Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Death squads, gangsters and unwelcome visitors

You have to hand it to reactionary politicians, don't you? I 
mean, for sheer gall they really take the cake.

Just look at Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe, the darling of 
Washington and about as reactionary as you can get. A little over 
a month ago Uribe proposed a law that would allow members of the 
largest and most bloody of the Colombian paramilitary groups, the 
so-called Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), to avoid jail.

These are creatures who have been responsible for an estimated 80 
percent or more of the thousands of killings in Colombia, 
including innumerable massacres of whole families even entire 
villages of peasants.

But under Uribe's plan, these right-wing killers will be allowed 
to get off scot free providing they agree to lay down their arms, 
admit their crimes, turn over some land, pay some fines and 
provide community service when they turn in their weapons.

As the October 2 issue of Workers World newspaper rather aptly 
commented: "The prospect that the same people who decapitated, 
hanged, raped, castrated or tortured their sons, daughters or 
neighbours will now be carrying out 'community service' brings 
little solace to most Colombians."

Colombia's paramilitaries have rarely made any attempt to hide 
their activities or their identities. Yet the government claims 
to be unable to catch them or bring them to trial.

Green light for bloody acts

Instead, as Colombian journalist Mauricio Vargas pointed out in 
the magazine Semana, it has now given them a green light 
to intensify their bloody acts. "The paramilitaries are currently 
acting without restraint because they know that whatever criminal 
acts they commit now will be pardoned the moment they 
demobilise."

Last month the British newspaper The Guardian reported 
that over 80 Colombian organisations concerned with civil rights 
had issued a report which asserted that Uribe's "authoritarian 
government" had "overseen a dramatic increase in extra-judicial 
killings, civilian massacres and other abuses".

The report contained what even the Army chief, General Jorge 
Mora, called "extensively documented links" between the Army and 
the paramilitaries. At the same time he claimed that the rights 
groups had "fabricated" the evidence "in order to justify their 
own existence".

President Uribe's response was to label the rights groups 
"cowards" and "terrorist sympathisers". Such labelling amounts to 
an open invitation to right-wing paramilitaries to carry out 
assassinations and other terrorist acts against these groups.

While President Uribe is bending over backwards to "integrate" 
the paramilitaries into Colombian society, he is spurning the 
peace overtures of the popular guerrilla movements, the ELN and 
the FARC-EP.

To no one's surprise, the New York Times reports that the 
Bush White House is giving the Uribe plan its "full support".

A Republican Congressman from South Carolina named Greshman 
Barrett apparently thinks the Bush Administration is too soft on 
"terrorists". He has introduced a bill into the US Congress with 
the catchy name, Stop Terrorists Entry Program Act.

The seemingly clumsy name allows the bill to be known by its 
acronym as the STEP Act. Ain't that cute?

The STEP Act, if passed, would prohibit anyone from countries 
designated by the US State Department as "state sponsors of 
terrorism" from studying in, working in or just visiting the USA.

Currently the State Department list includes Iraq, Iran, Cuba, 
Libya, Syria and North Korea but not, of course, the US itself 
and its Middle East surrogate Israel. This seems more than a 
little quaint considering just how much actual terrorism the US 
and its Israeli protigi really do sponsor.

Barrett's bill also aims to prevent naturalised US citizens from 
the designated countries bringing their relatives into the USA as 
migrants under family reunion provisions. And it gives current 
visitors and non-immigrant students from those countries just 60 
days to leave the US.

The thinking behind the bill is a little unclear. It is 
apparently meant to "punish" countries that get on the State 
Department's list. The guys who hijacked the airliners on 
September 11 and flew them into the Twin Towers came from Saudi 
Arabia and Yemen, neither of which is on the list, so the bill 
would not have kept them out.

Paranoia, arrogance

Paranoia? Definitely. And arrogance, too. A very unhealthy 
combination!

George W Bush seems totally unaware of the actual meaning of the 
speeches he reads off the autocue. Take the extraordinary one he 
made at the UN General Assembly on September 23:

"Events during the past two years", intoned Bush, "have set 
before us the clearest of divides: Between those who seek order, 
and those who spread chaos; between those who work for peaceful 
change, and those who adopt the methods of gangsters; between 
those who honour the rights of man, and those who deliberately 
take the lives of men, and women, and children, without mercy or 
shame."

He is absolutely right, of course, but sees himself on the side 
of "those who seek order ... work for peaceful change ... and 
honour the rights of man". Not many other people see him on that 
side.

Take "seeking order" vs "spreading chaos". Immediately before 
Bush's speech, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan warned the General 
Assembly that pre-emptive war and unilateralism, two strategies 
that Bush has embraced, threatened to destroy more than half a 
century of international order and spread the "lawless use of 
force".

During the Iraq war, Bush gleefully posed as a gung ho fighter 
pilot, while real US airmen were deliberately killing thousands 
of Iraqi "men, women and children, without mercy or shame".

And only someone whose thinking was seriously deformed could 
possibly confuse the Anglo-US invasion of Iraq with "working for 
peaceful change". It certainly smacks of "the methods of 
gangsters" to me.