The Guardian | ukwatch.net

Guardians of (coal-fired) power

Tim Holmes — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 07:46:47 +0000

A few days from now, on 16th of July, the Guardian is set to host a variety of high-profile guests for “The Guardian Climate Change Summit 2008”. With the lowest entry prices for this event around the £350 mark, it is likely to attract a rather exclusive clientelle. But for most of those in attendance, such costs are hardly likely to be a big deal. The event’s lead sponsor is E.ON, better known as the company behind the proposed Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent (the target of this year’s Climate Camp), whose successful lobbying ensured that the plant would be given the go-ahead without even the formal requirement that it captured and stored its carbon emissions. To put this in perspective, NASA’s James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, has recently pointed out that, if the current headlong rush into the arms of the most polluting fossil fuel is not stopped, “there is little hope of avoiding the climate tipping points, with all that implies for life on this planet” - a position also backed by the Royal Society, perhaps Britain’s most prestigious scientific institution.

Also sponsoring the event is BMW (yes, that BMW - condemned in scathing terms by Friends of the Earth last year for a “joint lobbying offensive designed to water-down and delay the mandatory CO2 emission reduction targets proposed by the [European] Commission after voluntary targets were not met”); and among its “Marketing partners” is a body called the Energy Institute - a pretty innocuous-sounding name, perhaps, though it includes among its corporate membership “all the major oil companies”.

So what does the summit hope to achieve? According to the Guardian’s site, attendees are granted the opportunity to “[u]nderstand how leading organisations are working with individuals for business and environmental benefits”. “Leading businesses realise that now is the time for collaboration” on the issue of climate change, we are assured - “with each other, with government, with NGO’s and individuals.” The summit will be a “must-attend event” for, among others, senior executives from “corporate social responsibility” and “communications” departments.

The summit, in other words, looks set to be a festival of greenwash, allowing a number of companies to spruce up their reputations while swapping a few tricks of the P.R. trade. Self-regulation is the order of the day: with talk of the wise nodding heads from enlightened companies “realising” the need for action, of fulfilling their “corporate social responsibility”, it’s easy to forget just how little the corporate world actually cares about the issue - the world’s biggest companies, in fact, ranking it “far down” their priority list, and Britain’s biggest companies in particular, according to a survey taken last year, placing it “bottom of the priority list”.

Nor is this the first time that the Guardian have collaborated with the fossil fuel industry in this way. According to its own website, for instance, the paper has “worked closely with Shell to push the debate on how business needs to react to climate change”:

“Shell was the lead sponsor of the Guardian’s Climate Change Summit in June [2007] which was attended by business leaders, NGOs and senior civil servants. An eight-page supplement [in the Guardian itself] and microsite on guardian.co.uk followed, which covered business issues around climate change and highlights of the summit.”

Shell, we are also informed,

“has been very keen to show how it is engaging with business and government to cut CO2 emissions and use new technologies to combat climate change.”

Not, you might think, the most remarkable phenomenon: a company whose whole business model is a fundamental driver of climate change, which has itself estimated, according to New Scientist, that functional carbon capture and storage technology is at least 42 years away, is quite keen on publically announcing just how green it is. Jaws must indeed be hitting the floor at that revelation. But the good old Guardian was there to provide them with publicity for their efforts, “[t]he whole programme”, the paper reports, having “stirred up a lot of interest”. In fact, as it states elsewhere, “[t]his is a growing sector for Guardian Professional and the Guardian as a whole, and we are planning new publications online and in print. We welcome proposals from interested partners” - suggesting that its latest venture, in the form of the “Climate Change Summit”, is building on the success of its previous partnership with Shell.

So far be it from me to condone anything outwith the bounds of British law, if you happen to be in and around the area of the Business Design Centre, 52 Upper Street, Islington, London, N1 0QH next Wednesday, carrying a mop and bucket of green paint (or what you will), it probably doesn’t matter too much if you happen to be a little bit clumsy with it. The corporations’ “greenwash” is flowing thick and fast in the direction of the general public; it’s high time we started returning the favour.

UPDATE: The Greenwash Guerrillas, bless ’em, are already on the case. Here’s wishing their action every success!

FURTHER UPDATE: And here they are, in all their glory (courtesy of The Coal Hole):

The Guardian Covers (Up) Colombia’s Reality

tim — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:44:14 +0000

Colombia received more detailed attention than usual from the daily Guardian of the UK during the months of March and April of this year for many reasons:

1) On March 1 Colombia's military violated Ecuadorian sovereignty to kill Raul Reyes, a leftist (FARC) guerrilla leader, and thereby provoked a regional crisis.
2) In mid March a minor scandal erupted due to UK Foreign Minister Kim Howells' aggressive support for UK arms exports to Colombia
3) Rumors were reported in late March that a high profile hostage of the FARC rebels, Ingrid Betancourt, was gravely ill.
4) Mark Penn resigned on April 6 from Hillary Clinton's campaign because of his lobbying work on behalf of Colombia in support of a trade agreement with the US.

During these two months the Guardian published 38 articles that discussed Colombia in significant detail. It is a very revealing exercise to scan these articles for information that is readily available on the website of Human Rights Watch (HRW). 

HRW is a prominent organization with a track record of being disproportionately hard on US enemies (Hizbullah, Hamas, Venezuela) and soft on the US allies (Israel, Haiti under Gerard Latortue). [1] It is not a group likely to exaggerate the crimes of a US and UK ally.

One might expect that a supposedly left leaning newspaper like the Guardian would, at the very least, tell readers what HRW has been reporting.

In February of 2008, in an article for the Progressive magazine, two senior HRW officials wrote:

"For years, the Bush administration in the United States has stood by the government of President Álvaro Uribe in Colombia unconditionally, turning a blind eye to Colombia's serious human rights problems. The Blair government in the UK, for the most part, quietly followed suit, providing substantial assistance to Colombia's military with no strings attached. Colombia presents one of the worst human rights records in the world. At nearly three million, Colombia's population of internally displaced persons is second only to that of Sudan."[2]

In the 38 articles examined, not a single word (out of roughly 25,000) appeared about Colombia's internally displaced people. No doubt, unconditional support for Colombia is easier to maintain when the magnitude of its human rights disaster is completely hidden by the Liberal media, but the Guardian did not just bury the scale of the crimes. It kept the leading perpetrators mostly out of sight.

HRW's summary reports about Colombia from 1989-2002 frequently pointed out that the vast majority of political murders have been perpetrated by the military and rightwing paramilitary groups that operate with the tolerance and even direct support of the military. In 2002, HRW reported that the largest paramilitary death squad (AUC) was responsible for 50% of political killings compared to 8% for the FARC, the largest of the leftist rebel groups.[3]

In more recent years, HRW has shied away from identifying the leading perpetrators of political murders. Instead it has reported qualitative conclusions regarding a limited subset of crimes. For example, it has reported that leftist rebels are responsible for most recruitment of child soldiers while paramilitaries are usually responsible for murdering trade unionists.[4]

However, according to the Jesuit-run Center for Research and Popular Education (CINEP), whom HRW has cited in past reports, as of 2006 the majority of human rights abuses continued to be perpetrated by the Colombian military and the paramilitaries. [5]

HRW's recent reports give no reason to doubt CINEP's conclusions. In 2005 HRW produced an extensive report exposing the fraudulence of the Colombian government's "demobilization" of the paramilitaries. The report, entitled "Smoke and Mirrors: Colombia's demobilization of paramilitary groups" summarized the situation of the paramilitaries as follows:

"Colombia's right-wing paramilitary groups are immeasurably powerful. Through drug trafficking and other illegal businesses, they have amassed enormous wealth. They have taken over vast expanses of the country's territory to use for coca cultivation or as strategic corridors through which they can move drugs and weapons. In recent years, they have succeeded in expelling left-wing guerrillas and strengthening their own control of many parts of the country. And thanks to this power, they now exert a very high degree of political influence, both locally and nationally.....paramilitaries have historically enjoyed the collaboration, support, and toleration of units of the Colombian security forces, a fact that has led many to refer to the paramilitaries as a ‘sixth division' of the army. Today, paramilitaries have made major gains in consolidating this impunity, along with their economic and political power, with the collusion of the Colombian government." [6]

To what extent did the Guardian convey any of this during the months of increased attention on Colombia?

In the 38 Guardian articles the word "FARC" appears 135 times; only 17 times do the words "paramilitary" or "paramilitaries" appear. There were 13 articles that mentioned Colombia's baseless allegations of Venezuelan collaboration with the FARC [7] - only five articles that mentioned the well documented collaboration between the Colombian government and the paramilitaries. But even these lopsided numbers understate the extent to which the Guardian covered up Colombia's human rights record.

On March 26, HRW, along with 22 other international human rights organizations that included Amnesty International, signed an open letter to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe after four unionists were murdered who were involved with protests against paramilitary violence that took place on March 6. Many other protest organizers were attacked and received death threats. The open letter stated:

"Shortly before the attacks, presidential adviser José Obdulio Gaviria made a series of statements on national radio linking renowned victims' representative Ivan Cepeda and other organizers of the March 6 protest to the notoriously abusive guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). On February 11, one day after Gaviria first made the statements, the supposedly demobilized United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary group released a statement echoing Gaviria's allegations." [8]

The letter called on Uribe to denounce the baseless allegations and break the links between the paramilitaries and his government. Neither the open letter nor the March 6 protests were reported by the Guardian.

It is worth looking closely at one of the five Guardian articles that did actually mention collaboration between the government and rightwing paramilitaries. The article, "Colombia's ‘parapolitics' scandal casts shadow over president", by Sibylla Brodzinsky was published April 23. Brodzinsky wrote:

"Mario Uribe was the latest in a string of more than 30 politicians elected to Congress in 2006 who have been arrested on charges related to conspiracy with the paramilitary death squads that controlled huge swathes of the nation before they began demobilizing in 2003."

This neglects to mention that most of the politicians are from Uribe's coalition and that the paramilitary power has been left untouched by the "demobilization". A week before Brodzinsky's article appeared HRW had reported:

"Nearly all the 30,000 ‘demobilized' paramilitaries are free and have never been investigated" and that "scores of ‘new' groups closely linked to the paramilitaries are operating all over the country, engaging in extortion, killings, forced displacement, and drug trafficking. " [9]

Brodzinsky also wrote:

"President Uribe has said that it is thanks to his policies that Colombia has been able to go through the collective catharsis."

This argument stood unchallenged even though HRW had recently provided a strong counter argument:

"....these investigations are the result of an initiative by the Colombian Supreme Court - not the Uribe Administration. While Uribe has funded the court, he has often taken steps that could undermine the investigations, lashing out against Supreme Court Justices and even, at one point, floating a proposal to let the politicians avoid prison." [10]

Brodzinsky then made the following outlandish claim:

"Despite repeated journalistic and judicial investigations into alleged links between the president and paramilitary groups, no evidence has ever come forth."

There is, of course, overwhelming evidence of very strong links between the Colombian government (which has been run by Uribe for several years) and the paramilitaries. Some of the evidence is even reported in Brodzinsky's article. The Guardian appears to employ an unique definition of the word "evidence" for politicians supported by Washington.

Brodzinsky's article also cited Urine's 84% approval rating, but failed to convey the risks that journalists, activists and politicians take with their lives if they challenge Uribe. It would be wrong to deny that Uribe has significant popular support, but it would also be wrong to deny that his government makes eroding that support through peaceful means is a very dangerous task.

Moreover, there is good reason to believe Urine's approval rating exaggerates his level of support. In presidential elections Uribe has captured the vote of roughly 25 percent of the eligible voters. In 2003, Uribe campaigned very aggressively for the passage of a "yes" vote on a referendum that made fifteen sweeping proposals. He failed to convince 25 percent of the electorate to turn out for it - the minimum turnout required for it to pass - despite having a 75 percent approval rating at the time.[11]

The Guardian's coverage of Colombia explains why UK Foreign Minister Kim Howells dared to be photographed with Colombian soldiers (in fact, with a unit accused of murdering trade unionists), and why Howells had the audacity to lash out maliciously at Justice For Colombia, a UK based solidarity group. [12] If newspapers like the Guardian do not even report much of what establishment friendly groups like HRW have to say then it should come as no surprise that backing Colombia's worst criminals comes with negligible consequences.

SUGGESTED ACTION

Write to the Guardian readers editor Siobhain Butterworth
reader@guardian.co.uk
Siobhain.Butterworth@guardian.co.uk

Write to Guardian Journalists Sibylla Brodzinsky and Rory Carroll (Latin America Correspondent)
sibylla.brodzinsky@guardian.co.uk
rory.carroll@guardian.co.uk

NOTES

[1] http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/emersberger240208.html
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/4131
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/Herman_Peterson_Szmaely2007.pdf
http://www.counterpunch.org/cook09252006.html
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=705

[2] http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/02/01/colomb17975.htm

[3] http://www.hrw.org/doc?t=americas&c=colomb&document_limit=120,20

[4] http://hrw.org/englishwr2k7/docs/2007/01/11/colomb14884.htm
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2008/04/15/colomb18551.htm

[5] http://www.cipcol.org/?p=580

[6] http://www.hrw.org/reports/2005/colombia0805/

[7] http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/04/16/colomb18630.htm

[8] http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/04/16/colomb18630.htm

[9] see note 8

[10] http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2008/04/16/colomb18630.htm
Also, for a great summary of the "parapolitics" scandal see: http://www.cipcol.org/?p=542

[11] The referendum results are here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/17/foreignpolicy.tradeunions

[12] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/17/foreignpolicy.tradeunions