May 1999
Like something I said? Hate something I said? Do you think I should "go back to Russia"? Do you think that Bill Clinton should be impeached for killing over 500,000 children in Iraq? Don't keep it to yourself! Send me an email. And then hopefully after a while, I will give you a way to post your views directly on this site...
My fine, fine nephew
While in New York in May, Veva (my wife) and I visited my sister, Laurie, her husband Mike and their delicious and delightful son, Markus Finnbar Walsh. 13 months old and just beginning to rev up for a very fun life. Born premature, the first year has been a long, tough one, but he is doing very well -- and he is so cute! He is very close to walking, always in a good mood, and always ready to eat, as the picture will demonstrate.
Barak a peacemaker?
Okay, I admit it: the date is now June 2, 1999, so I should be writing my June entry, but most everything I will write about occurred in May so what the heck.
May 1999 was a month away from home. Toronto, UK and then New York City in three weeks. Way too much for me! I actually even started to get bored with my training materials, which hasn't really happened before -- even after two years of doing essentially the same trainings!
I got excited in the UK: the last time I visited that country, Pinochet was arrested the day I arrived. Wonderful news! He still has not been extradited to Spain, but neither has he been allowed to return to the country where he killed tens of thousands of people. May he die alone and perhaps finally in agony over the misery he caused so many others...
But this time in the UK, Ehud Barak knocked Benjamin Netanyahu out of government. It was a "stunning" rejection and I thought it boded well for peace in the Middle East. I believed, in particular, that it might mean that Israel would negotiate in good faith with the Palestinians. Sadly, that looks to not be the case.
Here is a reprint of an article that shows how close Ehud Barak hues to the standard hard Likud line around Palestinians and the Jewish settlements:
Agence France Presse
June 01, 1999 Israel-Palestinian 2ndlead 10:35 GMT
HEADLINE: Barak hopes to skip promised West Bank withdrawals
BYLINE: Nomi Bar-Yaacov
JERUSALEM, June 1 (AFP) - Prime Minister-elect Ehud Barak hopes to skip further West Bank withdrawals promised
by earlier Israeli governments and move straight into talks with the Palestinians on a final peace accord, Labour
Party sources said Tuesday.
The sources said policy guidelines being drawn up by Barak to show
potential partners in his governing coalition could omit any reference to
the interim Wye River land-for-security accord signed last October under
US auspices.
"Barak opposes interim agreements," said one Labour Party source who asked not to be identified. "He
would like to see the whole map, the map of the final status accord, before committing to any withdrawals."
The final status talks are due to determine the borders and powers of the
Palestinian entity in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, territories captured
by Israel in 1967 and where the Palestinians hope to create an independent
state.
During his election campaign, Barak promised to respect the Wye Accord,
under which Israel's outgoing right-wing government agreed to hand another 13 percent of the West Bank over to
Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and take other steps expanding Palestinian self-rule prior to a final deal.
But outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suspended the agreement in December under pressure from hardline
elements in his government.
Barak's reported change of heart on Wye coincides with his efforts to draw those same hardliners, both from Netanyahu's
Likud bloc and the far-right National Religious Party (NRP), into a broad coalition government.
The NRP and many Likud officials strongly object to ceding any more
territory to the Palestinians.
The Labour Party aide, confirming a story published Tuesday in the Haaretz newspaper, said Barak would consult
with both the United States and the Palestinians before dumping the Wye accord, which has the status of an international
treaty and was ratified by Israel's parliament.
"Barak knows he is bound by Wye, but he is not happy about it," he said.
"He would not unilaterally jump to final status against the wishes of the
US and the Palestinians, he has to show some good will, the Palestinians
are running out of patience," he said.
Palestinian officials insisted this week that implementation of Wye was a
precondition for entering final status negotiations.
And a spokesman at the US embassy in Tel Aviv reaffirmed that the "Wye
memorandum remains the basis for forward movement."
"Once the new government is formed, the United States hopes to see early
progress on implementing Wye and a reconvening of the final status
negotiations," he told AFP.
Barak comes from the right wing of the dovish Labour Party and was the
only member of Yitzhak Rabin's Labour government not to support interim
autonomy arrangements with the Palestinians in 1995.
Since his May 17 election, Barak has again taken a hard line on
Palestinian issues, notably ruling out a return to Israel's 1967 borders
or any compromise over Jerusalem.
NRP officials said this week that Barak had also promised them he would
permit Jewish settlements in the West Bank to continue growing despite US
and Palestinian charges this prejudges the outcome of final status talks.
Barak has revealed little of his policy or coalition plans and Israeli
newspapers this week widely quoted Labour Party officials expressing
frustration with his secrecy and rightward policy tilt.
"He seems far more right-wing than anyone previously believed," said the
Labour aide.
Finding My Own Moral Center
5/12/99 I sit on a 737 on a runway in Toronto waiting for ATC clearance to return home. Just spent 3 days at the airport here doing a training for Oracle Corporation. It was in many ways an agonizing time. I am reading Amazing Grace by Jonathan Kozol, a recounting of the lives and beliefs of the residents of the South Bronx, one of the most devastated communities in our nation. It makes me so angry, so depressed, so outraged to read about how our own citizens, our own children, our own mothers, are treated like absolute human garbage -- left to rot and die, while so many others in New York City grow insanely rich from the tax cuts that force the spending cuts in "social programs" that result in situations like giant rats chewing on babies in cribs and eight-year olds falling to their deaths down shafts of broken elevators, and terribly sick people waiting days in the most disgusting of hospitals -- those that remain open after the spending cuts, anyway.
I feel more and more that this country, in particular the wealthy and comfortable in this country -- of which I am certainly one, faces a moral crisis. Sure, this country has never been a kind and just place for its own people of color and poor people. Sure, this country has always been a deliverer of death and misery to millions of people around the world. But now it seems to me that we are getting SO MUCH WORSE. We don't just wage war. We pretend it as a video game and exult in our smart technology, as woman and children and bridges and hospitals and television stations and markets are destroyed by those oh so very smart bombs. We don't just not offer job training and decent daycare and even minimally acceptable public schools and clean public hospitals. We cut taxes on the wealthy and shut down the most basic services to our poor. We let cockroaches and rats and lead paint and waste incineration fumes and the anxiety of bullets and cocaine and heroin tear our children to pieces -- and we blame their parents.
I look at myself and am disgusted. Sure, I speak out more than others, I donate a whole bunch of money to the Crossroads Fund, which supports groups with the object of "change not charity". But it's not enough. It's not nearly enough. I am complacent, I am too self-involved. I get angry and then let the moment and the anger pass, because it is fundamentally not a part of my life. My own children are not suffering, and the suffering slides out of view. I am opposed to racism, but almost all of my friends and acquaintances are of European descent. I barely ever cross the boundaries into communities of color and poverty. What am I doing to change society? What am I doing to change myself?
Before I make speeches and think about how things need to be changed, I need to change my own life. I need to make room in my brain, in my thinking, in my time to think things through, take clearer action, actually commit a chunk of my life to working for change. I need to clarify my principles and then live by them more thoroughly.
I need to stop taking on a never ending stream of professional obligations and "opportunities". How many books do I need to publish? How many days must I be away from home training people?
Looking ahead, I see that I am "busy" through the Spring of 2000. We will revamp my books into a multi-volume series (there will be five full-length texts on PL/SQL by yours truly at that time). I need to draw the line. No more books. No more new ventures.
Here is the way I see it in most the fundamental terms: we cannot expect the very wealthy in this country, the people who make the decisions, who currently direct the policies and politics of the United States, to change their ways, to voluntarily give up their wealth and power. They are in many ways lost souls.
But there are millions of other middle-class, right-thinking people who acquiesce to the most cruel acts taken IN OUR NAME by our governments and by the corporations that make their homes in our states. We benefit from this cruelty and unless we speak out and act to stop it, we become become more and more culpable, until it is impossible to extricate ourselves from our gated communities, our private schools, our high-speed Internet connections, our small circle of similar friends, our vans and SUVs.
Then it is too late -- too late for all of us, for our nation in its entirety.
Family Stuff
5/8/99 My parents just swept through Chicago...they came up to NY from their "retirement" in Florida to celebrate my youngest nephew's first birthday -- HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARKUS FINNBAR WALSH! Then on to Minneapolis to visit my oldest sister, Jaye, husband Ami and two wonderful daughters, Masada and Timnah. Then to Chicago, where they spent a few days with us. Unfortunately, my father was feeling none too well, and didn't have whole lots of energy to visit around the city. We spent a wonderful afternoon at the North Park Nature Center, a small forest preserve inside the city. The frogs in the lake were out in abundance and making their mating views known; wow, were they loud!
The weather was wonderful and our lilac bush in the backyard is full of flowers -- which served as a perfect backdrop to this photo of my parents and sons.
Ah, the Joys of War
Saturday, May 8: All right! We are bombing again. And this is not some dinky little war in some backwater country like El Salvador, where we had to let the proxy death squad soldiers, trained in torture at our very own School of the Americas, do the dirty work for us.
Finally, our own pilots, our own shiny, new planes and cruise missiles can rain death down upon some scummy ethnics way over somewhere else. This is a big one! This is so big, we have run out of those smart cruise missiles that only managed to bomb a television station and many bridges over the Danube (violating international treaties). Now we have to drop "old iron" cluster bombs, which are very indiscriminate and just took out a market and hospital. Whoops! Well, you can be sure that NATO will apologize for that one. But we're running out of the good stuff, which means we need to make lots more. So Congress will authorize an extra $10 billion for war materiel. And the Pentagon will say that they clearly need a WHOLE LOT MORE MONEY if they are to do their job (fight two significant regional conflicts simultaneously) and Congress will give it to them, and they will give it to Northrup and Boeing and all the rest of the deathmakers. And they will take it away from schools and anti-hunger programs and drug rehabilitation programs.
But we will be SO MUCH SAFER...until some teenage kid with a dozen AK-47s levels a high school.
I think that people like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair live/have spent their life waiting for such moments. Heroes! Great men making those tough decisions!
They disgust me. They are, to me and according to international law, war criminals. They bomb a television station, 'cause it is contributing to the Serbian war machine through propaganda. So if Milosevic decides to blow up a bomb in CNN headquarters would that also be OK? Certainly, CNN is contributing to the US/NATO war effort through some serious propaganda.
AYSO Soccer, Spring 1999
Eli was lucky enough to spend 10 days in France in April, spring break with a friend and his family in the Bordeaux region...what a life! Well, he came back very psyched-up about soccer and a week later played a Saturday game with his AYSO Lakefront Region 418 Demon Dogs team. Was I impressed!
Eli has always been a solid player, with a big foot, and a leaning towards defense. But last Fall, as the testosterone levels kicked in, he said: "I want to play offense. I want to score goals." And he has been true to his word. On this past Saturday (May 1), he scored two goals and assisted on three others. His corner kicks were awesome, floating right down into the goal area, leading directly to two goals. His foot work is sharp, he can turn on tremendous bursts of speed, and he snaps off hard, quick shots. He is a joy to watch (and talk about, which is part of the reason that I am repeating some of what I said in last month's diary, in case anyone was wondering).
5/9/99 - Well, now I have an update. Eli played yesterday on an overcast, slightly chilly, but at least dry day. He scored three goals -- and really early on in the game, too! He felt a little bit bad, like he should have been passing more, but he was afraid (at least on the third goal) that Jesse, a small but VERY talented soccer player, was in an offside position. So, what the heck, he took the kick and scored his third.
I didn't have such a great time being a ref. In my first game, a small girl (maybe 11 years old) caught a hard kick right on the nose, glasses knocked off, nose bleeding. Her coach (a woman I seem to have a conflict with in every game I ref of her team) came over and had her put her head back, etc. After a minute or two of that, I told her to take her player off the field. Anyone who is bloody cannot stay on the field. She went quasi-ballistic on me, claiming that I was being so cold or hard or non-compassionate or something and began to declaim loudly to all the players around us about how I was setting a bad example for the girls. This woman is really something else! And she will probably file a complaint against me!
But it is a wonderful spring and our lilac bush in the backyard is blooming like never before; a load of purple flowers and a wonderful scent.
NYPD, FBI and CIA...
Was sent this joke via email a couple weeks ago...
The NYPD, the FBI, & the CIA have engaged for years in serious
competition to determine which organization is the most deft
apprehender of criminals. The President, wanting to resolve the
question once and for all, releases a rabbit into a forest and
challenges each organization to utilize its best methods to bring
the rabbit in to him.
The CIA goes in. They place animal informants throughout the
forest. They place hidden microphones on all of the trees and
motion detectors behind each rock. After three months of
extensive investigations, they conclude that rabbits do not exist.
The FBI goes in. After two weeks with no leads, they burn the
forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit, and make no
appologies.... the rabbit had it coming.
The NYPD goes in. A mere two hours later they come out leading a
badly beaten bear by the ear. The bear is yelling: "OK, OK, I'm a
rabbit, I'm a rabbit."
Political Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT)
I received this from Darko Egersdorfer, a friend from the world of Oracle technology.
"This test consists of one multiple-choice question," the author of the test said.
Here's a list of the countries that the U.S. has bombed since the end
of World War II, compiled by historian William Blum:
China 1945-46
Korea 1950-53
China 1950-53
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-60
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Peru 1965
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991-99
Bosnia 1995
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
In how many of these instances did a democratic government, respectful of human rights, occur as a direct result?
Choose one of the following:
(a) 0
(b) zero
(c) none
(d) not a one
(e) a whole number between -1 and +1 --
NATO Violates International Law?
by Raju G. C. Thomas
[Raju Thomas is Professor of Political Science at Marquette University. He
is the author of 8 books, over 50 journal articles and book chapters, and
over 70 OP-ED newspaper articles. His recent books were Democracy, Security and Development in India (1996), and
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime (1998). He was educated at Bombay University, the London School of Economics,
and the University of California at Los Angeles from where he obtained his Ph.D. He has been a visiting Fellow
at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London.]
-----------------------------------------------------
Does NATO's attack on Serbia violate International Law? Does HumanitarianLaw override the territorial integrity
of states?
I. NATO and International Law
The US and NATO is violating a number of international laws in attacking
Serbia over Kosovo which is part of a sovereign independent state.
(1) It is a violation of Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter that prohibits the
use of force against a sovereign state where it has not committed aggression on other states. Serbia did not attack
any neighboring states
outside its sovereign borders. The Security Council did not sanction the
use of force here. Efforts to justify these actions through earlier resolutions or Chapter 7 of the Charter are
acts of distortion and convenience.
(2) It is a violation of NATO's own charter which claims it is a defensive
organizations and is only committed to force if one of its members is attacked. No member of NATO was attacked.
(3) The so-called Rambouillet "Agreement" (there was no "agreement" by
Serbia ) is a violation of Articles 51 and 52 of the 1980 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties which forbids
coercion and force to compel any state to sign a treaty or agreement. Serbia is being asked to sign this "Agreement"
through NATO bombs and missiles, anything but persuasion.
(4) It is a violation of the Helsinki Accords Final Act of 1975 which
guarantees the territorial frontiers of the states of Europe. What this
so-called peace plan offers is (a) the severance of Kosovo through NATO
bombing with immediate effect; or (b) the severance of Kosovo through NATO occupation three years later. The Serbs
chose Option A.
(5) If the sequel to the bombing is recogntion of Kosovo as an independent
state, this will violate international law that prohibits recognition of
provinces that unilaterally declare independence against the wishes of the
federal authorities.
(6) If the bombing of Yugoslavia results in the destruction of Serbian
religious and historical sites, this will be in violation of the 1954 Hague
Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed
Conflict.
(7) The Geneva Conventions Act 1957 (amended 1995) of the United Kingdom specifically states that "civilians
shall not be the object of attack"
(Schedule 5, Article 52.1) and that "civilians shall enjoy protection
unless they take a direct part in hostilities" (Schedule 6, Article 13.3).
Targeting the Serbian TV station at night when it was inhabited by
civilians only constituted an intentional and premeditated attack on
civilians.
(8) Beyond the above, there may be several other international regulations
about the environment that is being violated by the attacks on chemical
plants, fuel storage, and refineries. They include the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer
(1985, UNEP), the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (1987, UNEP), and the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992).
II. Humanitarian Law and the Territorial Integrity of States
United States and Great Britain have argued that the attack on Serbia was
justified under the 1948 Genocide Convention and/or other general humanitarian principles. Claims have also been
made that Article 2(4) of the UN Charter which upholds the territorial integrity of states against external military
attacks, is countered by Articles 1(2) and 55 of the Charter, which speak of self-determination of peoples.
However, these articles, including Articles 73 to 91 which deal with
"Non-Self Governing Territories" and the "Trusteeship System," pertain to
decolonization and not the right to secede from existing sovereign
independent states. Article 1 of International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights passed in 1976 referred to the rights of minorities to
self-determination but did not inlcude the right to secede. It implied the
right of peoples in all states "to free, fair and open participation in the
democratic process of governance freely chosen by each state." A 1990
meeting of the then Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in
Copenhagen went far in affirming democratic rights and human rights of
peoples but did not go as far as to endorse the right to secede.
In any case, the internal Yugoslav republics of Slovenia, Croatia and
Bosnia declared their independence before any human rights violations or
violence had occurred and were recognized. Those unilateral declarations of independence produced the subsequent
violence. Before the NATO attack, the deaths of 2000 on all sides and the internal displacement of 300,000 people
in Kosovo did not constitute genocide. In Kosovo, a province no different from Krajina of Croatia from where all
Serbs were driven out, NATO bombing led to the human catastrophe not just for Albanians but for Serbs, Hungarians
and Sandjak Muslims.
Much has been made about "Serbian genocide" in Bosnia which has become the pretext for the current NATO
attack. Like the Kosovo "genocide," this was more propaganda than fact. The Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute determined that between 35,000 and 50,000 people died in Bosnia on all sides. In comparison,
an average of 20,000 people are victims of homicide in the US every year. The investigators for the Hague Tribunal
have interviewed only 223 women claiming to be raped, and have collected 575 affidavits from women claiming to
be raped. Compare this with an average of 100,000 women who file rape complaints with the police every year, and
an estimated 400,000 unreported rapes annually. NATO's unqualified and unrestrained bombing campaign that includes
the infrasturcture is more likely to kill millions of Yugosalv citizens in the long run, through lack of proper
medical facilities, polluted water supply, atmospheric poisoning, ozone depletion, and climatic change. NATO is
committing ecocide and therefore also genocide in the long run.
If NATO had the right to intervene in Kosovo, does it now have the right
to intervene in Palestine, Kashmir, Tibet and "Kurdistan where human rights violations are also taking place?
Can any state now bypass the UN Security Council and attack another state by invoking humanitarian considerations?
(1) NATO cannot unilaterally invoke the 1948 Genocide Convention , the
1948 Universial Declaration of Human Rights, and other humanitarian laws, and proceed to attack independent states.
Only the Security Council can do so which was deliberately bypassed by NATO because it knew that Russia and China
would veto such an attack.
(2) There was no humanitarian intervention by the US and the West when the Nigerian authorities crushed the Biafra
separatist movement between 1967 and 1970 causing the deaths of one million Ibos, when Pakistani forces killed
one million and drove out 10 million Bengalis during the East
Pakistani secessionist struggle in 1971, when the Pol Pot regime killed one
million Cambodians, to name just a few cases.
In the latter two cases, the US condemned India and Vietnam for their
military interventions and threatened military action against them. However, both India and Vietnam intervened
after the human catastrophes had
taken place. NATO's rush to bomb caused the human catastrophe in Kosovo, as did Western interventions earlier in
Croatia and Bosnia by promoting and rushing to recognize Croatia and Bosnia as independent states against the wishes
of the Serbian populations.
(3) Ethnic cleansing is not genocide. If it were, the Allied powers were
guilty of genocide for the expulsion of some 12 million Germans from
Poland, Czechoslavkia and elsewhere at the end of the Second World War, and surely European Jews committed genocide
when it drove out nearly a million Palestinians to carve out the state of Israel in 1948.
(4) There is now an ethnically pure Greater Croatia. There are almost
900,000 Serbian refugees ethnically cleansed from Croatia and the
federation, 300,000 in Republika Srpska and 600,000 in Serbia. This is more than any other ethnic group. Croatia
conducted the largest single ethnic cleansing of the war with American military support.
III. Conclusion
Russia, China and India, representing half the human race, got it right
about the Kosovo crisis. NATO, the only alliance left after the Cold War,
committed aggression on Serbia. This is all about saving NATO's face at a
very heavy price for the Serbs. If NATO is above international law, then so is every other state and organization.
It has set a terrible precedent. A
Times of India editorial of April 29th, 1999, concluded rightly that "just
as the US cannot afford to lose, the rest of the world cannot afford to let
it win. If NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia is allowed to prevail, the
alliance will eventually turn its destructive attention to other 'out of
area' operations."
Raju G. C. Thomas
Return to Diary Index
My fine, fine nephew
Barak a Peacemaker?
Finding My Own Moral Center
Family Stuff
Ah, the Joys of War!
AYSO Soccer, Spring 1999
NYPD, FBI and CIA...
Political Scholastic Aptitude Test
NATO Violates International Law?
www.stevenfeuerstein.com © 1999 Steven Feuerstein. All rights reserved.