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Feminist Movements Challenge El Salvador's Total Abortion Ban |
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Monday, 12 December 2016 13:30 |
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Pineda writes: "El Salvador's total ban on abortion has horrific consequences for tens of thousands of Salvadoran women. Feminist movements are demanding reforms, while conservatives promise harsher sentences."
Feminist and social movement organizations march throughout the capital of San Salvador to demand an end to all forms of violence against women. (photo: Samantha Pineda)
Feminist Movements Challenge El Salvador's Total Abortion Ban
By Samantha Pineda, NACLA
12 December 16
El Salvador’s total ban on abortion has horrific consequences for tens of thousands of Salvadoran women. Feminist movements are demanding reforms, while conservatives promise harsher sentences.
 n November 25th, over 500 hundred people marched through the streets of San Salvador to commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and to demand an end to all violence against women. Women-only drum crews pounded out a festive rhythm as participants from social movement organizations convened by the country’s feminist movement, including unions and labor groups, the LGBTQ community, healthcare workers, agricultural cooperatives, and environmentalists, all took to the streets.
A principal demand of the marchers was a call for El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly to ease the country’s total ban on abortion. While the feminist struggle for full reproductive rights is nothing new in El Salvador, organizing efforts over the past few years have gained momentum, found new openings, and are pushing forward the fight for women’s health, safety, and bodily autonomy.
Salvadoran feminist organizations and legislators of the governing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) made history in October when they introduced legislation to legalize abortions in cases of rape, incest, an unviable fetus, and when a woman’s life is at risk. If approved, Salvadoran women could once again seek therapeutic abortions, which were legal prior to 1997 when a right-wing-controlled legislature passed a total ban. The 1997 sanction was followed in 1998 by a Constitutional reform that recognized human life as beginning at conception, creating a legal framework that allowed prosecution of women and abortion providers for murder. The result is that today El Salvador is only one of six countries worldwide with a complete ban on abortion.
According to Sara García from the Agrupación Ciudadana por la Despenalización del Aborto Terapéutico, Ético y Eugenésico (Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion), the criminalization of abortion has “imposed serious consequences on the health and lives of women and young girls, generating everything from stigmatization to unjust criminalization.”
García noted that criminalization denies women access to life-saving medical care and also “causes judicial insecurity for health and medical personnel who treat cases of high-risk pregnancies.” Indeed, even in the case of an ectopic pregnancy - a life-threatening situation for a woman where the fetus develops outside of the womb with no chance of survival - doctors are unable to offer the recommended medical treatment of terminating the pregnancy.
Another consequence of the abortion ban is the frequency with which women who experienced a miscarriage or still-birth are unjustly convicted of abortion or, in many cases, murder. Valentina Ballesta, a lawyer at the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), explained to the Salvadoran press, “many women who have medical emergencies or births outside of hospitals are accused by their own doctors or by health personnel, and processed for aggravated homicide.” Advocates point out that in these cases, classist and misogynist attitudes often violate a woman’s right to the presumption of innocence, which is protected under the Salvadoran constitution. Virtually all women convicted of abortion or feticide are impoverished, reliant on the public healthcare system, and, in many cases, have limited formal education.
The total abortion ban holds particularly difficult consequences for pregnant girls and young women. According to a report by El Salvador’s Ministry of Health and the United Nations Population Fund, over 13,000 girls became pregnant in 2015, 1,400 of whom were between the ages of 10 and 14. The study also found that these girls are often impregnated through rape and other forms of sexual violence by older men, in many cases a relative or family friend. García says the harshest indication of this reality is that the leading cause of maternal death in girls and teenagers is suicide.
Once pregnant, the report notes that 80% of these girls are no longer able to attend schools, become responsible for domestic duties, and have more children with those who impregnated them. In response to this data, the Minister of Health, Violeta Menjívar made an impassioned plea to the Attorney General to prosecute sexual predators. She lamented, “It’s unfathomable that only [women and girls] are persecuted for interrupting a pregnancy and not the men who impregnated them…if we do not begin to deal with the concept of justice, as much as we may want [to reduce these pregnancies], we will not advance.”
The absence of sexual and reproductive education, high levels of violence against women, and the absolute criminalization of abortion have disproportionately negative impacts on women’s human rights, as women are the ones that have to live with the consequences of wrongful convictions, precarious medical attention, and family separation. Rarely, are these issues part of the public debate on abortion, which has historically been dominated by powerful, conservative sectors whose influence is reflected in public opinion polls that show minimal public support for women’s full reproductive rights. Until recently, even many leftist and progressive politicians considered defending reproductive rights political suicide. Influential feminists within the FMLN such as Norma Guevara and Violeta Menjivar who in 2010 criticized former President Mauricio Funes for his refusal to consider reforming the countries total abortion ban have also continued to push the issue both within the party and from their positions within the government. As a result, current and previous FMLN administrations have made unprecedented gains in addressing the needs of women in the country, but the abortion ban persists.
In recent years, the Salvadoran feminist movement has increased organizing and mobilizing to challenge the country’s draconian abortion law. The international campaign “Liberty for the 17” has fought for pardons for women unjustly imprisoned for abortion or aggravated murder in the aftermath of miscarriages or obstetric emergencies. The campaign has successfully secured the freedom of three women, but even these victories remain precarious as the country’s Attorney General is appealing the exonerations.
Public education campaigns by feminist groups with the support of international NGOs may be playing a role in shifting public opinion. Between 2009 and 2012, it appears that the percentage of Salvadorans who support permitting abortions or who agree that the church should permit abortion in case of rape or malformation has risen considerably. While the Central American University’s (UCA) most recent poll found 57.4% support for permitting abortions when the mother’s life is in danger, 51% when the fetus is unviable, and 22.7% in cases of pregnancies resulting from rape, though it still showed less than 6% of the population backs abortions for girls and teenagers who feel unprepared for motherhood or for adult women unable to support a child. Just three years before, in a 2009 study on religion and abortion, the UCA found that only 15.2% of participants agreed that churches should permit abortion in cases of rape of malformation, while 82.5% of participants disagreed or highly disagreed.
But feminist groups are up against anti-choice messaging propagated through the country’s churches and a well-funded lobby. Julia Regina de Cardenal, the wife of one of El Salvador’s wealthiest businessmen, Luis Cardenal, is the most public face of this lobby. Her foundation “Yes to Life” receives ample space from the local media to spread messages like, “abortionists use any excuse to justify the murder of the unborn,” and convince the public that even a moderate easing of the current ban is just a first step towards full legalization of abortion.
In response to the feminist movement’s growing success, Ricardo Velásquez Parker, a legislator from the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party introduced a bill in July 2016 to increase the penalty for abortion to 50 years in prison (currently the maximum sentence is eight years, though women convicted of murder often serve up to 30 years). This right-wing backlash persuaded the feminist movement to build on mounting support for their cause by pro-actively going after the inhumane ban. They found a natural ally in staunch feminist and FMLN legislator Lorena Peña, who was finalizing her term as president of the Legislative Assembly.
On Tuesday October 11th, Peña introduced legislation drafted in coordination with the Alianza por la Salud y la Vida de las Mujeres (Alliance for the Life and Health of Women) and the Citizens Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion to reform Article 133 of the Penal Code to decriminalize abortion in cases of rape, incest, an unviable fetus, and when the mother’s life is at risk. All 31 FMLN legislators in the Legislative Assembly have committed their support. Right-wing legislators have publicly expressed their opposition and ARENA’s Ricardo Velásquez told the press, “With this FMLN proposal, I think it is clear to the population who is in favor of this global genocide.”
At the November 25th march, Lorena Peña encouraged feminists to continue demanding their reproductive rights and stressed that “under an ARENA government it is impossible, under the FMLN it’s possible.” To get the reform approved, massive pressure is needed to convince twelve legislators to join the 31 FMLN legislators. This will be an uphill battle, as ARENA and the Christian Democrat Party (PDC) have publicly stated that they will vote against. The other two parties with representation, the Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA) party with eleven seats and the National Conciliation Party (PCN) with six, have yet to express party-wide positions, but neither have a history of championing women’s rights. The recently-named Human Rights Ombudswoman Raquel Caballero de Guevara, who was nominated by conservative ARENA legislators, has come out against the proposed reform and promised that she will “never support abortion.”
Yet Salvadoran feminists remain hopeful. According to García, the Citizen Group and other reproductive rights organizations have “great expectations,” and an objective going forward is to ensure the first ever “serious and scientific debate” in the Legislative Assembly about abortion and the inhumane consequences of its criminalization. “We hope that following the debate that the Legislative Assembly carries out along with the media and civil society, that [the proposed reform will] be approved,” added Sara Garcia.
El Salvador’s total ban on abortion is a form of institutionalized misogyny. It represents State-sponsored reproductive punishment that disproportionately affects poor and working-class women, women with disabilities and chronic illnesses, and those with limited formal education who are already on the receiving end of institutionalized violence. García expressed that approval of the proposed reform would “be an indicator that El Salvador is constructing public policies through democratic processes…it would constitute a concrete action for consolidating a more just and equitable society.” She went on to say that, success “will be the result of years of work by social and feminist organizations, who have fought so that this subject not be silenced and forgotten.”
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The Ambassador of Exxon |
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Monday, 12 December 2016 13:28 |
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Gross writes: "Rex Tillerson has fought for Exxon Mobil's interests abroad, putting him at odds with America's. Is that what we want in a secretary of state?"
Rex Tillerson, the chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil, speaks during the 2015 Oil and Money conference in central London on Oct. 7, 2015. (photo: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images)
The Ambassador of Exxon
By Daniel Gross, Slate
12 December 16
Rex Tillerson has fought for Exxon Mobil’s interests abroad, putting him at odds with America’s. Is that what we want in a secretary of state?
 t has become increasingly clear that President-elect Donald Trump plans to place America’s policymaking apparatus in the hands of a gang of old, white dealmakers. The latest apparent winner of The Cabinet Apprentice is in keeping with this vision: Trump is reportedly poised to nominate Exxon Mobil Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state.
Unlike so much of what Trump says, the idea of giving America’s top foreign-policy post to the chief executive officer of a global corporation isn’t absurd on its face. The typical CEO of a multinational has far more experience dealing with foreign governments than the typical senator. Many large companies effectively have their own foreign policies, since they do business around the world. And none has one more so than Exxon Mobil, a “corporate oil sovereign,” in the words of Steve Coll, who wrote the book on the company.
There are obvious reasons to be skeptical of a Tillerson State Department—and a few glimmers of a silver lining to his nomination. Set aside the obvious mantra that critics will sound: Government is not business. Tillerson, a native Texan who joined Exxon in 1975, hasn’t expressed much interest in subjects outside the oil business. He and his company are concerned with other countries only to the degree they have hydrocarbons on their land or off their shores that can be exploited. (Venezuela, yes; Guatemala, no. Saudi Arabia, yes; Lebanon, no.) That’s a skewed lens through which to view the world. When Tillerson and his colleagues interact directly with a foreign government’s leader, the conversation revolves around resources and money—not human rights, broad-based economic development, regional stability, or international alliances.
What’s more, Exxon Mobil’s foreign policies don’t necessarily align with those of the United States. Tillerson is tight with Vladimir Putin, in part because Russia is such a significant player in the global resources industry. I can’t imagine he really cares too much about Russia’s annexation of the Crimea. Nor can I see his State Department rallying opposition to a Russian effort to exert its influence in the Baltics. Russia has oil and natural gas; Lithuania and Estonia don’t. Typically, we expect our secretaries of state to give hope to proponents of democracy wherever they can be found and stand up forthrightly for American values and interests. Nothing in Tillerson’s career suggests he would be capable of—or interested in—doing so.
The reality is that the company Tillerson runs, while based in Irving, Texas, is increasingly a rootless, cosmopolitan citizen of no country.* While the U.S. isn’t quite a rump operation for Exxon Mobil, it’s an increasingly less important one. The company broadly divides its businesses into three categories: upstream (getting oil and natural gas out of the ground); downstream (refining, distilling, and distributing it); and chemicals. In the third quarter of this year, Exxon Mobil lost $1.8 billion on its U.S. upstream operations, while earning $2.7 billion on its upstream operations everywhere else. It made $824 million on its U.S. downstream operations, while earning $2.1 billion on its non-U.S. downstream operations. And the U.S. chemicals business made $1.5 billion in profits, compared with $2.2 billion for the non-U.S. chemicals business.
Moreover, virtually all of Exxon Mobil’s future investments are slated to take place outside the U.S. A deck it shares with investors, which you can see here, lists the company’s major projects for the decade. Between 2012 and 2015, of 22 major projects initiated, only two were in the United States. The rest were in places like Canada, Malaysia, Nigeria, Norway, and Russia. Of 37 projects the company anticipates initiating between 2016 and 2018, only six are in the U.S. And they’re generally small, dwarfed by the projects it has planned in Australia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere. America First? Not for Exxon Mobil.
And yet: This corporate internationalism may not be such a bad thing in this case, because it at least means Exxon Mobil doesn’t fully buy into the know-nothing nationalism that the GOP has embraced. To be clear, Exxon Mobil is unabashedly in the fossil-fuel business, which emits carbon. It’s not trying to pivot by getting into solar and wind, as some foreign oil-based companies have done. And it is certainly no friend of the planet.
But precisely because Exxon Mobil has its own foreign policy, it has to respect international norms. Which means Tillerson’s company has taken a set of attitudes and policy oppositions at odds with those of Trump and the Republican Party.
Exxon Mobil has no interest in obviating the need for fossil fuels. But it is taking steps to eliminate emissions from its own activities. Exxon Mobil’s investor slide deck highlights how it has reduced greenhouse gas emissions in its operations, largely through reducing the practice of flaring while stressing energy efficiency and cogeneration (using heat generated during operations to create electricity). The company boasts that is “participating in one third of the world’s carbon capture and sequestration capacity.”
Last month, Exxon Mobil endorsed the Paris climate treaty (which Trump is threatening to rip up). After the election, Suzanne McCarron, vice president of government and public affairs at the company, tweeted a reaffirmation of the company’s recognition of the importance of the Paris treaty and the risks of climate change. The company has also supported a tax on carbon.
None of this is because Exxon Mobil is going green or is being responsive to critics, which include (historical irony alert!) the Rockefeller Family Fund. It is simply because this engineering-, science-, and project-based culture has to be practical and realistic. And the reality of the world is that there are significant geographies in which the company operates where carbon emissions are constrained (like Europe and Canada), and there are significant geographies where they could be in the future (like China.) So it can’t simply stubbornly dig in its heels, the way American coal companies have. Exxon Mobil operates in a global framework, not a domestic one.
There’s no guarantee Tillerson would bring this mindset to the Trump administration. But his background is an indicator of just how strange the next several years are going to be. A friend of Vladimir Putin who has made his life’s work extracting oil from the Earth’s surface could be our next chief diplomat. On a relative basis, he’s likely to be one who recognizes international norms and acts as a force for practicality in the conduct of foreign affairs. But that won’t make his presence in the State Department any less surreal.
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FOCUS: It's 2016. Do You Know Where Your Bombs Are Falling? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=31568"><span class="small">Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Monday, 12 December 2016 13:06 |
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Gordon writes: "On how many countries is U.S. ordnance falling at the moment? Some put the total at six; others, seven. For the record, those seven would be Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and, oh yes, Yemen."
A man walks past a graffiti, denouncing strikes by U.S. drones in Yemen, painted on a wall in Sanaa November 13, 2014. (photo: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)
It's 2016. Do You Know Where Your Bombs Are Falling?
By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
12 December 16
What is it about America and its twenty-first-century wars? They spread continually -- there are now seven of them; they never end; and yet, if you happen to live in the United States, most of the time it would be easy enough to believe that, except for the struggle against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, there were no conflicts underway. Take the Afghan War, for an example. Now 15 years old and heating up again as the Taliban takes more territory and U.S. operations there grow, it was missing in action in the 2016 election campaign. Neither presidential candidate debated or discussed that war, despite the close to 10,000 U.S. troops (and more private contractors) still based there, the fact that U.S. air power has again been unleashed in that country, and the way those in the Pentagon are talking about it as a conflict that will extend well into the 2020s. It makes no difference. Here, it’s simply the war that time forgot. Similar things might be said, even if on a lesser scale, about expanding American operations in Somalia and ongoing ones in Libya. Nor is the intensity of the air war in Syria or Iraq much emphasized or grasped by the American public.
And then, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, author of American Nuremberg, makes clear today, there’s the war that couldn’t be forgotten because, in essence, just about no one here noticed it in the first place. I’m speaking of the U.S.-backed Saudi war aimed significantly at the civilian population of desperately impoverished Yemen. It’s a conflict in which the actual American stake couldn’t be foggier and yet the Obama administration has supported it in just about every way imaginable, and it will soon be inherited by Trump and his national security crew. It could hardly be grimmer, more devastating, or more gruesome, and yet most of the time, from an American point of view, it might as well not be happening. There is evidently no good moment to bring up the subject of where American bombs are falling on our planet, so why not now?
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
It's 2016. Do You Know Where Your Bombs Are Falling?
The Forgotten War in Yemen and the Unchecked War Powers of the Presidency in the Age of Trump
 he long national nightmare that was the 2016 presidential election is finally over. Now, we’re facing a worse terror: the reality of a Trump presidency. Donald Trump has already promised to nominate a segregationist attorney general, a national security adviser who is a raging Islamophobe, a secretary of education who doesn’t believe in public schools, and a secretary of defense whose sobriquet is “Mad Dog.” How worried should we be that General James "Mad Dog" Mattis may well be the soberest among them?
Along with a deeply divided country, the worst income inequality since at least the 1920s, and a crumbling infrastructure, Trump will inherit a 15-year-old, apparently never-ending worldwide war. While the named enemy may be a mere emotion (“terror”) or an incendiary strategy (“terrorism”), the victims couldn’t be more real, and as in all modern wars, the majority of them are civilians.
On how many countries is U.S. ordnance falling at the moment? Some put the total at six; others, seven. For the record, those seven would be Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and, oh yes, Yemen.
The United States has been directing drone strikes against what it calls al-Qaeda targets in Yemen since 2002, but our military involvement in that country increased dramatically in 2015 when U.S. ally Saudi Arabia inserted itself into a civil war there. Since then, the United States has been supplying intelligence and mid-air refueling for Saudi bombers (many of them American-made F-15s sold to that country). The State Department has also approved sales to the Saudis of $1.29 billion worth of bombs -- “smart” and otherwise -- together with $1.15 billion worth of tanks, and half a billion dollars of ammunition. And that, in total, is only a small part of the $115 billion total in military sales the United States has offered Saudi Arabia since President Obama took power in 2009.
Why are American bombs being dropped on Yemen by American-trained pilots from American-made planes? I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, a glimpse of the results.
“On the Brink of Abyss”
The photographs are devastating: tiny, large-eyed children with sticks for limbs stare out at the viewer. In some, their mothers touch them gently, tentatively, as if a stronger embrace would snap their bones. These are just a few victims of the famine that war has brought to Yemen, which was already the poorest country in the Arab world before the present civil war and Saudi bombing campaign even began. UNICEF spokesman Mohammed Al-Asaadi told al-Jazeera that, by August 2016, the agency had counted 370,000 children “suffering from severe acute malnutrition,” and the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) says 14.4 million people in Yemen are “food insecure,” seven million of them -- one fifth of the country’s population -- “in desperate need of food assistance.” Before the war began, Yemen imported 90% of its food. Since April 2015, however, Saudi Arabia has blockaded the country’s ports. Today, 80% of Yemenis depend on some kind of U.N. food aid for survival, and the war has made the situation immeasurably worse.
As the WFP reports:
“The nutrition situation continues to deteriorate. According to WFP market analysis, prices of food items spiked in September as a result of the escalation of the conflict. The national average price of wheat flour last month was 55 percent higher compared to the pre-crisis period.”
The rising price of wheat matters, because in many famines, the problem isn’t that there’s no food, it’s that what food there is people can’t afford to buy.
And that was before the cholera outbreak. In October, medical workers began to see cases of that water-borne diarrheal disease, which is easily transmitted and kills quickly, especially when people are malnourished. By the end of the month, according to the World Health Organization, there were 1,410 confirmed cases of cholera, and 45 known deaths from it in the country. (Other estimates put the number of cases at more than 2,200.)
Both these health emergencies have been exacerbated by the ongoing Saudi air war, which has destroyed or otherwise forced the closure of more than 600 healthcare centers, including four hospitals operated by Doctors Without Borders, along with 1,400 schools. More than half of all health facilities in the country have either closed or are only partially functional.
The day before the U.S. election, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the U.N.’s envoy on Yemen, described the situation this way: “People are dying... the infrastructure is falling apart... and the economy is on the brink of abyss.” Every time it seems the crisis can’t get any worse, it does. A recent Washington Post story describes such “wrenching” choices now commonly faced by Yemeni families as whether to spend the little money they have to take one dying child to a hospital or to buy food for the rest of the family.
The Saudi-led coalition includes Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain. Between March 2015 and the end of August 2016, according to the Yemen Data Project, an independent, nonpartisan group of academics and human rights organizations, the coalition launched more than 8,600 air strikes. At least a third of them struck civilian targets, including, the Guardian reports, “school buildings, hospitals, markets, mosques and economic infrastructure.” Gatherings like weddings and funerals have come under attack, too. To get a sense of the scale and focus of the air war, consider that one market in the town of Sirwah about 50 miles east of the capital, Sana’a, has already been hit 24 separate times.
Casualty estimates vary, but the World Health Organization says that, as of October 25th, “more than 7,070 people have been killed and over 36,818 injured.” As early as last January, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees reported that 2.4 million people (nearly one-tenth of the population) were already internally displaced -- that is, uprooted from their homes by the war. Another 170,000 have fled the country, including Somali and Ethiopian refugees, who had sought asylum from their own countries in Yemen, mistakenly believing that the war there had died down. Leaving Yemen has, however, gotten harder for the desperate and uprooted since the Saudis and Egypt began blockading the country’s ports. Yemen shares land borders with Saudi Arabia to the north and Oman -- the only Arab monarchy that is not part of the Saudi-led coalition -- to the east.
In early October, Saudi planes attacked a funeral hall in Sana’a where the father of the country’s interior minister was being memorialized, killing at least 135 people and wounding more than 500. Gathered at the funeral, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), were a wide range of Yemenis, including journalists, government officials, and some military men. HRW’s on-the-ground report on the incident claims that the attack, which intentionally targeted civilians and involved an initial air strike followed by a second one after rescuers had begun to arrive 30 minutes later, constitutes a war crime. The Saudi-led coalition acknowledged responsibility for the bombing, blaming the attack on “wrong information.”
U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon was horrified and called for a full investigation. “Aerial attacks by the Saudi-led coalition,” he said, “have already caused immense carnage, and destroyed much of the country’s medical facilities and other vital civilian infrastructure.”
For once in this forgotten war, the international outcry was sufficient to force the Obama administration to say something vaguely negative about its ally. “U.S. security cooperation with Saudi Arabia,” commented National Security Council Spokesman Ned Price, “is not a blank check.” He added:
“In light of this and other recent incidents, we have initiated an immediate review of our already significantly reduced support to the Saudi-led coalition and are prepared to adjust our support so as to better align with U.S. principles, values, and interests, including achieving an immediate and durable end to Yemen's tragic conflict."
That "check" from Washington did at least include the bombs used in the funeral attack. According to HRW’s on-the-ground reporters, U.S.-manufactured, air-dropped GBU-12 Paveway II 500-pound laser-guided bombs were used.
What’s It All About?
Why is Saudi Arabia, along with its allies, aided by the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom, fighting in Yemen? That country has little oil, although petroleum products are its largest export, followed by among other things “non-fillet fresh fish.” It does lie along one of the world’s main oil trading routes on the Bab el-Mandeb strait between the Suez Canal at the north end of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in the south. But neither Saudi nor U.S. access to the canal is threatened by the forces Saudi Arabia is fighting in Yemen.
The Saudis have specifically targeted the Houthis, a political movement named for its founder Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, a Zaidi Shi’a Muslim religious and political leader who died in 2004. The Zaidis are an ancient branch of Shi’a Islam, most of whose adherents live in Yemen.
Officially known as Ansar Allah (Partisans of God), the Houthi movement began in the 1990s as a religious revival among young people, who described it as a vehicle for their commitment to peace and justice. Ansar Allah soon adopted a series of slogans opposing the United States and Israel, along with any Arab countries collaborating with them, presumably including Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. As Zaidi Muslims, the movement also opposed any significant role for Salafists (fundamentalist Sunnis) in Yemeni life and held demonstrations at mosques, including in the capital, Sana’a.
In 2004, this led to armed confrontations when Yemeni security forces, commanded by then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh, attacked the demonstrators. Badreddin al-Houthi, the movement’s founder, was killed in the intermittent civil war that followed and officially ended in 2010. Al-Jazeera, the Qatar government’s news agency, has suggested that President Saleh may have used his war with the Houthis unsuccessfully to get at his real rival, a cousin and general in the Yemeni army named Ali Mohsen.
During the Arab Spring in 2011, the Houthis supported a successful effort to oust President Saleh, and as a reward, according to al-Jazeera, that same General Mohsen gave them control of the state of Saadra, an area where many Houthi tribespeople live. Having helped unseat Saleh, the Houthis -- and much of the rest of Yemen -- soon fell out with his Saudi-supported replacement, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. In January 2015, the Houthis took over Sana’a and placed Hadi under effective house arrest. He later fled to Saudi Arabia and is believed to be living in the Saudi capital Riyadh. The Houthis for their part have now allied with their old enemy Saleh.
So, once again, why do the Saudis (and their Sunni Gulf State allies) care so much about the roiling internal politics and conflicts of their desperately poor neighbor to the south? It’s true that the Houthis have managed to lob some rockets into Saudi Arabia and conduct a few cross-border raids, but they hardly represent an existential threat to that country.
The Saudis firmly believe, however, that Iran represents such a threat. As Saudi diplomatic documents described in the New York Times suggest, that country has “a near obsession with Iran.” They see the hand of that Shi’a nation everywhere, and certainly everywhere that Shi’a minorities have challenged Sunni or secular rulers, including Iraq.
There seems to be little evidence that Iran supported the Houthis (who represent a minority variant of Shi’a Islam) in any serious way -- at least until the Saudis got into the act. Even now, according to a report in the Washington Post, the Houthis “are not Iranian puppets.” Their fight is local and the support they get from Iran remains “limited and far from sufficient to make more than a marginal difference to the balance of forces in Yemen, a country awash with weapons. There is therefore no supporting evidence to the claim that Iran has bought itself any significant measure of influence over Houthi decision-making.”
So to return to where we began: why exactly has Washington supported the Saudi war in Yemen so fully and with such clout? The best guess is that it’s a make-up present to Saudi Arabia, a gesture to help heal the rift that opened when the Obama administration concluded its July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. Under that agreement’s terms, Iran vowed “that it will under no circumstances ever seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons” in return for the United States lifting years of economic sanctions.
U.S. Boots on the Ground
The munitions the United States has supplied to the Saudis for their war in Yemen include cluster bombs, which sprinkle hundreds of miniature bomblets around an area as big as several football fields. Unexploded bomblets can go off years later, one reason why their use is now generally considered to violate the laws of war. In fact, 119 countries have signed a treaty to outlaw cluster bombs, although not the United States. (As it happens, Saudi Arabia isn't the only U.S. ally to favor cluster bombs. Israel has also used them, for instance deploying “more than a million” bomblets in its 2006 war against Lebanon, according to an Israel Defense Forces commander.)
We know that U.S.-made cluster bombs have already killed civilians in Yemen, and in June 2016, many Democratic members of Congress tried to outlaw their sale to Saudi Arabia. They lost in a close 216-204 vote. Only 16 Democrats backed President Obama’s request to continue supplying cluster bombs to the Saudis. Congressional Republicans and the Defense Department, however, fought back fiercely, as the Intercept has reported:
“‘The Department of Defense strongly opposes this amendment,’ said Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., chairman of the House Committee on Defense Appropriations, during floor debate. ‘They advise us that it would stigmatize cluster munitions, which are legitimate weapons with clear military utility.’”
Perhaps some weapons deserve to be stigmatized.
These days it’s not just American bombs that are landing in Yemen. U.S. Special Operations forces have landed there, too, ostensibly to fight al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, the local terror outfit that has been expanding its operations amid the chaos of the war in that country. If anything, the air war has actually strengthened AQAP’s position, allowing it to seize more territory in the chaos of the ongoing conflict. In the ever-shifting set of alliances that is Yemeni reality, those U.S. special ops troops find themselves allied with the United Arab Emirates against AQAP and the local branch of the Islamic State, or ISIS, and also, at least temporarily, with a thriving movement of southern Yemeni separatists, who would like to see a return to the pre-1990 moment when there were two Yemens, north and south.
In the beginning, the White House claimed that the special ops deployment was temporary. But by June 2016, the Washington Post was reporting that “the U.S. military now plans to keep a small force of Special Operations advisers in Yemen... for the foreseeable future.” And that has yet to change, so consider us now directly involved in an undeclared land war in that country.
Compared to the horrors of Iraq and Syria, the slaughter, displacement, and starvation in Yemen may seem like small potatoes -- except, of course, to the people living and dying there. But precisely because there are no U.S. economic or military interests in Yemen, perhaps it could be the first arena in Washington’s endless war on terror to be abandoned.
Missing (Reward Offered for Sighting It): Congressional Backbone
I vividly recall a political cartoon of the 1980s that appeared at a moment when Congress was once again voting to send U.S. aid to the Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Having witnessed firsthand the effects of the Contra war there, with its intentional military strategy of attacking civilians and public services as well as its use of torture, kidnapping, and mutilation, I found those Congressional debates on sending money, weapons, and CIA trainers to the Contras frustrating. The cartoon’s single panel caught my mood exactly. It was set in the cloakroom of the House of Representatives. Suspended from each hanger was a backbone. A blob-like creature in a suit could just be seen slithering out of the frame. The point was clear: Congress had checked its spine at the door.
In fact, in every war the United States has fought since World War II, Congress has effectively abdicated its constitutional right to declare war, repeatedly rolling over and playing dead for the executive branch. During the last 50 years, from the Reagan administration’s illegal Contra war to the “war on terror,” this version of a presidential power grab has only accelerated. By now, we’ve become so used to all of this that the term “commander-in-chief” has become synonymous with “president” -- even in domestic contexts. With a Trump administration on the horizon, it should be easier to see just what an irresponsible folly it’s been to allow the power of the presidency and the national security state to balloon in such an uncontrolled, unchecked way.
I wish I had the slightest hope that our newly elected Republican Congress would find its long-lost spine in the age of Donald Trump and reassert its right and duty to decide whether to commit the country to war, starting in Yemen. Today, more than ever, the world needs our system of checks and balances to work again. The alternative, unthinkable as it might be, is looming.
It’s 2016. We know where our bombs are. Isn’t it time to bring them home?
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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FOCUS: Bernie's Party? |
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Monday, 12 December 2016 11:37 |
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Galindez writes: "All of the signs I see lead me to believe that the political revolution is succeeding in its effort to transform the Democratic Party."
Bernie Sanders greeting supporters at a rally in Baltimore. (photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)
Scott Galindez | Bernie's Party?
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
12 December 16
 ll of the signs I see lead me to believe that the political revolution is succeeding in its effort to transform the Democratic Party. This Wednesday night, Our Revolution will be live streaming an event with Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison. Ellison is the leading candidate to replace Donna Brazile as chair of the DNC. The location of the event and one of its participants lead me to believe that Our Revolution has already won over a significant chunk of Hillary Clinton’s base of support.
The headquarters of the American Federation of Teachers is where the event will take place. Randi Weingarten, the union's president, is participating in the event, which is focusing on Congressman Ellison’s vision for where he would lead the Democratic Party.
Weingarten and the teachers union endorsed Hillary Clinton early. Weingarten was one of the fiercest supporters of Secretary Clinton and has a lot of sway with Clinton supporters around the country. Her support of Keith Ellison, Bernie’s choice to be chair, signals to me that at least organized labor has joined the political revolution.
If you remember shortly after Trump’s victory there was a rally in Upper Senate Park organized by Our Revolution. The rally, which featured speeches by Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Keith Ellison and Nina Turner, also included many labor leaders who supported Clinton. The chair of the board of Our Revolution is Larry Cohen, former president of Communication Workers of America. It looks to me like Cohen has succeeded in bringing labor on board.
Another thing to remember is Cohen is co-chairing a critical commission charged with reforming the nominating process. The “Unity” Commission will have seven members appointed by Sanders in addition to Cohen. The Clinton Campaign will appoint nine members. The next party chair will appoint an additional three members. Keith Ellison is the heavy favorite at this point to win the chairmanship. Ellison, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was the first elected official to endorse Bernie Sanders. A 10-9 majority would be enough to guarantee substantial changes in the nominating process. There are signs, however, that many in the Clinton camp are open to significant changes.
Of course, the commission can only suggest changes that the DNC will have to approve in the end. There is reason for optimism as we watch the way party leaders are pushing Bernie out front. Reforming the nominating process will be the number one priority for Sanders and Ellison at the DNC.
Usually, the party’s presidential nominee selects the new chair of the party. There are exceptions: sometimes a candidate with a significant number of delegates negotiates the naming of the next party leader as a condition for releasing their delegates. In 1988 Jesse Jackson did that, resulting in the chairmanship of Ron Brown.
There is no indication that happened this time, but the silence of Hillary Clinton in the process of electing a new chair leads me to believe that Bernie Sanders is now the de facto leader of the party.
I may be wrong, but the handwriting on the wall is indicating that Bernie played his cards right and is now poised to transform the Democratic Party. Age is the only thing that may stop Sanders from being the frontrunner for president in 2020.
Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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onald Trump stirred controversy on Monday by revealing that he intends to spend only half his time as President at the Kremlin—and the remainder at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
