IRAQ: Hundreds of U.S. Soldiers Emerge as Conscientious Objectors; link to SA war resistance campaign

NEW YORK, Apr 15 (IPS) – Although only a handful of them have gone public, at least several hundred U.S. soldiers have applied for conscientious objector (CO) status since January, says a rights group.

The Center on Conscience and War (CCW), which advises military personnel on CO discharges, reports that since the start of 2003 – when many soldiers realised they might have to fight in the Iraq war – there has been a massive increase in the number of enlisted soldiers who have applied for CO status.

SEE REPORT BY Gabriel Packard from Interpress Service Agency

In 1987 following the lead taken by Dr Ivan Toms, David Bruce, Kevin Wilkinson, a group of 15 South African conscientious objectors refused to do military service in the Apartheid war machine. After the End Conscription Campaign was banned in 1988, hundreds of white South African war resistors refused the call-up, and conscription into the War in Angola and Civil War raging in South Africa’s Black Townships

HISTORY OF THE END CONSCRIPTION CAMPAIGN

WIKIPEDIA VERSION http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_Conscription_Campaign

Refusing to bear arms: a world survey of conscription and conscientious objection to military service

IRAQ: British Doctor, refuses military service, follows in footsteps of South Africa’s own Ivan Toms

On March 3, 1988 – Conscientious objector Dr Ivan Toms was sentenced to 640 days’ imprisonment for refusing to serve in the SADF. Yesterday, a Royal Air Force doctor was jailed for refusing to serve in Iraq. A case of history repeating itself?

SEE Full story by Hasan Suroor, THE HINDU

LONDON: A Royal Air Force doctor has become the first serving British military officer to be dismissed from service and jailed for refusing to serve in Iraq on grounds that he believed it was an illegal war.

But Flt Lt Malcolm Kendall-Smith (37), maintained that he was justified in refusing to participate in a military campaign which, he argued, fell into the “category of criminal acts”.

“I have been convicted and sentenced… .but I still believe I was right to make the stand that I did and refuse to follow orders to deploy to Iraq ‘” orders (that) I believe were illegal,” he said after a court martial sentenced him to eight months for disobeying orders to go to Basra last June.

Dr. Kendall-Smith said there were “many others” in the army who shared his view. Describing the Iraq invasion as a “campaign of imperial military conquest”, he said: “To comply with an order that I believe unlawful places me in breach of domestic and international law, something I am not prepared to do… .I would have had criminal responsibility vicariously if I had gone to Iraq.”

Dr. Kendall-Smith, who served in Iraq twice before, said he decided the war was illegal after reading books and articles on the subject. The court martial ruled that obeying orders was at the “heart” of any disciplined force and an officer could not “pick and choose” which orders to obey.

Dr. Kendall-Smith was praised by anti-war groups and rights campaigners for taking a “courageous stand”.

“Many people believe the war in Iraq was an illegal war and therefore we would consider he was quite within his rights and it was indeed commendable to stand up to what he considered to be an illegal instruction to engage in an illegal war,” said Kate Hudson, chairperson of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Recently, an SAS soldier Ben Griffin resigned from the army protesting that the Iraq war was illegal.

From THE HINDU — Online edition of India’s National Newspaper

NUKES: Environmentalists call foul over Namibian Uranium Mine

CONCERNS continue to mount over the opening of the Langer Heinrich Uranium Mine in the Namib-Naukluft Park despite Government insisting that ‘all is well’.

[EXRACTED FROM THE NAMIBIAN]

The World Information Service on Energy (Wise), one of the world’s largest networks of groups working on nuclear energy issues, is the latest organisation to express opposition to the opening of the mine.

In a statement, Wise said uranium mining creates radioactive dust and emission of poisonous gas.

The emissions, it said, put residents at a greater risk of developing cancer.

“Wise, one of the largest networks of groups working on nuclear energy issues, strongly opposes the opening of the Langer Heinrich Uranium mine in Namibia.

Mining uranium and mineral sands creates radioactive dust and radon gas,”said Peer de Rijk, Executive Director of Wise.

“When breathed into the lungs, the dust and gas release their radiation at close range where it does the most damage to the lining of the lung and increases the risk of developing cancer.”

Further, noted the pressure group, the radiation exposure could affect men and women’s reproductive health.

Studies by the United States Department of Occupational Safety and Health revealed that low doses of radiation, spread over a number of years, could be just as dangerous as acute exposure.

In short, there are no safe levels of radiation exposure.

In Namibia, the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) has said that the mining operations would seriously affect the biodiversity of the Swakopmund environs.

The ecosystem, it said, was set to be contaminated.

But Government insists that the criticisms do not hold water.

According to Joseph Iita, Permanent Secretary of Mines and Energy, those with dissenting voices were not saying much tangible.

He said all procedures were followed properly and everything was in order.

Iita said an environmental impact assessment study was carried out before s licence was granted.

Concerns over the environment, he added, were adequately addressed.

“In line with constitutional mandates, all procedures pertaining to the environment were properly followed.

An environmental impact assessment study was carried out prior to issuing the licence.

Nothing is so peculiar to uranium mining in Namibia.

“It’s not the first time either.”

While Government expressed satisfaction with the progress so far, the NSHR said the granting of the licence was “as good as licensing death”.

Dorkas Phillemon, a public relations and administration officer at the NSHR, said research on uranium mining at a global level had shown that no single mine to date had done very well.

Phillemon said it was improper to sacrifice people’s health for the sake of investment and employment.

“Such kind of investment is not proper,” said the human rights activist.

Rijk added that the health risk of uranium mining was not confined to workers alone.

Waste leaks into surrounding areas, especially rivers and underground water supplies, could pollute water sources.

The Wise executive director said: “The radioactive wastes left over from mining are a major hazard because they are easily dispersed through wind, rain and human error.

“Waste leaks into surrounding areas, especially rivers and underground water supplies, affect people’s skin, clothing and vehicles can be contaminated by being near radioactive material.”

The German Oeko Institute and Earthlife Namibia have also raised concerns about the granting of the licence.

They raised technical issues related to the way in which the environmental study was undertaken, insisting that notable issues were left blowing in the wind.

The Oeko Research Institute said the assessment done by the Australian company Paladin Resources Limited was not carried out properly, as it did not clearly define the area where the doses were below the dose limits and where the limits were exceeded.

Earthlife Chairperson Bertchen Kohrs said one of the most serious shortcomings of Paladin’s assessment was that no realistic view of the hazardous effects on workers at the mining site was presented because no estimate had been made of the collective dose for the proposed operations.

The Oeko Institute said it had established that the Australian mining company had underestimated the concentrations for radium and radon by a factor of four.

EXRACTED FROM THE NAMIBIAN

http://www.namibian.com.na/2005/September/national/05DA450878.html

NAVAJO NATION bans uranium mining (and nuclear industry)

On April 29, 2005. Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley, Jr., signed what is believed to be the first Native American tribal law banning uranium mining and milling. With dozens of community members and dignitaries looking on, Shirley signed the Diné Natural Resources Protection Act (DNRPA) of 2005, which was passed by the Navajo Nation Council by a vote of 63-19 on April 19. As amended by the Council during floor debate, the act states, “No person shall engage in uranium mining and processing on any sites within Navajo Indian Country.” The law is based on the Fundamental Laws of the Diné, which are already codified in Navajo statutes. The act finds that based on those fundamental laws, “certain substances in the Earth (doo nal yee dah) that are harmful to the people should not be disturbed, and that the people now know that uranium is one such substance, and therefore, that its extraction should be avoided as traditional practice and prohibited by Navajo law.”

In the late 1970s, Navajo uranium miners and their families asked for help to show that their lung diseases had been caused by their work in underground uranium mines in the 1940s-1960s. SRIC staff responded with medical and scientific data, in-community education strategies, and legislative support. As a result, Congress adopted legislation in 1990 to compensate former miners and their survivors. Ten years later, with SRIC’s on going technical support to advocacy groups, the law was amended to cover virtually all uranium miners who worked before 1971.

Despite making great strides in protecting miners’ and community health, compensating former miners and their families, and cleaning up uranium mill sites, significant problems stemming from the legacy of uranium development still exist today in the Four Corners Area. Hundreds of abandoned mines have not been cleaned up and present environmental and health risks in many Navajo communities. Health conditions in those communities have never been studied despite being impacted by uranium development that dates back to the late-40s and early-50s.

Some of these same communities are now confronted with proposed new uranium solution mining that threatens the only source of drinking water for 10,000 to 15,000 people living in the Eastern Navajo Agency in northwestern New Mexico. Since 1994, SRIC has worked with those communities and the community-based group, Eastern Navajo Din� Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM-CCT), to stop the proposed mines through community education, interaction with Navajo Nation leaders, and a seven-year-long legal challenge of the mines’ federal license.

The work of SRIC, ENDAUM-CCT and their law firms – the New Mexico Environmental Law Center (NMELC) and the Harmon-Curran firm in Washington, D.C. – has erected major roadblocks to the proposed mining, but has not yet terminated the license. Citizen opposition to mining is widespread, and the Navajo Nation leadership recently determined that uranium solution mining is unsafe and that the proposed mines are too risky to the health and environment of the Navajo people.

Against this background, working with Navajo groups and communities to stop new mining and continuing to assess and document the health and environmental effects of past uranium development are the principal focuses of UIAP work.

DESPITE PRECEDENTS SUCH AS THE ABOVE, DISPOSSESSED SOUTHERN AFRICAN NATIONS ARE FORCED TO ALLOW MINING OF URANIUM ON TRIBAL GROUNDS COLONISED BY WHITES AND OWNED BY MULTINATIONAL COMPANIES WORKING IN TANDEM WITH GOVERNMENT AGENCIES.

SOURCE: http://www.sric.org/uranium/index.html

NUKES: Workers Health threatened by Uranium Mining & Koeberg Programme

URANIUM threatens the health of mine workers and the communities surrounding the mines. According to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, uranium mining has been responsible for the largest collective exposure of workers to radiation. One estimate puts the number of workers who have died of lung cancer and silicosis due to mining and milling alone at 20,000.

Mine workers are principally exposed to ionising radiation from radioactive uranium and the accompanying radium and radon gases emitted from the ore. Ionising radiation is the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that extends from ultraviolet radiation to cosmic rays. This type of radiation releases high energy particles that damage cells and DNA structure, producing mutations, impairing the immune system and causing cancers.

Uranium mining companies, including WMC and ERA, claim that they can minimise the risk to ‘acceptable levels’ by attention to proper ventilation of the shafts, and close monitoring of workers to radioactive exposure. However, each time International Commission for Radiation Protection and other experts/organisations conduct a review on “safe” levels of radiation exposure, they conclude that low levels of ionising radiation are more dangerous than was previously decided. On average, these organisations have concluded that the actual danger is twice as bad as they thought twelve years before. This means that people are legally exposed to a certain dose of radiation one year and the next year they are told that the dose was far too high.

The new limits mean that the annual risk of death (from cancer) for a uranium miner is 1 in 1250, which is nearly ten times the risk of fatal injury in Australian industry generally, which is 1 in 20,000.

Even so the uranium industry has protested that the ICRP’s new limits would be uneconomic for underground mining. In the Roxby mine underground miners have received up to 30 milliSv a year. The dose limits which the NHMRC has adopted permit a health risk which is clearly unacceptable.

It is widely agreed in the scientific community that there is no safe level of radiation exposure. Because it can take more than twenty or more years for cancer produced by low levels of ionising radiation to become apparent, it is not easy to trace the cause. It is imperative that long term medical records be kept of all workers, residents and their children, including those conceived after leaving Olympic Dam and Ranger, and yet this is not being done.

At present there is no independent monitoring of the Roxby Downs or Jabiru communities. We are the only ‘developed’ nation which has no such monitoring system in place. In twenty years time, when the health effects of uranium are emerging, the people will be left to pick up the costs, just like the asbestos mining communities before them.

References

Information by the Medical Association for the Prevention of War (WA) and the MAUM public education sheet on Ionising Radiation And Health.

Anti-Nuclear Alliance of Western Australia
email: [email protected]

CULTURE: African Universality challenged by Picasso Criticism

IF IT were not for the seething acrimony of contemporary South African art criticism, the debate over Picasso’s alleged appropriation of African art forms — the accusation of theft leveled by Sandile Memela and the subsequent belligerent reportage by Donaldson — would have probably descended into polite satire — the culture of the absurd.

Instead of upbraiding the Pretoria News for its initial opinion piece, which had slammed Memela’s remarks for being: ‘more sad and pathetic than disturbing because they reveal an Afrocentrism clutching so desperately for something that it can claim as all its own.’ Memela chose rather to roast Donaldson’s admittedly egregious banter with yet another statement that inflamed the conservatives.

‘The voices that must have the final word are white. There is no room for the political and cultural critique by independent African voices on this contentious subject,’ Memela protested, in what one can only presume to be a sneaky piece of polemic calculated to bait former racists and cultural imperialists alike, but as it turned out, the imperialists and conservatives were right, having swallowed the hook, they would now witness the truth behind the Africanist position on Picasso, before the eyes of the world, or so it seems.

One can only commiserate with all those high-brow cocktail party-goers, those exhibition schlebs munching on pretzels while ineffectual cultural workers still slouch on the sidelines.

Regardless of cultural status, one still seeks common ground, and believing in the slow dance away from polarization. Yet again the public is enthralled by a debate of extremities — the neat binary opposition of the exclusive Africanist position vs vi die-hard Europhiles. An invariable extremism of tastes, a frenzy of aesthetic desires that see fit to ostracize certain Africans on the assumption that race is the determining factor in our identity as a nation; race and race alone is what will conclude this visual arts debate, thereby cementing the new African Renaissance and Globalism with a new flavour of pap, untouched by white hands?

For Memela, Africa can only be defined by what it is not. Africa can never be European, it must stand apart, and be purified like some dark continent only accessible to its original inhabitants. For Donaldson, the European Continent will always be the omega point of cultural discourse, while Africa must stand alone, like a poor, half-sister forever at the cocktail bar of discourse.

Memela on the other hand presumes that his own people are synonymous with the first peoples of our land, the Khoekhoe, the !Kung San, the Griqua; furthermore, that the ‘birthplace of humankind” is also the “cradle of civilization and only ‘African intellectuals’ may debate these issues. Donaldson moreover falls into the trap of a patronising snideness, an effete familiarity that can only bread contempt for the position of “white critics” on the sub-continent.

Turning Mamela’s attack upon Donaldson, in on itself however, may be considered a little disingenuous; it opens us all up to accusations of Eurocentricism and the harshest attack of all, of simply ‘being white’ regardless of ones skin tone. The very same kinds of attacks leveled at Memela by the conservatives, and now thrown about, in a circus of ritual absurdity that has begun to characterize popular debate in South Africa. One must therefore find another means of waging intellectual assault, perhaps the notion of universality spoken about by white intellectuals like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?

If the juxtaposition of Memela’s use of the term ‘African’ (in contradistinction to the use of the term ‘whites’ ) our own semantically starched trap, were not bad enough, Donaldson’s use of a simple phrase without any universal appeal, except perhaps to his own mother, has snowballed into a literal form of xenophobism, a negro-centric attack against so-called white Africans of European descent.

This kind of intellectual sparring inevitably results in hate speech, of the insidious kind outlawed by our constitution. It is pointless going back to that time when racists of all hues could launch verbal barbs with a flick of the wrist, without forethought or fear of censure. It is even less advantageous for pale critics and ebony-coloured bureaucrats to deploy the arguments of racists, in the attempt perhaps to better themselves and others, uplifting nothing except the hated ideology of the past.

The Picasso Controversy — African Chauvenism or European Arrogance?

Sandile Memela’s accusation of theft has left Picasso supporters outraged. Here is a link to the original article published in City Press and responses from critics like Andrew Donaldson etc

CITY PRESS: Unmasking Picasso and finding Africa beneath


RESPONSE: Pretoria News “Mamela’s Picasso ravings”

DONALDSON: Starched dashiki brigade wide of mark on Picasso

MEMELA: Whites think they are the only ones allowed to debate the arts

LETTER: Dashiki basher gives away his racial prejudices

NUKES: Uranium Mining poses serious threat to indigenous nations.

Extracted from Human Health Impacts on the Navajo Nation from Uranium Mining
by Erin Klauk

Radioactive pollution is a serious threat to the welfare of the Navajo peoples. Some Navajo miners were exposed to high levels of radioactivity in mines and mills. One 1959 report found radiation levels ninety times acceptable limits (LUHNA, 2002 (more info) ). Of the 150 Navajo uranium miners who worked at the uranium mine in Shiprock, New Mexico until 1970, 133 died of lung cancer or various forms of fibrosis by 1980 ([Ali, 2003] ).

Because times were hard for the Navajo, most families were thankful when mining started on the reservation because they were given employment. Unfortunately, the people who operated the mines did not tell the Navajo of the danger that was associated with uranium mining. The miners and their families were forced to figure out the dangers on their own, from experiencing the illnesses themselves ([Brugge, 2000] ).

When mining ceased in the late 1970’s, mining companies walked away from the mines without sealing the tunnel openings, filling the gaping pits, sometimes hundreds of feet deep, or removing the piles of radioactive uranium ore and mine waste. Over 1,000 of these unsealed tunnels, unsealed pits and radioactive waste piles still remain on the Navajo reservation today, with Navajo families living within a hundred feet of the mine sites. The Navajo graze their livestock here, and have used radioactive mine tailings to build their homes. Navajo children play in the mines, and uranium mine tailings have turned up in school playgrounds (103rd Congress, 1994 ).

Source: Impacts of Resource Development on Native American Lands

PANZI KOEBERG & MINI-KOEBERG; FORWARD TO A NON-RACIST, NON-SEXIST, NUCLEAR-FREE CONTINENT!

NUCLEAR POWER: Erwin’s Folley is Manuel’s Madness

FIRST, our own finance minister, gets his facts all wrong by spending R500 000 000 on radioactive toasters and nuclear kettles –the so-called Mini-Koeberg “Pebble-beds”. Then Erwin, contradicts his own finance minister and announces a further R500 000 000 or so to be spent on a “second” Koeberg, that’s right, lets push South Africa to the brink of nuclear empowered disaster.

Where do our politicians get the time to push dirty Nuclear Energy that is not only expensive, but a major source of pollution and background radiation to boot. Don’t we know that radiation from the nuclear chain is bad for us, and the Uranium Mining industry is worse than the Asbestos Industry? Remember Asbestos “perfectly safe for you and that’s a guaranteed promise with no money back
from Alec Erwin, Trevor Manual and the South African government.”

Why not simple spend the money on world trip to push nuclear powered outboard motors for the next big spend grand prix?

The anti-nuclear lobbey is one of the longest running environmental campaigns in South Africa. In fact, alongside Nan Rice’s Dolphin Action Group, Mike Kantey’s Koeberg Alert, it predates the formation of Earthlife Africa

Despite the Koeberg Alert’s concerns about the so-called “peaceful use of nuclear energy”, and the fact that South Africa’s own nuclear bomb industry was finally exposed to be a giant fraud. (De Klerk and his National Party only came clean after 1994). South Africa and our own Erwin & Manual, continues to espouse the doctrine of nuclear power for peaceful ends. An oxymoron of a ministry if ever there was one.

Unfortunately, the debate around Koeberg has swung from mass rallies against nuclear energy, to self-satisfied and smug debates of the bourgoisie vs labour;the pros and cons of nuclear safety and of course, the energy issue. The public is confused, politicians are hamstrung, tongue-tied, and bound up by Patricia De Lille and Helen Zille and just nobody knows what to think as the 25 year old debate about renewable resources vs peaceful nuclear energy which continues to give partriarchy a hard-on, and male cabinent members a re-usable condom.

Enough is enough. Let’s top debating the issue. Lets stop haggling over renewable minutia and strategic advances on the quantum-micro-macro economic level. Let’s stop buying into the lies about Koeberg and Koeberg 2 and focus our efforts instead on demonstrating that the nuclear industry is exactly what it says it is, “As safe as the Asbestos Industry”.

Getting rid of dirty Asbestos-siding is one of the green movement’s few success stories — local industrialists once claimed “asbestos was good for everything,” just like nuclear energy. And of course, “blacks asbestos miners don’t need environmental awareness or green leftists to save them from cancer”.

Asbestos the Uranium of the Sixties was forced to close down and pay reperations for health loss and damage to lungs to countless workers, by the actions of Koeberg Altert, ELA, EJF and the Cape Town Ecology Group

And with nothing to gain, except notoriety for effecting change in society, change that lead to transformation and sustainable development.

Get the message straight;keep it simple: We don’t want safe nukes, or peaceful nukes, what we demand is no nukes whatsoever.

Close down Koeberg, Stop the Refueling Shipments, and Forward to a Nuclear-Free, Non-Racist, Non-Sexist African Continent.

Discommunication — the rewiring of thought in the digital age

AS technology changes our communication habits, human behaviour is increasingly becoming programmed. Eventually, we won’t be able to get around without an iPod, let alone understand each other without rushing off to blog our troubles away, like some agony aunt turning to the confession box and balling us out about some nutter who ruined the day, and all because topic headers no longer make any sense here.

Please try to give some indication as to what it is that we’re supposed to be reading, because soon, I won’t be able to tell the difference between the truly poetic and the practically insane. Come to think of it, imagine what happens to meaning the more one drifts off into cyberspace and discovers those virtual tendrils reaching backward over time. Hugs to anybody out there who went to Vision over the weekend. DRL (I love my banging beat music).