declared his intent to refuse orders to deploy. After careful study of the events leading to the invasion and reports of the ways the occupation has been conducted in light of US Constitutional and international law, Lt. Watada reached a conclusion shared by many, perhaps most of his fellow Americans.

Lt. Watada stated, “The war in Iraq violates our democratic system of checks and balances. It usurps international treaties and conventions that by virtue of the Constitution become American law. The wholesale slaughter and mistreatment of the Iraqi people with only limited accountability is not only a terrible moral injustice, but a contradiction to the Army’s own Law of Land Warfare. My participation would make me party to war crimes… My oath of office is to protect and defend America’s laws and its people. By refusing unlawful orders for an illegal war, I fulfill that oath today.”

On June 22, Lt. Watada refused orders to deploy with his unit to Iraq. On July 5, he was formally charged with three articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), including charges of missing movement and of “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman” and using “contemptuous words” toward officials, specifically President Bush. The words used by Watada, “our government led us into war based on misrepresentations and lies,” echo the sentiments of millions of people in the US. The charges against Watada represent the first known prosecution since 1965 of UCMJ Article 88 regarding contempt of superior officers. Lt. Watada’s lawyer, Eric Seitz, said, “We expected the missing movement charge, but we are somewhat astounded by the ‘contempt’ and ‘conduct unbecoming’ charges. These additional charges open up the substance of Lt. Watada’s statements for review and raise important First Amendment issues.”

A pre-trial hearing of Lt. Watada’s case is scheduled for August 17. Watada does not consider himself a Conscientious Objector to all war, but he takes seriously his obligation to abide by the Nuremberg Principles, international law ratified by the US following WWII.

The fourth article of the Nuremberg Principles states, “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” Punishable as crimes under international law are the following:

Crimes Against Peace, including “waging a war of aggression.”

War Crimes, including “ill treatment of prisoners of war, plunder of public or private property and wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.”

Crimes Against Humanity, including “murder and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population.”

Do we want soldiers to follow orders without question, or do we want them to think critically about their actions? Why are some soldiers punished for committing atrocities during war at the same time that other soldiers are punished for resisting orders to participate in a war known for its atrocities? Lt. Watada joins a growing number of soldiers whose moral convictions are leading to punitive convictions in military courts. Many soldiers who have sought Conscientious Objector status have been denied. Thousands of soldiers have gone AWOL as a result of the formidable legal blocks to establishing moral objections to the Iraq war. Many have sought refuge in Canada, though political asylum for US military war resisters is not official there.

Freedoms are protected and expanded, not through war, as President Bush would have us believe, but through the courageous moral choices being made by young war resisters like Lt. Ehren Watada. By practicing First Amendment freedoms of speech, press and conscience, they are shouldering the responsibilities being shirked by their elders to bring international and US law to bear on the war in Iraq.

Van Haitsma is active with Nonmilitary Options for Youth in Austin, Texas. She can be reached at jeffjweb@sbcglobal.net