articles- July 10

SHARING SAME STRUGGLE Global event aims to protect Medicine Lake

By Alex Breitler, Record Searchlight
July 10, 2004

FALL RIVER MILLS -- Lucas Naikuni's story sounds frighteningly familiar for north state American Indians.

Eyes widening with worry, he describes how a British company is trying to extract minerals from a lake in Kenya considered sacred to his indigenous Maasai tribe.

The company will get rich, he says, while his people fear the lake will be defiled. They won't see a penny of the royalties.

"Instead, they're subject to poverty," said Naikuni, 39. full article
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Tribes Want Salmon Way Over Klamath Dams
By Jeff Barnard
Associated Press Writer

Published: Jul 10, 2004 7:22 AM EST

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) - American Indian tribes, commercial fishermen and conservationists are going to Scotland to pressure utility PacifiCorp's parent company to give salmon a way over dams on the Klamath River.


The group plans to make its case at the July 23 annual general stockholders meeting of Scottish Power in Edinburgh.

"They need to see we have culture and traditions that have been here since the beginning of time," said Troy Fletcher, executive director of the Yurok Tribe, whose reservation lies along the lowest reach of the Klamath. full article

Maori party breaks into Kiwi Parliament

Associated Press

Wellington — New Zealand's first indigenous Maori political party won its first seat in parliament on Saturday in a by-election.

Tariana Turia, a representative of the new Maori Party, beat five other candidates to win the North Island electorate of Te Tai Hauauru.

Mr. Turia held the same seat before resigning from the Labour party because of disagreements over its Maori policies. It was his resignation that prompted the by-election. full article

Bushmen fight for ancestral lands
Landmark legal case may be last hope for displaced San people of Botswana

Rory Carroll in Kukama
Saturday July 10, 2004
The Guardian

It was a little court in a big desert, and the lawyers grew uneasy as the shadows lengthened: lions are nocturnal hunters. Gordon Bennett, a British barrister, suggested the court adjourn. "Dusk is almost upon us and we are camping tonight."
To everyone's relief, the three judges wedged in the Land Cruiser agreed, and the convoy dispersed to collect firewood before another night under the stars.

It was a surreal safari, where baseball caps and sunglasses replaced wigs and robes, but there was no doubting the seriousness of this week's effort to bring justice to the Kalahari.

The San people, also known as bushmen, have challenged the government of Botswana over their expulsion from ancestral lands in what could be a landmark case for indigenous rights in Africa. full article

Gene Warfare in Oaxaca
Genetic Mutation of Mexican Maize
By CAMELO RUIZ MARRERO

Scientists from Mexico, Canada and the United States met on March 11th this year in the Hotel Victoria in Oaxaca for a symposium on the effects and possible risks of the presence of genetically modified maize in Mexico. The furtive and growing presence of this maize has been documented in small plots of land belonging to rural workers first in the southern State of Oaxaca and more recently throughout the whole country. This discovery could have serious implications for agricultural biodiversity since maize is the third most important crop in the world after wheat and rice and Mexico is the center of its origin and diversity.

Alejandro de Avila, director of the Oaxaca Ethnobotanic Garden reported that the most recent archaeological studies indicate that maize was discovered and domesticated in Oaxaca ten thousand years ago, not six thousand or eight thousand as had been believed until recently. Maize is considered to be humanity's greatest agricultural achievement and the greatest treasure Christopher Columbus took back to Europe from the American continent. full article

Wither the Empire
The Rise of Global Resistance
By OMAR BARGHOUTI

Mahmoud Darwish, arguably the Arab world's leading contemporary poet, wrote in his recent poem, Nothing but Iraq, the following

Dead blacksmiths awaken from their graves to make our shackles
but we never dreamt of more than a life like life
and of dying our own way

One doesn't have to be endowed with the eloquence of Darwish to identify with his quest. When a "life like life" becomes too much to dream of, humanity as such is essentially defied.

The tens of millions of war-protesters who blossomed on the world's Main Streets like belated spring flowers, days before the war on Iraq, did not look alike, speak the same language, belong to the same culture or religion, read the same papers, watch the same TV news or hold the same political thought. But, they were all motivated by a far grander and more noble cause than mere opposition to yet another war on a battered nation of the South: they shared the ideal of resisting empire.

Perhaps the fervor and intensity of protest have relatively waned since the images of the "sweeping victory" over Iraq, carried by not-so-free western media, inundated us. But after the US war crimes in Falluja, the racist torture orgy at Abu Ghraib and the wedding massacre were revealed, the motivation for resisting empire is on the rise again, globally. This essay goes back and explores the formative stage of this resistance: the critical period before and right after the start of the war on Iraq, arguing that such a resistance is not just ethically laudable, but also practically winnable. full article

The Senate Report
NYTimes editorial
Published: July 10, 2004

In a season when candor and leadership are in short supply, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the prewar assessment of Iraqi weapons is a welcome demonstration of both. It is also disturbing, and not just because of what it says about the atrocious state of American intelligence. The report is a condemnation of how this administration has squandered the public trust it may sorely need for a real threat to national security.

The report was heavily censored by the administration and is too narrowly focused on the bungling of just the Central Intelligence Agency. But what comes through is thoroughly damning. Put simply, the Bush administration's intelligence analysts cooked the books to give Congress and the public the impression that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear arms, that he was plotting to give such weapons to terrorists, and that he was an imminent threat. full article