Monthly Archive for March, 2009

Obama flies to London for G20 summit
Ewen MacAskill, Guardian, 31 March 2009

To avoid any risk of his trip being judged a failure, he is ready to back a fudged communique on how to handle the recession and has backed away from asking European allies, other than Britain and Poland, to contribute more combat troops to Afghanistan.

Monday, 30 March 2009 14:20
Written by Free Gaza Movement

DEAR FRIENDS: The Free Gaza Movement will again challenge Israel’s illegal closure of the Gaza Strip and collective punishment of its civilian population by sailing the HOPE FLEET, a flotilla of passenger and cargo ships, to Gaza at the end of May 2009 – to be followed by freedom riders this summer. We are turning to you, our friends & supporters, to help make Hope come alive.

[Read the appeal]

Richard Seymour, Lenin’s Tomb, 22 March 2009

This is a remarkable article. On the one hand, it contain a shocking revelation – that Slobodan Milosevic’s intelligence chief was also a CIA spy. (Actually, the revelation itself is some weeks old, and it is now alleged that he also worked for Russian intelligence, which is not mentioned in the Herald article). This is not the first time that the CIA has been found to have high-level involvement in the former Yugoslavia. Their involvement in training KLA militias in 1998-99, while working as OSCE officers, was revealed in 2000. Still, the implications of this are obviously sweeping. It would suggest that the US government not only had some unseen leverage in the war on the Serbian side, but that it had insight that enabled it to decisively influence negotiations at key points with a reasonable expectation as to the outcome.

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By G20Voice | Sat, 28 Mar 2009 – 23:31

G20Voice bloggers were at the Put People First Rally in London on March 28th where over 35,000 people held a peaceful march and rally through the streets of London to send a message to the leaders meeting at the G20 Summit on April 2.

Find out what they saw, heard and thought.

Read the post | G20Voice blog stream | Flickr: G20Voice’s Photo Stream

Pambazuka News
26 March 2009

In response to the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, Mahmood Mamdani argues that those enforcing rights also need to be held accountable when justice is sought. Skilfully tracing the Darfur conflict’s broader history, Mamdani argues that basing its understanding on spurious assumptions – seeing the duration of the conflict as mirroring that of the Sudanese president’s time in office, and assuming a single set of perpetrators of violent deaths and rape – has enabled the ICC to lay the blame squarely at al-Bashir’s door. Given the mass deaths experienced in Darfur over the 2003–04 period, this is not to ignore the central issue of accountability however, but merely to recognise that these deaths represent mass murder orchestrated by a variety of players, rather than outright genocide at the hands of the Khartoum government. Ultimately of greater concern for the African continent, Mamdani contends, will be the relationship between law and politics and the politicisation of the ICC. If a fundamentalist search for justice regardless of political context is not to come to represent mere vengeance, Mamdani concludes, then criminal accountability will need to be effectively subordinated to political reform.

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