US base | ukwatch.net

Iraq: New US plan for total control

Ellie Keen — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

George Bush is ending the pretence that Iraq is a “democratic state”. He is imposing new “security accords” that will strip the country of its sovereignty and allow it to be used as a platform to launch more wars.

This is the thrust of a secret treaty – known as the Status of Forces Agreement – that is being imposed on the country.

Even the puppet Iraqi parliament and its pro-occupation allies have found it difficult to stomach.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis took to the streets last week as the provisions in the “accords” were leaked to the Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat.

Bush wants to establish 400 permanent military installations, including bases near the Turkish, Iranian and Syrian borders.

According to one pro-US Kurdish leader these bases will “exist for the next 15 or 20 years”.

Included in the treaty is the right for the US to launch wars on “third countries” from Iraqi soil.

This is a direct threat against Iraq’s neighbours and another step towards a war on Iran.

But for many Iraqis, the biggest insult in the new treaty is that all US troops, citizens and mercenaries – the so-called contractors – will be immune from Iraqi law.

Under these terms, occupation forces can use deadly force under any conditions, giving them a green light to arrest, imprison or kill any Iraqi with no fear of prosecution or regard for the country’s institutions.

Also included in the treaty is a provision that all deals and undertakings for reconstruction contracts negotiated since the occupation began will become null and void. This clears the way for a US monopoly over the economy.

The US previously agreed to share these contracts with Iraqi firms in an attempt to draw them into co-operating with the occupation. But this strategy failed to quell resistance to the occupation. So now the US wants unlimited access to, and control over, the country’s wealth.

Britain and the US repeatedly said in the run-up to the invasion that they would respect Iraq’s sovereignty, end repression and build a democracy. Now they no longer bother with that lie.

But as before, the US has seriously miscalculated.

A broad spectrum of Iraqis have condemned the deal, which is due to be signed by prime minister Nuri al-Maliki before the end of July.

Rebel Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who has led three uprisings against the occupation, denounced the accords as “a project of humiliation”.

The Association of Muslim Scholars, the mouthpiece of the mainly Sunni Muslim sections of the resistance, said the deal would pave the way for total “military, economic and cultural domination” of the country.

Referendum

Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq’s vice‑president and a stalwart of the occupation, said the country’s sovereignty is a “red line” which the US is attempting to cross.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the highest Shia Muslim authority in Iraq, is demanding a popular referendum. He said he would not allow Iraq to sign such an accord “as long as he was alive”.

Even Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the pro-US Badr Brigades, has objected.

Faced with this growing opposition, US ambassador Ryan Crocker threatened to strip Iraq’s puppet regime of any authority if it refused to rubber stamp the accords.

The latest US plan for Iraq confirms the worst fears of the anti-war movement in the run‑up to the invasion.

We warned then that behind the talk of “humanitarian intervention” and “democracy” lay a plan for total subjugation and endless war.

These accords show how that plan can become a reality.

The fight is still on to stop US and British warmongering in the Middle East and around the world. For this reason we have to turn out in massive numbers to protest against George Bush’s visit to Britain on 15 June.

Marooned by the Special Relationship

Ellie Keen — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:04:08 +0000

Of course we are all shocked, shocked, that the CIA would have misled the British government about renditions taking place via so-called British territory Diego Garcia.

But we should also be shocked that Whitehall did not suspect or know about it. We would not be that shocked if it turned out that that the CIA’s assurances that none of the prisoners were tortured was more than a little wobbly. Indeed, five years ago, exactly such questions were being raised – and waffled away by Tony Blair’s ministers. It is, let us say, coyly, not beyond probability that the CIA, which lies to its own legislators, may be economical with the truth with satellite state governments.

But apart from putting some truth in Robert Harris’s novel The Ghost about a former British prime minister wanted by the International Criminal Court for aiding and abetting just such rendition, the brief flurry of interest in these islands may remind people worldwide of the original mass rendition, by which the British deported the island’s inhabitants in order to hand over a nominal British colony to effective American control.

Luckily, the politicians involved then are now mostly dead, and the ICC has no retrospective authority, otherwise the ethnic cleansing and continued exclusion of the inhabitants would be subject to prosecution, as indeed would be complicity in the renditions.

Indeed, the British signature on the International Court of Justice, which precludes liability for any act occurring before 1974 and from any present or past member of the Commonwealth, also handily stops the Seychelles from protesting the timely removal of the islands from its jurisdiction just before independence.

Of course the American presence, and the islanders’ absence from their home, is all in the name of defending the world for democracy and the rule of law – which is why the British government is defying successive court rulings in favour of the cleansees.

Indeed Diego Garcia is the distilled essence of the “special relationship” between Britain and the US. The British government stole the islands from their own inhabitants and the Seychellois, and handed them over rent-free to the US in return for a discount on the Polaris submarines that in turn marked the end of the genuinely independent British deterrent that the post-war Labour government had strived for, and tied the country’s fate almost inextricably to the US. It involved giving up Blue Streak, the successful rocket which would have allowed Britain to have a presence in space as well.

Harold McMillan, who did the Polaris deal, believed like Blair that Britain could be Athens to Washington’s Rome. He had marginally better expectations of constructive results from John F Kennedy than Blair did from his diplomatic duet with George Bush. At the insistence of the latter, Blair over-rode decisions of British courts on letting the inhabitants of Diego Garcia return.

Surely it’s time for a declaration of independence. The lease of Diego Garcia is up for renewal in 2016. Britain should let the islanders back immediately and let them take it over then and join the Seychelles if they wish. And it should drop the pretensions to “independent” nuclear power and give up on the Trident replacement. Any relationship that involves the country in violations of international human rights law is indeed “special”, but it is not necessarily desirable.

A People Without A Home

Ellie Keen — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 01:03:54 +0000

Earlier this month, there was a small but hugely significant demonstration outside Number 10 Downing Street, the home of the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

A group of islanders from the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean asked the government to stop preventing them from returning home. It is something they have been asking the British for forty years.

It was in 1966 that that the British started forcibly removing some 2000 islanders from their beautiful homeland of coral atolls that lies midway between Africa and Asia.

The British had just done a secret deal with the Americans, letting them use the main island, Diego Garcia, as a strategically-positioned airbase to counter the perceived Soviet threat for a period of fifty years. In return the British got access to American nuclear missiles at a greatly reduced cost. A non-negotiable part of the deal was the eviction of the local population at whatever the human cost.

So began yet another disgraceful episode in British foreign policy – an injustice that burns brightly to this day. Veteran investigative journalist, John Pilger, writing in his book “Freedom Next Time” which was published last year, describes how “Not only was their homeland stolen from them, they were taken out of history. Until recently, the [British] Foreign Office website denied their very existence”.

Documents from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) from the time show the deceit the British planned. Internal FCO documents described how any deportations should be “timed to attract the least attention and should have some logical cover where possible worked out in advance [otherwise] they will arouse suspicion as to their purpose”.

Other documents argued that once the local population had been removed, the British would present to the outside world “a scenario in which there were no permanent inhabitants on the archipelago”. This they did. The FCO wrote to the British Representative at the UN asking him to lie to the General Assembly that the Chagros Islands were “uninhabited when the United Kingdom first acquired them”. This he subsequently did too.

One document, written by a legal advisor to the FCO in 1968, was called “Maintaining the Fiction”. The “fiction was that the local people were “only a floating population” because this would bolster our arguments that the territory has no indigenous or settled population”. This was despite the fact that the local population had lived there for generations.

Over a number of years, the islanders were removed and barred from returning. Their story is absolutely heart-breaking. The islanders were literally just dumped in the capitol of Mauritius, St. Luis. They received no help from the British in resettling them. For a people who had lived and survived peacefully by fishing and practicing subsidence agriculture, they suddenly had nothing: no homes, no jobs, no way of making a living. Moreover, much worse, is that they had no way of returning to their beloved homeland.

Over the following years, the exiled islanders died of neglect, poverty, or suicide. One islander, Lizette Talate’s two children died within days of each other. They “died of sadness” she recalls.

It is a story that is repeated. Another islander, Loius Onezime lives in cramped appalling conditions in St Louis, with a leaking roof, and no kitchen. His family often goes hungry. His young wife died of a heart attack. “She died of sadness”, he told John Pilger last year.

It is a reoccurring theme of the islanders. Sadness is killing them, one by one. The lawyer representing the islanders in London, Richard Gifford, told the Times newspaper earlier this month. “I’ve lost count of the old folk I’ve met who have subsequently died broken-hearted at the fact they couldn’t see their beloved homeland.”

So far it has been a forty-year fruitless fight for the islanders to realize their dream of going home. In 1975, the islanders petitioned the British High Commission, complaining how they used to “live free” and how “we were not dying of hunger”… “Here in Mauritius we, being mini-slaves, don’t get anybody to help us. We are at a loss not knowing what to do.”

In 1982, a group of the most impoverished islanders accepted a “full and final” settlement from the British of £4 million, which equates to less than £3,000 a head, in compensation. Many of the illiterate islanders signed the document, unable to read what they had just signed and not knowing that they had just renounced their right to return home.

John Pilger points out the bitter irony at the time. In 1982, whilst the British government offered a paltry amount of money to the 2000 black Chagossians it had illegally evicted from their homeland, it was spending £2 billion protecting some 2000 white islanders of the Falklands Islands against the invading Argentineans.

Three times in the last few years the islanders have won their legal case in the courts, only to be rebuked again by the British. In 2000, the High Court in London ruled that the islanders’ “wholesale removal was an “abject legal failure”. After the verdict, the British government accepted the Chagossians’ right to return to any of the islands except Diego Garcia.

However, then came September 11th and the islands of Diego Garcia increased in importance to the Americans due to its strategic geographical location in the new “War on Terror”. It is from Diego Garcia that B52 bomber launch bombing raids in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is there also that it is rumoured the CIA has secretly been holding Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders at a secret prison camp. The Americans do not want anyone living even remotely close to their secret base. So now even the outlying islands –once the proposed place the islanders could return to – is off limits to the islanders.

In 2004 the British government once again removed the right of the islanders to return home. In 2006 the High Court ruled that the Government’s move was unlawful and “repugnant”. In May this year the Court of Appeal agreed. It concluded that Britain’s actions had negated “one of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings, the freedom to return to one’s homeland”.

But still the British government refused to allow the islanders to return. The government had until this month to decide whether they would fight the latest legal judgment. Days before the deadline, a selection of British MPs urged Gordon Brown to accept “the right of the Chagossians to return to their islands”. The letter argued that any further action by the British government “would waste more public funds, delay justice for the Chagossians” and “expose” Gordon Brown’s words on the right to liberty as “hollow”.

Just days later, just as they had forty years earlier, the British government used political events to cover up its continuing abuse of the Chagossians. On the same day as one of the most important events in the British political calendar – where the Queen opens the new session of parliament – the government quietly let slip that it intended to appeal again and continue the islanders’ plight.

It is difficult to overestimate the cynical nature of this move. The British government knows that many of the islanders are getting older and dying. Of the 2,000 evicted only 700 are still alive. It could well be another year before the islanders receive the next legal judgment by which time more will have died. After that there could be two or three more years of legal wranglings as to who is going to pay the meager cost of re-housing the islanders.

Standing outside Downing Street last weekend was Hengride Permal, of the Chagossian Islands Community Association. Standing dignified and tall he said simply: “We want the government to pay us compensation for 40 years of pain and suffering, and 40 years of exile. We want Gordon Brown to take action and withdraw the appeal. We want to go home to our island.”

Come on Gordon. Give up the fight. Let them go home to live in peace. Before another islander dies of a broken heart.