Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Global Issues
Slave Trade Still Part of U.S. Labor Market
01 year ago
“The bosses carried weapons. They scared me. I never knew where I was. We were transported every fifteen days to different cities. I knew if I tried to escape I would not get far because everything was unfamiliar. The bosses said that if we escaped they would get their money from our families.”
–Congressional testimony of Maria, trafficking survivor from Mexico
The legacy of slavery in America is inextricably bound with the history of the nation. And the State Department has finally acknowledged that, even today, people continue to be bought and sold as property.
The State Department’s 2010 Trafficking in Persons report, a global review of human trafficking and civic and legal responses to it, for the first time ranks the United States among the nations that harbor modern-day slavery.
Although the report, released last week, gives the United States relatively high marks for its law enforcement and civic efforts to combat trafficking, victims are scattered throughout the workforce: the captive migrant tomato picker, the prostitute bonded by a smuggling debt, the domestic servant working around the clock without pay.
The media have often focused on dramatic narratives of young girls lured into prostitution rings. But government data suggests that “more foreign victims are found in labor trafficking than sex trafficking,” particularly in “above ground” sectors like hotel work and home health care. Official estimates vary widely, but the number of victims could be more than 12 million children and adults worldwide.
Although citizens have also been trafficked, immigrant workers are uniquely at risk. The top countries of origin for foreign trafficking victims, according to the State Department, are Thailand, Mexico, Philippines, Haiti, India, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.
Today’s slave trade capitalizes on vast inequalities across national borders, wrought by migration and economic globalization. Many governments have instituted anti-trafficking policies, but with uneven success. The report states that 23 countries got an “upgrade” in the ranking of their anti-trafficking programs. But 19 countries were “downgraded” due to “sparse victim protections, desultory implementation, or inadequate legal structures.”
Despite the country’s relative wealth and sophisticated legal infrastructure, slavery trickles into the United States the same way it does everywhere else, through deep cracks in labor and immigration laws.
Victims often remain hidden because they fear the cost of attempting escape; they depend on their bosses not only for their livelihoods but also protection from immigration authorities if they are undocumented. Moreover, legal status is hardly a safeguard against exploitation, and temporary worker visas may even facilitate trafficking. Stephanie Richard, director of policy with the Los Angeles-based Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), told In These Times:
We’re actually seeing an increase in the number of cases of people coming in lawfully, on lawful visas, and then ending up in human trafficking… because people are using those visas as one of the forms of coercion for keeping people working for them against their will.
To its credit, the State Department’s report stresses that anti-trafficking measures should not just emphasize cracking down on trafficking crimes, and that a comprehensive “victim-centered” approach should “focus on all victims, offering them the opportunity to access shelter, comprehensive services, and in certain cases, immigration relief.”
But advocates fear that bureaucratic rules put basic humanitarian benefits out of reach for many victims. To qualify for special immigration relief for trafficking survivors known as the T-Visa, survivors essentially must cooperate with a law enforcement investigation—a process that advocates say can be humiliating and traumatic. That may be one reason why the number of T-visas granted annually is far smaller than the estimated scope of the problem. (And despite pressure to bring survivors into the criminal process, the Department of Justice’s Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit pulled through only 43 human trafficking prosecutions in fiscal 2009.)
Though the government has documented major strides since the enactment of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, this year’s report continues to gloss over the systemic failures that underwrite the bottomless thirst for cheap labor—or even better, free labor.
Sienna Baskin, an attorney with the advocacy initiative Sex Workers Project—which is currently campaigning for legislation to protect the rights of trafficked sex workers in New York—sees a continuum between the trafficking epidemic and immigration and law enforcement policies that criminalize victims:
A highly punitive and restrictive immigration system is a factor that leads people to take risks in migrating, sometimes ending up trafficked, although we must also look at poverty, persecution and gender inequities as factors. The growing problem of labor exploitation could be lessened by comprehensive immigration reform that provides visas and fair wages to all workers.
In California, Richard noted that CAST links its assistance programs for trafficking victims to a wider network of community groups fighting for worker justice:
We believe that there is a spectrum of labor exploitation and abuse that’s just unacceptable in this country. And actually, some of the work that we do is taking steps to address the whole spectrum, with the idea in mind that we don’t want people to end up in a trafficking situation.
The Florida-based Coalition of Imokalee Workers merges anti-trafficking and labor activism in their campaigns for farmworkers’ rights. The group was recently honored by the White House for its Campaign for Fair Food, which has successfully pressured corporations to adjust their labor policies across the supply chain, from the tomato farms all the way up to brand-name restaurants like Taco Bell.
At the event announcing the new report, Laura Germino, coordinator of the Coalition’s Anti-slavery Campaign, reflected on the work left to be done. Just twenty years ago, she said:
There was no admission yet by this great nation that the unbroken threat of slavery that has so tragically woven through our history, taking on different patterns, but always weaving the horrendous deprivation of liberty – that it was a constant.
But here’s the good part. There was nowhere to go but up.
Over three centuries into America’s path toward emancipation, the government’s recent, belated steps to combat modern slavery evoke both wary hope and historical shame. Now, at least, we may finally be reaching the right side of a long arc of tragedy.
Cross-posted from In These Times.
Remembrance: Soweto Massacre and Bloody Sunday
01 year ago
This week brings somber remembrances of two acts of massive brutality that occurred about a generation ago on opposite ends of the hemisphere. Both incidents exposed the shame of racial or ethnic strife under colonization, both galvanized radical social movements that later rose to overturn the establishment, and both demonstrated lessons about the power of mass protest, as well as the power of the media to frame and expose injustice to observers around the world.
In South Africa today, World Cup followers are remembering the 1976 Soweto Uprising, a bloody clash between the apartheid regime and student protesters opposed to the white-supremacist education system, which left an untold number dead. Amid the air of triumph surrounding the first African World Cup, South Africans and the rest of the world can reflect on the long journey from apartheid to a vision of post-colonial democratic peace, which in many ways remains more aspirational than real.
Citizens of Ireland and the United Kingdom revisited a similar stain left by another colonial legacy in Northern Ireland. The new British Prime Minister David Cameron delivered a sharply worded, if long overdue apology for the Bloody Sunday massacre in Londonderry in 1972. The families of the protesters who were killed in the clash finally obtained some vindication and closure, as an official report declared that they were indeed the victims of a brutal crackdown by army soldiers.
The Irish and South African youth born after these tragedies might have trouble recognizing the images, now that their respective communities have spent decades in the process of collective healing, to varying degrees of success. But when you look and listen closely, the trauma still resonates with today’s ongoing struggles against imperialism and oppressive regimes. The background may have shifted to other parts of the world, but the narrative remains constant, and we’re all responsible for holding the focus.
Image: Hector Pieterson was killed on June 16, 1976 (Sam Mzima, ezakwantu.com)
Mailorder Wombs: Outsourcing Birth to India
01 year ago
So much of America’s economic activity takes place on faraway shores, from call centers in Mumbai to sweatshops in Shanghai. Still, you’d think that making a baby would be one job that’s hard to offshore. But today, for a fee, a woman in another country can serve as a “gestational surrogate,” carrying a fertilized egg to term and then delivering the baby straight to your door, halfway around the world. We’re not used to talking about that kind of labor as an outsourced job. But farmed-out childbirth has become a full-fledged industry in India, turning the rural poor into wombs for hire.
The practice has become increasingly common with new advancements in in-vitro fertilization. The efficiency of the technology raises ethical, legal and cultural questions about the meaning of parentage.
Like Autotune and drone warfare, the transaction might feel disturbingly mechanized: someone, an infertile couple, for example, creates an embryo in a lab, ships it abroad for gestation in a stranger’s body, then takes possession again after birth. But in a consensual financial arrangement, what’s the big deal, really? There’s less (but still some) stigma surrounding child care services, though that also involves contracting out the duties of motherhood.
But maybe what makes the global surrogacy market so different is that the service providers are women in poor countries who feel compelled to lease their bodies to care for their own families.
In a parallel to the international adoption controversy, the potential for coercion is pervasive: To what extent are impoverished surrogates really free to negotiate their labor, especially if they are controlled by a childbirth clinic that regularly processes “recruits” into a $445 million industry.
Nicole Bromfield at RH RealityCheck describes the dynamics of the “recruitment” of rural Indian women:
In some of the Indian clinics, the surrogates are recruited from rural villages, with most recruits being poor and illiterate. Surrogacy recruits are brought to the clinics where they are required to stay in the clinic’s living quarters in a guarded dormitory-like setting for the entire pregnancy. Supposedly this practice not only allows the clinics to monitor the surrogates’ activities and behaviors during the pregnancy, but also is seen as protecting the surrogate from ridicule by family members and neighbors; most Indian women acting as surrogates keep it a secret because it is seen as dirty or immoral. What is alarming about the recruiting process is that it is notably similar to the recruitment process used by human traffickers to coerce rural women into sex work in cities. Also similar to other trafficking situations, the women have to sign documents (often in English) that they cannot read and then are kept “under lock and key” until the obligations set forth in the contract are fulfilled. Most surrogacy contracts prohibit sexual contact between surrogates and their husbands and surrogates are generally allowed only minimal contact with their partners in any case.
This regulation of the bodies of surrogate women (typically young, impoverished, and of color) challenges common assumptions about individual rights in the global labor market. Even outside the ethical debate on surrogacy itself, there’s a clear need for government oversight to ensure that both the women, and the babies they are commissioned to bring into the world, are protected from abuse.
Noting that some families have faced legal disputes over the citizenship of global-surrogate babies, Bromfield writes, “it is imperative that global standards be developed and the USA, European, and other nations take an active role in setting requirements. This can be done under rights of citizenship and immigration.”
As with most global trades, it all comes down to price: Bromfield reports, “Surrogacy costs about $12,000 to $20,000 per birth in India, whereas in the U.S., it is upwards of $70,000 to $100,000.” A rural Indian woman may earn roughly $5,000 to $7,000 from the surrogate pregnancy, far more than a regular low-paying job. But the easy flow of money across borders underscores another ethical quagmire. The same pattern emerges in global migration: wealth crosses national boundaries and products flow back the other way, but the movement of workers and families is brutally restricted. For better or worse, transnational surrogacy challenges us to reconcile human relations with commercial transactions in the global marketplace.
FIFA’s World Cup Having a Ball With Child Labor
01 year ago
by Michelle Chen
in africa, apartheid, childlabor, children, china, football, Global Issues, india, Labor, pakistan, soccer, southafrica, Sports, sportsandpolitics, thailand, worldcup
South Africa is the center of world this week, kicking off the
first-ever World Cup Games on the African continent. But as the cameras
pan across green fields and lavish festivities, labor activists are
keeping their eye on the ball.
According to a report on soccer ball manufacturing from the
International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), more than a decade since the
sporting goods industry was scandalized over rampant child labor abuses,
the exploitation continues. In Pakistan, India, China and Thailand,
ILRF says, “precarious labor, low wages, poor working conditions and
violations of freedom of association and collective bargaining rights
are found in the value chain of hand-stitched soccer balls.”
As degraded child workers in Asia supply the games played by other
youth around the world, FIFA promotes a platform of “corporate social
responsibility.” Since the late 1990s, following international condemnation of labor abuses in Pakistan,
FIFA has established a Social Responsibility code, “pledged its commitment
to fight child labour and has been supporting the International Labour
Organization (ILO) and its International Programme for the Elimination
of Child Labour (IPEC) in its efforts towards eradicating child labour
from the soccer ball industry in Pakistan.”
Additionally, FIFA now plans to develop twenty “Football for Hope
Centres to promote public health, education and football in
disadvantaged communities across Africa,” based on missions such as
rehabilitating children with disabilities and promoting the
socioeconomic advancement of women.
But the ILRF report suggests that the glossy charity projects are
overshadowed by the failure of the industry to live up to the principles
of the 1997
Atlanta Agreement, including both abolishing child labor and
fostering rehabilitation and education in manufacturing communities.
In India, soccer balls are at the center of a deeply entrenched labor
hierarchy: “Half of India’s stitchers live below the poverty line, and
90% of these households are part of the ‘untouchables’ caste…. Under
such conditions, families have no choice but to make their children
work.”
The ball isn’t the only symbol of oppression at play at the games;
the lavish stadiums sit astride signs of racial and economic inequalities that have exploded in recent years. According to Khadija Sharife of the South Africa-based Center for
Civil Soviety, “estimated expenditure for new stadiums totalled
US$1,346.9 billion,” and FIFA “has already cashed in” on the spending
spree spawned by aggressive overdevelopment leading up to the games.
Sharife argues, “Fifa’s Cup erodes rather than aids SA’s political
economy,” and the country will see little long-term benefit, as job
creation and tourism have fallen short of rosy expectations.
Critics in South Africa even doubt the potential to boost national
pride, as the games mainly cater to affluent foreigners and price out a
huge portion of Africans. Columnist Andile Mngxitama told the UK
Independent:
The World Cup is a colonial playground for the rich and for a few
wannabes in the so-called South African elite… Whereas in the past we
were conquered, the South African government has simply invited the
colonisers this time.
The ANC government’s branding attempt in fact started showing cracks
long before the kickoff. In a 2008 issue of Against the Current, Sam Ross
reported:
In September 2007, construction workers building the new Green Point
stadium in Cape Town demanded increased compensation for travel costs
to the worksite. After two strikes in a month, 1,000 workers were
locked out of the stadium, which will host the World Cup Semi-finals.In
early October 2007… FIFA Organizing Committee’s Chief Competitions
Officer Dennis Mumble claimed the committee was “very happy with the
progress being made and believe more than ever that we are on track to
host an extremely successful 2010 World Cup.” He made no mention of
labor disputes or of the fact more than one million South African
workers went on strike between June and October.
Since then, strikes
have popped up regularly, including a major transport
union strike in May. Meanwhile, class strife has swelled with the
threat of displacement. A ban on street vendors has stoked public frustration. And the longstanding
Black township Joe Slovo in the Western Cape, Socialist Worker reports
that some 20,000 people have resisted the authorities’ attempts to
evict them:
Zodwa Nsibande is the youth league secretary of Abahlali base
Mjondolo, a movement of shack dwellers set up to protect and advocate
for people living in shacks.“People are being forced from
their homes and treated like animals,” she told Socialist Worker. “We
live under constant threat. People are scared to move because they know
they can’t come back – they will have built something on the land.”…In South Africa the police have also been instructed to clear the
streets of homeless people for the World Cup.Isaac Lewis, who is homeless, has been arrested six times in the
past month for loitering.“Police harassment is increasing,” he says. “They want to make a
good impression for the foreigners coming. We are like insects to them -
like flies.”
And so South Africa joins a long tradition of mass sporting events
causing mass displacement. A study by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions,
published in 2007 ahead of the Beijing Olympics, found that “The
Olympic Games have displaced more than two million people in the last
20 years, disproportionately affecting minorities such as the homeless,
the poor, Roma and African-Americans.”
It’s inevitable, perhaps, that in a sporting event that draws
together people of all classes, creeds and colors, shameful paradoxes
will emerge: the interplay between child workers in Pakistan and sports
industry marketing agendas; the dissonance between the overbuilt
stadiums and the poverty of the workers who poured their sweat into the
concrete.
In such a starkly divided polity, Udesh Pillay, co-editor of Development and Dreams: The urban legacy of the 2010
Football World Cup, told the AP that the Cup “now is the emotional glue
that holds the country together.”
After the last match is
played, South Africans will seek another goal to bind the fractured
nation together. That pursuit, symbolically tied to the fate of the
entire Global South, should compel South Africa to return to the suspended vision of equity that defeated
apartheid, but today remains an unfinished triumph.
Cross-posted from In These Times
Photo: Two Indian children stitch soccer balls in late 2007 in Meerut, India. (Courtesy International
Labor Rights Forum/BBA)
Today in Anti-Muslim Party Politics: Dutch Edition
01 year ago
by Michelle Chen
in belgium, dutch, Elections, eu, europe, france, Global Issues, Integration, islam, muslim, netherlands
With the Tea Party making inroads in primaries across the country, you might think the rabid outbursts and vapid sloganeering are a peculiarly American phenomenon. But in fact, Thursday’s elections in the Netherlands show that the U.S. has no monopoly on right-wing anger.
The far-right Party for Freedom (it’s got a familiar ring to it, no?), led by anti-Muslim zealot Geert Wilders, has run on a platform of zero tolerance for the country’s burgeoning Muslim population. In Thursday’s elections, the party won 24 seats out of 150, nearly doubling its standing in Parliament. Many were surprised to see that a country known for its liberal culture and social policy has done a 180 at the polls, making a hard-right faction the third-ranking party in the government, behind the Liberal (VVD) and Labour (PvdA) parties.
Wilders–who is facing criminal charges of inciting racial hatred and was refused entry to the United Kingdom due to his anti-Islamic propagandandizing–is now emboldened to continue pushing his agenda of eradicating Islam from the Dutch public arena. His major initiative is a ban on the immigration of Muslims.
Wilders outlined his rationale to RT.com in March:
“The majority of Muslims in our Western societies are law-abiding people like you and me,” Wilders said. “Still, I want to stop the immigration of people from the Islamic countries because they still bring a lot of culture that is not ours. Look at all the countries for instance in the Middle East where Islam is dominant – you see no rule of law, no functioning parliament, no civil society.”
To deal with Muslims already living in the Netherlands, Wilders wants to stamp out new construction of Mosques and ban Muslim women from wearing a veil in public. Unfortunately, his racism isn’t even original; similar anti-veil crackdowns have emerged in France and Belgium as well.
Muslims, most of them of Turkish and Moroccan descent, currently make up about 6.5 percent of the national population of 16.5 million. The large size of the community helps explain why the white Dutch public might feel anxious about the growing Muslim presence in the Netherlands. But it also underscores how a supposedly “tolerant” country has failed to live up to principles of pluralism and cultural openness at a time when social inclusion is more crucial than ever.
As economic anxieties mesh with underlying xenophobia across Europe, Wilders may see his party as the vanguard of a right-wing resurgence. In fact, he has expressed eagerness to use his criminal trial to “expose” Islam to the public and present evidence that the religion poses a social threat. Whatever he reveals in court, Wilders has already exposed plenty about the roots of his country’s political confusion. When compared with the conservative backlash in the U.S., the shift in Dutch politics show that the vilification of Islam and immigrants has little to do with preserving any country’s unique “values” or “identity.” It has a lot more to do with the public’s generalized sense of insecurity and frustration, which quickly shades into hostility toward anything, and anyone, representing change.
Photo: Getty Images/Dan Kitwood
Obama and Abbas to Discuss, but Not Deal with Gaza Crisis
01 year ago
UPDATE 5:45 PM ET: Pres. Obama pledged $400 million in
U.S. aid for the West Bank and Gaza today following a meeting with
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. According to the White House, the
aid will be used to build housing and schools. In a statement, the
White House said, the “projects represent a down payment on the United
States’ commitment to Palestinians in Gaza, who deserve a better life
and expanded opportunities, and the
chance to take part in building a viable, independent state of
Palestine, together with those who live in the West Bank.”
It’s
still unclear however, how the aid will be distributed as long as
Israel’s blockade of Gaza remains in place. Additional questions about
implementation are raised because the funds would be administered by
Abbas whose party governs only the West Bank, not Gaza, where Hamas is
the governing party.
…………………………
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas arrives at the White House today for a meeting with President Obama that’s not likely to alter the core problems for the administration’s policy on Gaza. As international calls for Israel to end its blockade of Gaza grow, the United States continues to refuse to either outright condemn the Israeli raid on a humanitarian flotilla headed to Gaza or call for an end to the blockade, which has deprived Gaza residents of basic goods for three years.
An Obama administration official told the AP that Obama and Abbas will “discuss steps to improve life for the people of Gaza, including U.S. support for specific projects to promote economic development and greater quality of life.” But it’s unclear exactly how this will be possible if the Israeli blockade remains intact.
The U.S. has been unwilling to do anything that might appear to
support the Hamas government in Gaza, while simultaneously affirming
its commitment to easing the effects of the blockade on Gazans. Abbas
today is expected to make some proposal for ensuring Israeli security
if the blockade is eased. But Israel remains committed to its policy
toward Gaza and without significant U.S. pressure to open the region, a
shift is unlikely.
While Gaza is likely to dominate today’s discussions, a White House
official also said that the Obama and Abbas will discuss the future of
peace talks between the Israeli government and the Palestinian
Authority. “We look forward to engaging with President Abbas to move
the process forward so that we can get to direct talks to address all
the final status issues,” the official said, according to AP.
With no irony intended, the U.S. official said Obama would call on
Palestinians and Israelis to “ensure that neither side take provocative
steps that could stand in the way of progress.” Given the Israeli
attacks on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, this week’s killing of six
Palestinians and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to
stop building settlements in the West Bank, that contribution to the
discussion seems a little late.
Photo: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
Another Ship Heads to Gaza, Israel Again Vows to Protect Blockade
01 year ago
A new ship is headed to Gaza today, and the Israeli government has once again vowed to stop the vessel.
The boat, which flies the Irish flag, is named the Rachel Corrie, after the young American student crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli army bulldozer as she attempted to block the demolition of a house in Gaza.
Israel has said it will prevent the boat to arrive in Gaza, saying that such an allowance would end the breach the country’s blockage on Gaza. The AP reports,”The Rachel Corrie’s cargo of concrete is also a problem, because Israel considers that to have military uses.” Concrete is necessary to rebuild Gaza, which was largely flattened a year and half ago when Israel bombed the tiny 1.5 million-person area.
As international condemnation continues over the Monday killing of nine international civilians aboard a previous flotilla of aid ships, the United States has remained relatively muted, asking for an international investigation into what transpired that day but refusing to outright condemn Israeli actions. While new reports arose yesterday that the U.S. tried to dissuade Israel from acting with force against the flotilla, President Obama has not joined international calls to end the blockade on Gaza.
Read my Colorlines essay on Gaza and how the U.S. conversation about Israeli violence is still bound by false equivalencies and feigned victimhood. Click here.
Will American’s Death in Gaza Flotilla Change U.S. Stance on Israel?
01 year ago
An American citizen is reported to be among the 9 people killed by Israeli solders aboard a flotilla of ships headed to Gaza on Monday. Turkish investigators have identified one of the bodies flown from Israel to Turkey yesterday as a U.S. citizen of Turkish descent.
Thus far, the official U.S. response to the attack on the Free Gaza Flotilla has been muted. The Obama Administration has called for an investigation into the events but has refused to officially condemn the killings. Now that a U.S. citizen is known to be among the dead, one wonders if this will change.
Already, the reports that a U.S. citizen was killed sparked a new story about the government’s efforts to convince Israel to act with restraint when stopping the flotilla. The Washington Post reports:
The Obama administration said Wednesday that it had warned Israel’s government repeatedly to use “caution and restraint” with the half-dozen aid boats bound for Gaza before Israeli commandos raided the flotilla this week in the operation that killed nine people.
…White House officials said Wednesday that there is a growing consensus within the administration that U.S. and Israeli policy toward Gaza must change, even as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu flatly rejected calls for his country to lift its blockade of the Palestinian territory.
It still remains to be seen whether a shift in policy toward Israel will actually occur. Thus far, U.S. response to the killings has been fallen predictably within the standard American policy frame on Israeli violence. As I wrote yesterday in ColorLines, when Israeli violence is too egregious, the U.S. government hides behind “false moral equivalencies,” wherein the actions of armed commandos are compared to those of unarmed civilians. It’s a calculated attempt, as a Haaretz editorial put it last week, to give “the impression that Israel, not Gaza, is under a brutal siege.
This is not the first time that Israel has killed a U.S. citizen human rights worker. In 2003, an Israeli bulldozer operator on route to demolish a Palestinian home ran over and killed Rachel Corrie while she attempted to block the demolition. That horrific incident had no effect on US policy toward Israel, especially with regard to military aid, which has only continued increase.
As another ship streams toward Gaza, this one named The Rachel Corrie, let’s hope the U.S. is indeed applying the pressure needed.
American Occupation Casts Long Shadows Over Okinawa
01 year ago
On Memorial Day, America honored its war dead. Across the Pacific Ocean, the ghosts of war continue to haunt the coastline of Japan, now awash in political angst over the military base on the island of Okinawa.
Last week, the Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama apologized profusely to the public for reneging on his earlier commitment to shut down the U.S. military base on the small island. For years, local communities have grown increasingly frustrated and disgusted with the legacy of the postwar American occupation. The noise disruption and fears of violence and crime related to the base have strained the relationship between service members and the civilians whose land has been taken over in the name of security.
After months of campaigning and massive protest, public opinion about Japan’s conciliatory posture toward the U.S. (no doubt influenced by tensions surrounding North and South Korea) has been unforgiving, in large part because Hatoyama campaigned on a promise of removing the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma from the island.
Many hoped the Prime Minister would revise a 2006 accord with the U.S. and move the base off its current location, a bustling urban area. But the government ran into logistical hurdles and in the end caved to its own political timidity.
The AP reports:
The move infuriated Okinawans who have long shouldered the heavy U.S. military presence. Okinawa alone houses more than half of the 47,000 U.S. troops in Japan, stationed under a bilateral defense alliance.
For years, Okinawans have complained about base-related noise, pollution and crime, and many want the military presence on the island reduced or the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma moved off the island entirely.
A separate survey by the Yomiuri, Japan’s top-selling newspaper, showed Monday some 81 percent of respondents disapproved of Hatoyama’s decision to keep the U.S. base on Okinawa. Nearly 60 percent called for his resignation over the issue.
John Chan sums up the back story on wsws.org:
Concerns about pollution, accidents and the economic impact are bound up with wider anti-militarist sentiments.
Okinawa played a significant role as a springboard for the US-led wars in Korea and Vietnam, provoking sustained demonstrations against the latter, and the US military presence, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The region remained under direct US administration until 1972 when protests forced its return to Japanese control. Controversy flared again after the brutal rape of a young schoolgirl by US servicemen in 1995.
The animosity toward Okinawa isn’t just about national pride or sovereignty. It reflects of a deeper historical grievance against the U.S. military presence in Asia since the monstrous, racially charged brutality of World War II. In the wake of the mushroom cloud, Japanese imperialism yielded to Washington’s soft colonialism. The Cold War’s Pax Americana projected U.S. power through a network of military outposts from Guam to South Korea, paving the way for more bloodbaths in Vietnam.
So today, Japan’s body politic is struggling to cast off Washington’s dominipn, while the Obama administration brandishes a new foreign policy framework based on tempered liberal internationalism and “soft power.” But it doesn’t look like leaders on either side of the Pacific are willing to break the status quo left by their predecessors. The Okinawa base still stands as a symbol of an invidious occupation, and the communities living in the shadow of the U.S. hegemony every day grow more and more resentful of their “protectors.”
UPDATE: On Wednesday, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama announced his resignation, bringing to an end a short reign marred by public outrage over Okinawa.
Image: “Protesters in Okinawa, Japan shout a slogan during a March 23 rally against an alleged rape in February of a 14-year-old girl by a U.S. Marine.” (Itsuo Inouye / The Associated Press)
U.S. Brings Drug War to Jamaica, Death Toll Up to 50
01 year ago
Police patrol the streets outside the neighborhood of Tivoli Gardens in Kingston. REUTERS/Andrew P. Smith
Efforts to extradite an alleged Jamaican drug lord to the United States have led to a violent standoff between civilians and armed forces in Jamaica. Reuters is reporting that the death toll hit 49 last night after police broke through a barricade set up to protect Christopher “Dudus” Coke, often called the most powerful man in Jamaica.
Coke is wanted in the U.S. on charges of marijuana, cocaine and arms trafficking, and faces life in prison if found guilty. He is the alleged leader of a Kingston-based gang called the Shower Posse, with outposts scattered up and down the East Coast, Canada and the U.K. Since Prime Minister Bruce Golding announced he would honor the U.S. extradition request last week, Coke’s base in the poor neighborhood of Tivoli Gardens in Kingston has barricaded the neighborhood.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Golding declared a state of emergency after sending over a thousand armed troops to try to break through a barricade that Coke’s supporters had built around the Tivoli Gardens neighborhood of Kingston. Earlier this week, supporters of Coke’s firebombed police stations around the nation’s capital.
Coke is also seen as a local hero; hundreds of Coke’s supporters, wearing all white, turned out in the streets over the weekend hailing him as a generous leader who’s funded the health care and education of many Jamaicans.
The United States indicted Coke back in August but Golding signed the extradition request only two weeks ago. The Prime Minister maintained that the evidence against Coke was gathered illegally, but Coke also has incredible power in the small island country. Last week Golding admitted that he had retained a U.S.-based law firm to lobby on behalf of Coke.
”The government deeply regrets the loss of lives of members of the security forces, and those of innocent, law-abiding citizens who were caught in the cross fire,” Mr Golding told the House of Representatives on Tuesday.
Coke is still at large.