London Progressive Journal

The last couple of weeks have seen two huge disasters strike in Asia, one in Myanmar and one in China. Such disasters are unfortunately impossible to prevent, though the reaction to them can determine to a great extent how many people may survive. No matter what form of government any country has, its first duty must always be to protect the people it governs. Much has been said about the woefully inadequate reaction of the Myanmar government in its response to the cyclone aftermath there. Tragically, ten days after this disaster, an even greater tragedy struck Sichuan Province in Southwest China in the form of a 7.8 (according to the Chinese) or 7.9 (according to the US) magnitude earthquake. The response to this tragedy has further highlighted not only the derisory and callous attitude of the government of Myanmar towards the cyclone’s aftermath, but their total lack of legitimacy to govern the country.

Many in the West may view the two governments as being rather similar, especially as the recent nemesis of both seems to have been disgruntled monks. Most in the West would place these two nations firmly in the “bad” camp in their minds. However in reality, things are never so black and white. The reaction is so different that it is hard to believe that Cyclone Nargis actually occurred ten days before the earthquake, as the Burmese seem to be so far behind the Chinese in their response even now.

In Myanmar, there are still people who have not been reached, and there are currently roadblocks in place to actively prevent people being reached. Many aid workers have not been allowed beyond the limits of whatever city they are in, if they have been able to get in at all. By contrast the Chinese sent soldiers marching through the night, and dropped in others by air to Pingwu, Mao and Wenchuan when the weather finally permitted it, to reach everyone as soon as humanly possible. Fifty-thousand are now in the area directing operations.

In Myanmar much of the aid was initially refused, the government insisted first that tariffs be paid on it, then that it be handed over to them directly. When planes did finally arrive, the authorities seized them. This prompted a suspension of aid flights, which resumed after that aid was finally released for distribution after further delays, with people dying all the time. The aid now had labels on indicating that it was coming from the ruling generals. In China, the government have accepted help, though it is unclear how much is needed, and logistics are the main problem for getting in aid – local airports can only take in so many flights, and roads have to first be cleared. Some countries can be reluctant to accept help – the United States turned down offers of help from Cuba when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans - but the Chinese have even accepted help from a prominent Taiwanese Buddhist organisation, the Tzu Chi Foundation.

In Myanmar the media has been showing the military and generals hand out the little aid that they have allowed in, in an attmpet to dupe the very people their policies are killing. The authorities expended much energy hunting down CNN reporter Dan Rivers, who had sneaked in to film riverbanks littered with rotting human and animal corpses, still untouched a full week after the cyclone. No effort had been made to remove the bodies or reach the desperate villagers that he came across, but they did find enough time and resources to pursue him, and he was lucky to get out. China’s media is also tightly controlled and is focusing on the government’s positive attempts to alleviate the situation, but they have been showing live, uncensored, around-the-clock rescue efforts and allowed in news organisations from around the world to do the same and report what they like.

The government of Myanmar has continued to export rice to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka from the Thilawa container port, only bothering to distribute to its people the rice there that was spoilt by the storm. It has also informed 2,000 refugees sheltering in a school in Hlaing Tha Yar, near the capital Yangon, that they will soon be evicted as the school is to be a polling station in their sham referendum. The referendum has been delayed in this region due to the cyclone, although the government has already claimed victory, with 92% nationwide approval.

People have talked about how the Burmese need more help than the Chinese as they don’t have the resources to help themselves. The fact is, however, that they haven't even tried to help their own people. They have the second largest army in Southeast Asia, after Vietnam. It has doubled in size since 1989 and is the best funded and equipped organisation in the country. By some estimates it gets a massive 40% of the national budget. It has not been widely deployed to help people, to provide shelter or food, instead being send to guard polling stations for the sham referendum.

The current situation in Myanmar is in fact reminiscent of the 20th century’s deadliest natural disaster, the Tangshan Earthquake in China in 1976. Back then, the Chinese refused any outside help despite being under-equipped, fearing interference as the Cultural Revolution neared its end, and the ultra-radical Gang of Four were more concerned with stopping Deng Xiaoping. Jiang Qing, Mao’s last wife, summed up their attitude when she said “There were merely several hundred thousand deaths. So what? Denouncing Deng Xiaoping concerns 800 million people.”

Fortunately for the Chinese victims of this earthquake, their government has changed somewhat since those days and Carl Maukler, head of Red Cross operations in the area, has praised the reaction and “excellent co-operation” his organisation has received. By contrast Pierre Fouillant, of Comité de Secours Internationaux, has said of the Myanmar government’s response: "It's like they are taking a gun and shooting their own people."

To have one incident involving children locked up in a basement may be regarded as a misfortune, but to have two just seems like carelessness. Or evidence of a troubling undercurrent in Austrian society, depending on which newspaper you read. Indeed, some coverage has pointed to a national psyche that is fertile ground for these types of incidents, simmering under Austria’s elegant façade. So how are the Austrians interpreting the case of Josef Fritzl, who kidnapped his daughter 24 years ago an kept her in a soundproof basement, fathering seven children with her?

From outside Austria, people are quick to describe this as a uniquely ‘Austrian’ crime, attributed to a cultural failing that would cause and allow this type of thing to go on. Swiss papers have pointed to a culture of denial (which is a bit rich considering their banking policy,) Spain’s El Pais has described the case as “perversion and sickness becoming visible” and The Times labelled the country “indifferent.” Nigel Jones in the Daily Telegraph says “any foreigner who has lived there for any length of time will say there is something ‘odd’ about the Austrians”, which is a terrible generalisation to make. As someone who lived both in Austria (for 17 years) and Britain (for eight) I can write a list of ‘odd’ things about both countries, as well as any other I have visited.

And who are the “Austrians” who share this macabre cultural identity? The country has only been in its present form since the end of World War One, before which the empire stretched to Yugoslavia and beyond, with discrete regions defining themselves from each other. The capital, Vienna, is closer to Slovakian Bratislava than Germanic Salzburg. The current borders are like a (strangely-shaped) hoop that was allowed to fall at random on central Europe, gathering a disparate bunch of nations together and proclaiming them, for better or worse, countrymen. Look in an Austrian phone book and you will find just as many eastern European names like Vidlak and Mareschek as the German Schneider and Bauer. In a country that has so many sources of identity, it does not make sense to talk about a collective cultural psyche, if it ever does. It is equally unfair, tempting though it is, to say that all British people behave badly on holiday because they never got over losing the empire.

Culture of Blame

It would be inaccurate to state that it is only the “international” press that has pointed out the role Austria’s “shameful past” may have played a part in Fritzl’s psychosis - the Austrian press has dealt with it at length. Contrary to popular opinion, Austrians are all too aware of their country’s role in 20th century history. They are just as shocked and disgusted as anyone abroad as to how this could have happened and concede that certain “psychocultural” elements of their society may have played a role.

Fritzl has said he got a respect of control and authority from an upbringing under Nazi-controlled Austria. Yet he has also admitted to having incestuous fantasies about his mother. He is clearly a deeply disturbed individual whose issues manifested themselves early in his life, and while they were probably compounded by the anomic wartime society in which he spent his formative years, they are not solely to blame. Natascha Kampusch, the girl who escaped from her kidnapper in 2006, has also said, on Newsnight, that the wartime values that governed the parenting at the time of Fritzl’s boyhood may be partly to blame for this incident.

Blaming Fritzl’s psychoses on his own unfortunate circumstances is one thing, but it is destructive for media commentators to hijack his mention of the Nazis as a piece of evidence that an entire country is inextricably tied to a shameful past which accounts for a population’s collective ills. Using Austria’s historical ties with Nazism as symptomatic of a troubled society at large, ignores the new generations that have grown up in the 60 years since the end of the war. I am not ignoring the fact that Hitler was welcomed by the Austrians in 1933, nor that many high-level Nazis were Austrians - and probably not all exclusively of the German-identified west of the country. Hitler, for example, was from Braunau near the German border, an area which considered itself German and set itself apart from the Slavic east of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Austria has largely managed to escape from the brow-beating “Vergangenheitsbewaltigung” (coming to terms with its past) that Germany still practices. In Austria as in all other countries, racism is still a huge concern. But painting it as an underground Nazi haven is destructive and inaccurate. At the age of 73, Josef Fritzl may be the one of the last remnants of the old generation of suppressor and victims. Most parents alive now did not experience life under Nazism at all - in fact the post-war generations are brought up to believe that racism of any kind is abhorrent, but of course it still occurs, in the more subtle provincial xenophobia and the Neo-nazi movement (which, let us not forget, counts some supporters in Britain too).

From the Inside

So for all the analysis, what is Austria saying? The Austrian coverage of the Amstetten case has also been quick to wring its hands, asking if it happened because of historical practices of denial and burial manifested itself in personality. Fritzl may attribute his own upbringing to Nazism, but drawing a line directly from Nazi crimes to Amstetten does not make sense. Much of the commentary places the blame on ‘looking away,’ which is a facet of modern life in many countries but, while it does happen there, is fundamentally at odds with traditional Austrian values. Once removed from the anonymity of larger cities, in the country and even in the suburbs of Vienna, Austria is still a land of small communities where everyone knows each other. As a long-time resident of a northwest suburb of Vienna, I can attest to this. As a modern phenomenon, the obsession with privacy is cited as an example of traditional social ties breaking down and traditional values being eroded, rather than as a practice that is culturally ingrained.

In a country that is cosmopolitan and forward in some layers of society, but still holds some provincial traditional values, incidents like this are often explained by the domestic media as evidence of a lack of social cohesion caused in part by rapid changes.

Some international press attention has identified Austria’s geography as a factor in contributing to this national sickness of privacy, as symbolised by the shadows of the Alps and the elegant and almost obsessively clean streets of Vienna. Geography has shaped this small central European country, but because as a gateway to both east and west, it has a diverse ethnic population and is historically a hub of Europe. Ascribing an outwardly pleasant appearance as covering some kind of collective subconscious evil is too simplistic.

Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek, 2004’s Nobel Prize for Literature winner, has always been affectionately satirical towards her home country for its traditional patriarchal values. Broadly decribed as a Marxist feminist, her novels have often dealt with the fabric of societies as ruled by the masculine male, painted as a beast in his private life who is outwardly respectable, propagating society’s values. Indeed there is something familiar to her writing of misogynist males in the Fritzl case, which resonates with her literary explorations of male power and how it feeds, and is fed by, capitalist society.

In one of her books she describes a married couple whose tranquil outer appearance conceals the daily acts of rape and violence the husband enacts on his spouse, on the very household objects it is her duty to clean in order to continue the appearance of respectability. On her website, Jelinek has suggested that it is a combination of Austrian society’s patriarchal values which respect the man in control of his woman, combined with the ‘looking away’ culture and society’s need for harmony, which has been responsible for allowing this man to enact his fantasies.

It is interesting that Jelinek has mentioned patriarchy, yet unsurprising, preoccupied as she is with the power struggles of domestic life. More interesting still is that Fritzl’s lawyer, Rudolf Meyer, said his client struck him as an archetypal ‘paterfamilias’ who loved his family, who was firm but just. Sociologists have pointed out the outdated values of the 1950s which still guides women’s expectations today, placing a woman as subordinate to a man, who should interpret all his flaws as her own failings as a wife or mother. This is provided as an explanation generally excusing a man who may sometimes be violent or abusive. The Standard newspaper ran an editorial discussing this when neighbours of Fritzl describes him a “a man’s man” who seemed highly virile and dominant. The argument ran that this type of man is still respected in Austria, a traditionally Catholic and patriarchal society. Another editorial in Die Presse has pointed to the country’s attitude to parenting and children, which places the ultimate authority on the man as head of the family, which can go some way to explaining how Fritzl was able to officially ‘adopt’ the children he fathered with his daughter.

The Cultural and the Personal

It is tempting to ascribe to personal behaviour in cases like this a national explanation as we try to understand the myriad causes of something that is almost unthinkable. Explanations that focus on a national or cultural set of neuroses, such as have abounded in the media discussion of the Austrian cases, are pop psychology that will only go so far to explain things. Far beyond the gleeful Freudian interpretations this man will attract, the truth will lie in several explanations, including the more relevant point of Frizl’s private history - like Natascha Kampusch’s captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, Fritzl had an overbearing mother figure whom he idealized.

That said, one of the genuine tragedies of this case is failings of the state in the adoption process, and of course the “looking away” factor, which is a modern but by no means uniquely Austrian phenomenon. Nobody expects their neighbours (then again, maybe they will now) to be harbouring a second incestuous family in their cellar, so even if things seemed suspicious you might be even less, not more, inclined to investigate. Not knowing what one’s neighbours are up to, or even their first names, is the norm.

It is tempting to try and understand the causes of incidents by attributing broader cultural causes to individuals’ behaviour. School shootings in the US have a place in our consciousness as an ‘American’ type of crime, but intelligent coverage was mostly concerned, and rightly so, with the issue of gun control, rather than blaming Marilyn Manson or an American mindset. It would also have been tempting to explain the case of Armin Meiwes, who ate another man after finding a willing volunteer on the internet, as a uniquely German crime because it could hint at sordid tastes caused perhaps by the country’s outward reputation for order and efficiency - but this would also have obscured the real issues.

Criminal psychologists working on the case say that, for the sake of the victims, we need to understand why things like this happen, and ascribing a Landesmentalitaet (country mentality) will hinder this understanding and obscures important issues, like preventing these types of things from happening again.

Sworn testimony from one of the participants, a beeper message sent from one paramilitary death squad member to another, and the participation of his official helicopter, all indicate that the former Governor of the Colombian department of Antioquia was involved in the notorious 1997 'El Aro' massacre of 15 civilians by a paramilitary death squad. But of more interest today is that the then Governor of Antioquia, is now the President of Colombia – Alvaro Uribe.

Evidence of Uribe's involvement in the massacre is mounting rapidly with the latest development being the sworn testimony of former paramilitary fighter Francisco Enrique Villalba (pictured). He has testified under oath to the Prosecutor General's office that he saw then Governor Uribe at a meeting with paramilitary commanders and Army officers where the massacre was planned and then at a subsequent meeting days after the killing spree where Uribe thanked those who had taken part for a successful mission.

Opposition Senator Gustavo Petro has also asked why then Governor Uribe's personal helicopter was allegedly used to transport the paramilitaries to the site of the massacre. Other evidence has come to light showing that during the massacre one paramilitary sent a beeper message to another asking him to "call the Governor".

The Inter-American Human Rights Court has already condemned the Colombian Government for their involvement in the massacre, citing proof that the Army collaborated with the paramilitaries. But their sentence also mentions the fact that when Governor Uribe was told that a paramilitary massacre in the village of 'El Aro' was imminent, he refused to act to protect residents.

Here, using Villalba's testimony and other sources, JFC has attempted to put together the whole story of what happened before, during and after the massacre at 'El Aro' – a story that may have enormous consequences for Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

'El Aro', Alvaro Uribe's Massacre?

• On 22nd October 1997, according to testimony from Mr Villalba, Governor Alvaro Uribe, accompanied by his brother Santiago, attended a meeting at a ranch in the La Caucana area of Antioquia department. Also present at the meeting were several senior military officers from the 4th Brigade of the Colombian Army (including General Carlos Ospina, the commander of the Brigade) and a group of paramilitary death squad commanders. These commanders included Carlos Castano, the then national leader of the paramilitaries, and his deputy Salvatore Mancuso. Also present was a man named Jose Ardila, a senior leader of the private vigilante groups known as CONVIVIR that legally operated in Antioquia at that time after Governor Uribe had promoted their formation.

At the meeting the men planned an operation to attack the village of El Aro in the north of Antioquia department. Residents of the village were allegedly sympathetic to a local leftwing guerrilla unit and, most importantly for those present, and especially for the Uribe brothers, the guerrillas were thought to be holding eight wealthy ranchers nearby that they had kidnapped for ransom. Agreements were also reached that the Army would remove their checkpoints and roadblocks from the region on the day of the attack.

At the meeting Santiago Uribe, who was at the time (according to Villalba and several other sources) managing his own paramilitary death squad, committed 20 of his own men to participate in the El Aro operation. Governor Alvaro Uribe told those assembled to "do whatever you have to do".

• Human Rights Watch has documented what happened three days later:

"While soldiers maintained a perimeter around El Aro, an estimated 25 paramilitaries entered the village, rounded up the residents and executed four people in the village plaza...Storeowner Aurelio Areiza and his family were told to slaughter a steer and prepare food from their shelves to feed the paramilitaries on October 25.... The next day, Areiza was taken to a nearby house, tied to a tree, tortured and killed. Witnesses say the paramilitaries gouged out his eyes and cut off his tongue and testicles...Over the five days they remained in El Aro, the paramilitaries executed at least eleven people, including three children, burned forty-seven of the sixty-eight houses, including a pharmacy, a church, and the telephone exchange, looted stores, destroyed the pipes that fed the homes potable water, and forced most of the residents to flee. When they left on October 30, the paramilitaries took with them over 1,000 head of cattle along with goods looted from homes and stores. Afterwards, thirty other people were reported to be forcibly disappeared."

Subsequent investigations have found that in fact well over 100 paramilitaries were involved in the operation, that in total 15 people were murdered, and that female residents were raped.

Colombian Senator Gustavo Petro has also alleged that the paramilitaries were actually transported to El Aro by Governor Uribe's own helicopter. Separately Mr Villalba has alleged that at least 800 of the stolen cattle ended up at a ranch owned by Mr Mancuso, the paramilitary commander mentioned above.

• A few days after the massacre, according to Villalba, Uribe and his brother returned to the La Caucana ranch to congratulate the paramilitaries for carrying out the operation successfully as well as for their successful rescue, conducted alongside of the massacre, of the eight wealthy ranchers. Uribe was accompanied by a bodyguard with the surname Serna.

Note: When asked by the prosecutors whether he had ever seen either of the Uribe brothers on previous occasions Mr Villalba replied that he had never met Alvaro before the first meeting, but that Santiago was well known to the paramilitaries as he commanded his own death squad at the time. Villalba added that he only realised that Alvaro was the Governor at the second meeting.

• In the months and years that followed, government agencies as well as human rights organisations opened investigations into the massacre at El Aro. However, in 1999 the government investigators that were involved in this work were themselves all murdered. The highest profile human rights defender in Antioquia at that time, Jesus Maria Valle Jaramillo, publicly stated that the Army and paramilitaries had collaborated on the massacre and questioned why Governor Uribe had ignored the plea for help from residents in the period immediately preceding the attack. Uribe responded by accusing Mr Valle Jaramillo of being an "enemy of the armed forces". Then in February 1999, he too was assassinated.

• Some time afterwards Jose Ardila, the CONVIVIR representative who had attended the first meeting at the ranch with the Uribe brothers, had a falling out with Uribe. He was subsequently sentenced to a 60-year prison term but shortly afterwards was taken out of jail. He has never been seen since.

• Since going public with his testimony, Mr Villalba, who himself is in jail, has been the victim of three assassination attempts.

Endnote: As mentioned above, in July 2006, the Inter American Court Human Rights Court found the Colombian Government guilty of involvement in the massacre, citing proof of army involvement in the operation. The court ordered that the Colombian State pay $30,000 US dollars to each victims family – this, they instructed, should be split with 50% going to the partner of the victim with the other half being shared in equal quantities between parents, siblings and children of the victims. According to Victoria Fallon, the lawyer representing the families of the dead, not a penny has yet reached any of the families involved.

This article first appeared on Justice for Colombia.

The Green Belt policy aimed at preserving the countryside immediately around London is often lauded as one of Britain’s environmental success stories. The truth, however, is almost the opposite. Although many of a green disposition see the countryside as the ultimate setting for green living, this is almost certainly not the case. Cities are in fact the centres of true environmentally friendly “greenness”.

Country dwellers tend to have large houses, multiple cars, longer journeys, less access to recycling facilities, and as a result of all this, huge carbon footprints – per household that is. Urban inhabitants tend to use public transport, cycle when they can, have fewer cars, have easy access to recycling facilities, and essentially share their resources on a large scale, leaving them with much smaller carbon footprints per household or person than in the country.

Now, it suddenly makes you wonder why we have a so-called ‘Green’ Belt policy after all. Surely it would make sense for everyone to live in cities, where everyone would have smaller carbon footprints, thus reducing the nation’s entire overall footprint. Admittedly there is a greater concentration of pollution in cities, but the overall amount for the nation would still be smaller.

The Green Belt not only does the opposite to what it says on the tin by restricting and preventing the environmentally beneficial mass immigration of country-folk to the concrete jungle, but it also keeps house prices in the cities artificially high (supposedly another ‘good’ result as it prevents urban immigration). At a time when we have a housing crisis in this country, with many unable to reach even the first rung of the property ladder, surely it makes sense to free up land for more housing. Apparently not: the Green Belt appears to have achieved such a cult status, that its urbanisation whether total or gradual is deemed unthinkable, if not downright evil. Sure, the scenery will be missed, but I’d much prefer for there to be a greener nation as a whole as well as affordable house prices, wouldn’t you?

When we learnt last week that Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi had blown himself up in Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented this as a vindication of its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon says that his attack on Iraqi soldiers shows both that it was right to have detained him and that it is dangerous ever to release the camp’s prisoners. On the contrary, it shows how dangerous it was to put them there in the first place.

Al-Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least 30 former Guantanamo detainees who have “taken part in anti-coalition militant activities after leaving US detention”. Given that the majority of the inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they were detained, that’s one hell of a recidivism rate. In reality it turns out that “anti-coalition militant activities” include talking to the media about their captivity in Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon lists the Tipton Three in its catalogue of recidivists, on the grounds that they collaborated with Michael Winterbottom’s film The Road to Guantanamo. But it also names seven former prisoners, aside from Al-Ajmi, who have fought with the Taliban or Chechen rebels, kidnapped foreigners or planted bombs after their release. One of two conclusions can be drawn from this evidence, and neither reflects well on the US government.

The first is that, as the Pentagon claims, these men “successfully lied to US officials, sometimes for over three years.” The US government’s intelligence gathering and questioning were ineffective, and people who would otherwise have been identified as terrorists or resistance fighters were allowed to walk free, despite years of intense and often brutal interrogation. Should this be surprising? Without a presumption of innocence, without charges, representation, trials or due process of any kind, there is no reliable means of determining whether or not a man is guilty. The abuses at Guantanamo Bay not only deny justice to the inmates, they also deny justice to the world.

Al-Ajmi, the authorities say, initially confessed in the prison camp to deserting the Kuwaiti army to join the jihad in Afghanistan. He admitted that he fought with Taliban forces against the Northern Alliance. He later retracted this confession, which had been made “under pressure and threats”. When the Americans released him from Guantanamo, they handed him over to the Kuwaiti government for trial, but without the admissable evidence required to convict him. Among his defences was that neither he nor his interrogators had signed his supposed testimony. The Kuwaiti courts, without reliable evidence to the contrary, found him innocent.

All evidence obtained in Guantanamo Bay, and in the CIA’s other detention centres and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable, because it is extracted with the help of coercion and torture. Torture is notorious for producing false confessions, as people will say anything to make it stop. Both official accounts and the testimonies of former detainees show that a wide range of coercive techniques – devised or approved at the highest levels in Washington - have been used to make inmates tell the questioners what they want to hear.

In his book Torture Team, Philippe Sands describes the treatment of Mohammed al-Qahtani, held in Guantanamo Bay and described by the authorities (like half a dozen other suspects) as “the 20th hijacker”. By the time his interrogators started using “enhanced techniques” to extract information from him, al-Qahtani had been kept in isolation for three months in a cell permanently flooded with light. An official memo shows that he “was talking to non-existent people, reporting hearing voices, [and] crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end.”He was sexually abused, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of sleep for a further 54 days of torture and questioning. What useful testimony could be extracted from a man in this state?

The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed conflict after their release had not in fact been involved in any prior fighting, but were radicalised by their detention. In the video he made before blowing himself up, al-Ajmi maintained that he was motivated by his ill-treatment in Guantanamo Bay. “Twelve thousand kilometers away from Mecca, I realized the reality of the Americans and what those infidels want,” he said. He claimed he was beaten, drugged and “used for experiments” and that “the Americans delighted in insulting our prayer and Islam and they insulted the Koran and threw it in dirty places.” Al-Ajmi’s lawyer revealed that his arm had been broken by guards at the camp, who beat him up to stop him from praying.

The accounts of people released from Guantanamo Bay describe treatment that would radicalise almost anyone. In his book Five Years of My Life, published a fortnight ago, Murat Kurnaz maintains that one of the guards greeted him on his arrival with these words. “Do you know what the Germans did to the Jews? That’s exactly what we’re going to do with you.” There were certain similarities. “I knew a man from Morocco,” Kurnaz writes, “who used to be a ship captain. He couldn’t move one of his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs.” The young man – scarcely more than a boy - in the cage next to Kurnaz’s had just had his legs amputated by American doctors after getting frostbite in a coalition prison in Afghanistan. The stumps were still bleeding and covered in pus. He received no further treatment or new dressings. Every time he tried to hoist himself up to sit on his pot by clinging to the wire, a guard would come and hit his hands with a billy-club. Like every other prisoner, he was routinely beaten by the camp’s Immediate Reaction Force, and taken away to interrogation cells to be beaten up some more.

Fathers were clubbed in front of their sons, sons in front of their fathers. The prisoners were repeatedly forced into stress positions, deprived of sleep and threatened with execution. As a senior official at the US Defense Intelligence Agency says, “maybe the guy who goes into Guantanamo was a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He’s going to come out a fully fledged jihadist.”

In reading the histories of Guantanamo Bay, and of the kidnappings, extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the United Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become clear. The first is that these practices do not supplement effective investigation and prosecution; they replace them. Instead of a process which generates evidence, assesses it and uses it to prosecute, the US has deployed a process which generates nonsense and is incapable of separating the guilty from the innocent. The second is that far from protecting innocent lives, this process is likely to deliver further atrocities. Even if you put the ethics of such treatment to one side, it is surely evident that it makes the world more dangerous.

This article first appeared in the Guardian newspaper on 13th May 2008. The article with full footnotes also appears on [Monbiot.com]

It seems that Asia is a repeated target for the wrath of nature. Tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes and other natural disasters have continuously affected this region. The recent effects of Cyclone Nargis in the Irrawaddy Delta region have left the population of Myanmar at a disastrous standstill. Day to day living has necessitated the most rudimentary basics of survival. The populace of Burma (what the Burmese call their home) are facing unprecedented levels of displacement, malnourishment and starvation.

Poor sanitation levels are increasing the risks of water and air-borne diseases and infections. All the while, Myanmar's military regime is facing another disaster of its own making - civil unrest. Battered, bruised and broken, the people are hoping and waiting for aid to trickle in while the junta has isolated and hoarded crucially necessary supplies. Aid drops are sending in less than adequate supplies and the United Nations is negotiating on whether or not to send in troops so that aid can go directly to the people. Meanwhile, Burmese monks are helping to rebuild important shelters and infrastructures so that the people of Burma do not suffer any more than they have to.

Conversely, police are barricading aid workers from travel and getting necessary supplies and aid to the people. The Associated Press on May 13th, 2008, reported that the police were taking passport numbers and checking identification documents of aid workers as if to send the message that come hell or high water, this junta will impose its will. In the meantime, stockpiles of aid are piling up at the Yangon airport. Thousands have been displaced and are sharing make-shift shelters with strangers. Close to 35,000 people are officially reported dead and almost as many are still missing, many of them children. However, UN totals put the numbers at over 100,000 dead and over 200,000 are missing.

These numbers are reported by the Irrawaddy News, by reporters who are risking their own lives to get the real truth out. On the other hand, the "New Light of Myanmar," a state-sponsored newspaper, had one general stating that Myanmar didn't "need foreign aid workers right now." This is elementary political psychology, diminishing the crisis affecting the nation as though it is nothing more than an unsightly stumbling block and assuring the nation that the government is in complete control.

What will be most devastating to the Burmese people are the aftershocks of stabilisation - coming to the terms with the scale of the death toll and how many homes have been devastated. How does one cope with the loss of family and home all at once, in addition to being starved and sharing one's incredulous trauma with strangers? This is where the power of denial is strongest — when the people are in a collective state of post-traumatic stress and the governing junta continues to prolong the trauma.

All juntas are understandably fixated with keeping power once they seize it. This is achieved by taking over the communications, travel and governing functions of a particular country. What better way to exercise complete oppressive control than to hold a referendum during a humanitarian crisis? Describing the military junta in Burma, American President George Bush termed the regime "isolated or callous." One could easily conclude that the regime is both. That is how juntas maintain power — to isolate, divide, conquer, develop apathy and leave the populace to fend for itself. It is, simultaneously, callous and isolated.

One might also conclude that the junta has backed itself much too far into a corner to ever regain their former strength. Arresting and detaining monks during the Saffron Revolution and withholding of food and medical aid does not a respectable government make. Furthermore, it may lead to discontent on a scale hitherto unknown. The people of Burma, should they receive essential food and medical aid, could rise up in numbers as yet unseen to depose the military regime and provoke change.

We will not be seeing this extraordinary response any time soon. The military junta will ensure that people are absolutely dependent upon their extreme generosity during a time of absolute need. The hoarded supplies will suddenly and magically be given in small doses to the people, in the hope that the perceived generosity of the junta might entreats the respect of the people.

What remains to be seen is how the junta can maintain their repressive, authoritarian, self-absorbed ideologies in the face of humanitarian crises. If the UN troops decide to "storm in" and assure that aid gets directly to the people, will the junta strike back? And, if they do, who will pay the ultimate price?

Union busting is as old as trade unions themselves. Ever since workers started to form their own organisations back in the 18th century to fight for decent working conditions, employers have tried to break them. In the old days workers would be beaten, imprisoned, and sometimes killed for participating in trade union activities. Better working conditions meant less profits for the boss, and a harsh hand was dealt to keep the rich ruling minority firmly in charge.

Nowadays, in developed countries like Britain and the USA, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this kind of oppression towards working people had become a thing of the past. After all, we live in a democracy. But the case studies below show quite the contrary. Although techniques have changed far from becoming a thing of the past, union busting has swelled to become a multi-million dollar industry.

After the 1935 US National Labor Relations Act established the right to join a union and bargain collectively, companies seeking to operate union free could no longer use the bare-knuckle tactics of old. They needed more subtle and sophisticated tactics to fight the trade unions. What they needed were private expert companies that they could hire to do their dirty work for them, companies specialising in union avoidance services. Until the 1970s, however, professional union avoidance consultants were small in number and were not yet part of mainstream industrial relations. Most employers kept quiet about the idea of hiring consultants. One consultant stated that employers “used to sneak to seminars about keeping your plant non-union. They were as nervous as whores in a church! The posture of major company managers was, ‘Let’s not make the union mad at us during their organising drive or they’ll take it out at the bargaining table.”

That mindset changed dramatically in the 1970s and ‘80s, a period of significant expansion for the union avoidance industry, when most employers shed their inhibitions about recruiting union busting consultants. The size of the consultant industry increased tenfold during the 1970s, as employers sought out firms that could help them defeat trade union formation and expansion. Union busting consultants organised thousands of anti-union campaigns, targeting areas of growing importance to unions like healthcare, and white-collar employees. Today, the monopolisation of big business has led to giant companies accumulating enormous profits, and with them, the resource for union busting has grown to unprecedented proportions.

Genesis of Union Busting

The Logan Report, produced earlier this year by the British Trade Union Congress (TUC), reveals some startling statistics. It is estimated that companies in the USA alone are spending a whopping $4 billion each year on union busting! If you take into account that this money is directed mainly at a small number of workers actively engaged in struggle at any one time, that works out at thousands of dollars per worker. Add to that a staggering 25,000 lawyers that are apparently committed to preventing trade unions developing across the USA, and you have what has been described as a genesis for union busting policy.

The Burke Group (TBG), based in California, is one of the worlds’ biggest union busting consultants. It advertises itself as a 'management consulting firm specialising in union avoidance’. TBG has conducted over 800 union busting campaigns since its establishment in 1981, with clients such as Coca-Cola, Mazda, General Electric, Heinz, DuPont, and Lockheed Martin, with whom they boast a 95% success rate!

The tactic used by union busters like TBG is to get into the workplace and convince the workforce against voting in favour of union representation, or recognition. As trade unions benefit workers’ interests, the only way to achieve this is to lie. Workers are given company leaflets warning that if they join the union they are likely to be permanently on strike. They mislead workers into believing that the union will start harassing them in their homes, risk their job security, and cause them a loss of earnings and benefits. In other words they convince workers into believing exactly the opposite of what trade unions actually offer.

One textbook example of TBG’s union busting campaigns was for the Chinese Daily News (CDN), the largest Chinese language newspaper in North America. In October 2000, 152 mostly Taiwanese workers started a trade union organising campaign after management announced plans to cut pay, and force employees to sign a statement that they could be fired at any time. Within a month, 95 percent of the employees had signed union authorisation cards. In response, CDN hired TBG who immediately started an aggressive anti-union campaign. In March 2001, the workers stood solid and voted again for union recognition. The CDN management told the workers that it was prepared to spend $1 million on defeating the union. True to its word, by September 2005, after an intense five-year anti-union campaign, the union lost a rerun ballot. The head of the Newspapers Guild subsequently described the events as the “fiercest anti-union campaign I have ever been involved in.”

But isn’t this against the law I hear you ask? The simple answer is yes! The trouble is that legislation is so weak that it’s cheaper for the company to pay out damages to individual workers in court, than to give in to the trade unions. In 2007, the US Court of Appeals awarded CDN employees $2.5 million for numerous labour law violations committed by the company, but they will probably never gain union recognition.

Organisations like TBG have been so successful that, despite some 60 million Americans saying that they would like to join a trade union, national membership currently stands at only 7.5 percent of the US private sector workforce.

Bringing It Back Home

And if you thought this kind of thing could never happen here, think again! The Burke Group has been accused of bringing union busting tactics to Britain. In fact, a 2008 survey of trade union organising campaigns in Britain found that employers used anti-union consultants in about one fifth of the cases. TBG has attracted large companies operating here in Britain to its sinister services, including T-Mobile, Amazon.co.uk, Virgin Atlantic, Calor Gas, FlyBe, Cable & Wireless, and Kettle Chips. Many of TBG’s anti-union campaigns have had a devastating impact.

In the case of T-Mobile, George Rankin, an organising officer from the Communication Workers Union (CWU), has described some of the tactics that were used. He said that TBG sent a 7-minute video to the homes of five hundred and fifty T-Mobile workers in order to convince them against voting in favour of recognition of the CWU. TBG used scare tactics like those listed above. Workers were moved away from trade union influence by outsourcing their jobs to private companies. Trade union members were also intimidated and harassed. The union lost the vote for recognition by two to one. It’s a similar story with Cable & Wireless, and with Kettle Chips. The Graphical Print and Media Union involved in the Amazon case stated that “we had never faced this level of serious professional resistance before”, after the union also lost the vote for recognition.

But the FlyBe case is most revealing. In 2006, Europe’s largest regional low-cost carrier hired TBG when 400 cabin crew tried to join the Transport & General Union. However, midway through TBG’s union busting campaign, the union (now called Unite) persuaded FlyBe to drop TBG, and subsequently a huge shift by the workers in favour of union representation led to an election landslide, with 94% of the workers voting in favor of unionisation in an 89% turnout.

Fight Back

What does all this show? It shows that if the workers are left to organise they choose the trade unions. It shows that the only way for companies to avoid trade unions is to lie, to cheat, to manipulate, and to attack. It shows that the argument about capitalist society being governed by the natural forces of market trading is utter nonsense. Capitalist society is, in part, maintained by employers who squander billions of dollars to ensure that the rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor. These battles between trade unions and employers effectively mark out the boundary between the workers, and the business owners in society. It is a boundary between two classes. One side is fighting for decent working and living conditions, and the other side fighting to preserve exploitation and maintain its profits. For one side to gain the other must loose. True we live in a democracy, but it’s a parliamentary democracy, where legislation favours the interests of big business owners, not working people. The enormous resources currently being poured into blocking the unions in the workplace serves to exacerbate this problem. It means the discontent of the exploited workforce is trapped beneath the surface of society and will fester until it can find an avenue of expression.

The two trade union federations in the USA and Britain, the AFL-CIO and the TUC, have signed a joint agreement to work together to eliminate the intimidation of workers who want to improve the quality of their families’ lives by joining or forming a trade union. The two union federations agreed to share information about the activity of union busting firms, to develop a shared database of union busting activity, and create “Busting the Union-Busters” training materials. Both will jointly lobby governments and relevant international bodies to restrict the activities of the union busters. But, the only way to beat union busting once and for all is to unite the workforce, and join and organise in our trade unions, our own class organisations. A collective problem requires a collective solution. Ultimately we must build a new society based on the needs of the majority, not the needs of the rich minority. These are the foundations of a workers’ democracy, of a socialist society.

This article first appeared on Socialist Appeal.