The
JvL Bi-Weekly
James
van Luik
Publisher
& Editor & Compiler
Please
forward the Bi-Weekly to any who might be interested
Tuesday,
August 31st, 2004
Volume
3, No. 15
8
Articles, 12 Pages
2.
Foreign Troops Should Quit Iraq
3.
I Love You, Madame Librarian
5.
Fort Bragg PTSD Rates Comparable to Vietnam Era
6.
Dick Cheney, Hugo Chavez and Bill Clinton's Band
8.
A Birthday Present for Fidel
1. SLAUGHTER IN NAJAF, BUSH IGNITED THIS INSURGENCY, NOT al-SADR
BY
MILAN
RAI
Assaulting
the Shia Majority:
The
US has launched a war against a large part of the Iraqi people. It is the Bush
Administration's desire for total domination, not the militancy of Shia
insurgents that has triggered this latest uprising. The US is trying to tame
the Shia majority.
At
the time of writing, US forces have surrounded the most holy site in Shia
Islam, the Imam Ali mosque in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf, after eight
days of fierce fighting with the forces of Muqtada al-Sadr, reportedly leaving
hundreds dead. Elsewhere, "US air strikes and fighting on the ground in
the [largely Shia] Iraqi city of Kut have left 72 people dead and about 150
injured," according to the interim Iraqi government. (BBC News Online, 12
Aug.)
"British
troops [have also] fought fierce battles with militants in Amara and
Basra…British troops launched an offensive overnight on Tuesday [10 Aug.]
against Shia fighters in the southern town of Amara, killing 10 of them, the
militiamen said. Hospital officials in the town said four civilians had also
died." (Telegraphy, 12 Aug., p. 12)
"The
purpose was to regain control of al-Amarah," said Squadron Leader Spike
Wilson, British forces spokesperson. ("British troops kill 10",
Times, 12 Aug.) Control is what it's all about.
Next
stop: Sadr City, Baghdad:
"One
of the biggest challenges to the interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, is to
stamp his authority on the capital. Sadr City, as the Shia suburb in
north-east Baghdad is known, has increasingly started to resemble 1980s
Beirut. Scores have died in the past week as American tanks and fighter
aircraft have fought the insurgents.' (Telegraph, 12 Aug., p. 12)
Adrian
Blomfield of the Telegraph visited Sadr City: "That civilians are being
killed by US troops is not in doubt. In a pool of blood on a hospital
operating room floor yesterday, doctors were battling to save the life of
six-year old Ali Hussain "shot in the belly" by soldiers in a US
tank. The doctors said, "We have had at least 20 dead brought in
today." (Telegraphy, 12 Aug., p. 12)
Mehdi
Nouri, a shopkeeper in Sadr City, said: "The Americans can never win us
back now. The Americans are frightened of ordinary Iraqi people, that is why
they hate us. We are frightened of them, that is why we hate them. In such a
situation we can only see death and more deaths. We are begging the Americans
to leave." (Telegraph, 12 Aug., p. 12)
Allawi
Serves Washington:
This
is a US assault on Najaf. "Iraqi government troops are also involved,
though their participation may be largely for political reasons" not
least to signal that this is an operation that has the full backing of Iraq's
interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi." (Jonathan Marcus, Diplomatic
Correspondent, BBC News Online, 12 Aug.)
"Iyad
Allawi, the interim prime minister has laid his credibility on the line by
promising total destruction of [Sadr's] Mahdi army." (Telegraph, 12 Aug.,
p.12)
However,
"Ibrahim al-Jaafari, one of Iraq's two vice-presidents and leader of the
biggest Shia party, the Da'awa, yesterday [11 Aug.] said US troops should stop
fighting in Najaf and leave the job to Iraqi security forces." (Guardian,
12 Aug., p. 3) Jaafari "has topped opinion polls as Iraq's most popular
politician" earlier this year. (FT 12 Aug., p. 7)
The
US Started This Uprising, Not Sadr
"A
diplomatic source in Baghdad said yesterday that it was unclear why the cleric
was leading the bloody uprising, the second that he has instigated in four
months." ("British troops kill 10", Times, 12 Aug.) Media
reporting has done its best to obscure the origins of the violence.
The
simple truth is that, as in the case of the first "Sadr uprising",
this violence has been "instigated" not by Shia militants, but by
the US.
Go
back to the beginning, 2 Aug." "US forces in Iraq went on the
offensive against two Islamist political groups yesterday [2 Aug.], arresting
an influential Sunni cleric in Baghdad and breaking a two-months ceasefire
with followers of Shia radical Moqtada al-Sadr, based in Kufa. Sheikh Mahmoud
al-Sudani, a spokesman for Mr. Sadr in Baghdad, told journalists that US
soldiers had surrounded Mr. Sadr's house. Reuters news agency quoted witnesses
saying that US Forces had moved into Mr. Sadr's neighbourhood in Kufa, next to
Najaf, and were exchanging fire with members of Mr. Sadr's Shia militia, the
Mehdi Army," (FT, 3 Aug., p.9)
Interestingly,
despite later denials, it was clear in first reports that the mission was to
arrest Sadr: "The US military says an Iraqi arrest warrant
has been issued for Sadr in relation to the killing of a rival cleric
in Najaf last year." The Independent also noted that "during truce
negotiations earlier this year, Iraqi officials said Sadr would not face
arrest." (Independent, 3 Aug., p. 25) Another lie.
A
few days later Sabah Khadim, a senior adviser to the Allawi government,
indirectly confirmed that arresting Sadr is a priority: "Asked whether
Mr. Sadr would be arrested, Mr. Khadim said: We don't know exactly where he
is, but we will fight all criminals. It does not mater how big they are."
(Guardian, 7 Aug., p.1)
The
2 Aug. raid was followed by "days of mounting tension during which Mr.
Sadr's supporters seized 18 Iraqi police officers in response to the arrest of
several of the cleric's senior aides." Full scale violence in Najaf came
on 4 Aug. (Guardian, 6 Aug., p.2)
It
wasn't until 5 Aug. that "Militants linked to the firebrand cleric
Moqtada al-Sadr declared holy war on British forces". In Basra, British
forces had arrested four Sadr supporters on 3 Aug. Fighting broke out on 5
Aug. "after the expiration of a noon deadline to release them.
(Telegraph, 6 Aug., p. 14)
All
this is very like the start of the Spring "Sadr uprising", which was
triggered "after the US-led occupation authorities closed his newspaper,
arrested a key aide and called for his arrest over the killing of a moderate
Shia leader." (BBC News Online, 16 June)
On
5 Aug., a Sadr spokesperson in Amara said of this latest violence, quite
accurately, "the cease fire is over because of the actions of the
occupation forces." ( Telegraph, 6 Aug., p. 14)
Sadr
Calls for a Ceasefire:
Despite
all this, on the same day, "a spokesman for Mr. Sadr called for the
restoration of a truce agreed in June between Mr. Sadr's forces and US
troops." (FT, 6 Aug., p. 5)
The
governor of Najaf, Adnan al-Zurufi, responded to this appeal with the
statement that, "There is no compromise or room for another truce."
(Times, 7 Aug., p. 18)
A
US diplomat said, " This is one battle we really do feel we can
win." (Telegraph, 7 Aug., p. 12)
No
more cease fires:
The
reason Sadr wants a cease fire is because he wants to become part of the
political process. As part of the first truce, "Mr. Sadr issued a
statement calling on his men who are not from Najaf to "do their
duty" and go home… [and] announced he would set up a political party to
contest elections next year." ("Sadr orders militia to quit.
Najaf", BBC News Online, 16 June)
The
BBC's Dumeetha Luthra in Baghdad suggested that the order for non-resident
fighters to leave Najaf might be "a tentative step to secure a place in a
future Iraqi government." Sadr "urged supporters not to attack Iraqi
security forces, and said the recently formed interim government was an
opportunity to 'build a unified Iraq'" ("Sadr orders militia to quit
Najaf", BBC News Online, 16 June)
Sadr
was no longer calling the interim government a puppet of the US; he was
preparing for political, not military, mobilization.
It
is precisely the political strength of the Shia majority that the Allawi
government and the Bush Administration fear and wish to destroy. That is why
they launched the raid to capture Sadr. That is why they are willing to invade
Najaf and kill hundreds. That is why they are assaulting Shia communities all
over Iraq.
It
is not Sadr's guns, but his votes that pose a threat to US domination.
Elections (even the national assembly conference) cannot be held until the
opposition has been co-opted or crushed.
Private
Lee O'Callaghan, who was killed in the fighting in Basra on 9 Aug. was due to
return to the UK the following week. His aunt, Margaret Evans, said, "My
message to Tony Blair is we should not be there. Why are we in Iraq? My
message would be, get the rest of the kids out."
2. FOREIGN TROOPS SHOULD QUIT IRAQ
BY
TARIQ
ALI
London,
13 August 2004 – Most legends contain a small grain of truth, but none is to
be found in the fraudulent images being presented each day by the BBC (and the
US networks). The print media is not much better. Official propaganda is
constantly repeated in sentences such as: "On June 28th
the US and its coalition partners transferred sovereign control of Iraq to an
interim government headed by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. The transfer of
sovereignty ended more than a year of American-led occupation".
Meanwhile,
US intelligence agencies admit that the size of the resistance increases every
day. If Moqtada al-Sadr were to be captured or killed in the fighting taking
place in Najaf, the steady trickle of recruits could become a flood.
The
notion that Iraq today is a sovereign state governed by Iraqis is a grotesque
fiction. Every Iraqi citizen, regardless of political views or religious
affiliation, is aware of the actual status of the country. The
"handover", designed largely to convince US citizens that they could
now relax and re-elect Bush, was also an invitation to the Western media to
downgrade coverage of Iraq, which it dutifully did.
Of
the two Iraqis plucked from obscurity to be the front men for the occupation,
"President" Yawar is a relatively harmless telecoms manager. He was
perfectly happy to don tribal gear for official functions and photo ops with
Rumsfeld and the boys. "Prime Minister" Allawi was at one time a
low-grade intelligence employee for Saddam, reporting on dissident Iraqis in
London. Subsequently, Anglo-American intelligence outfits recruited him. After
the first Gulf War he was sent to destabilize the regime. His hirelings bombed
a cinema and a bus carrying children.
Before
the war Allawi helped manufacture the 45-minute WMD delivery systems warning
for the dodgy dossier men in No. 10. After the occupation he was rewarded and
put on the "Governing Council".
He
then hired a lobbying firm, which spent $370,000 campaigning in Washington for
him to be made prime minister, and also got him a column in the Washington
Post.
AS
"prime minister" he cultivates a thuggish image. On July 17 in a
remarkable dispatch from Baghdad, Paul McGeough, the Australian correspondent,
(and former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald) alleged: "Iyad Allawi,
the new prime minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six
suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington
handed control for the country to his interim government, according to two
people who allege they witnessed the killings."
McGeough
appears regularly on TV and radio to defend his story, which does not go away.
The
fact is that Iraq is in a much bigger mess today than before the war. The
situation was summed up by a former inmate of Abu Ghraib prison" "We
want electricity in our homes , not up the arse."
The
citizens of the aggressor states can see this for themselves and regardless of
the media will, one must hope, punish their leaders for taking them to war –
regardless of the fact that the alternatives on offer are so weak.
In
the US, Sen. Kerry is an unconvincing politician. Unlike some of his liberal
apologists, he does not like to portray the Democrats as the consistently less
aggressive of the two parties. It was, after all, Democratic – not
Republican – presidents who launched the wars in Korea and Vietnam. The
Republican Eisenhower's electoral appeal in 1952 was based on being the more
peaceful of the two candidates. In 1960 Kennedy attacked the Republicans for
the "missile gap", denouncing their weakness before the Soviet
threat. Carter, not Reagan, launched the second Cold War. And in 1982 Clinton
was thundering against Bush senior's weakness
on Cuba and China. Now Bush junior has outpaced any Democratic rival in
accelerated militarism.
It
is necessary to bear this record in mind, as pressure has built up for the US
left to fall into line behind Kerry. Many will, understandably enough, vote
for him to get rid of warmonger government. If they succeed, he must be put
under immediate pressure to withdraw from Iraq.
If
there had been no resistance in Iraq, the triumphalism of warmongers would
have drowned out oppositions of every hue.
The
defeat of the warmongers, if it happens, will be the outcome of what is
happening in Baghdad and Basra, Fallujah and Najaf. Even if they try and brush
aside the 37,000 Iraqi civilians killed in this conflict, according to a
recent estimate by and Iraqi-based NGO, Bush and Blair will not forget the
names of the cities whose people refuse to surrender. There is only one
serious option: The unconditional withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq.
3. I LOVE YOU, MADAME LIBRARIAN
BY
KURT
VONNEGUT
I
like most of you, have seen Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title
is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury's great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit
451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point,
incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury's
novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.
And
on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous
for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their
great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted
anti-democratic bullies who have
tried to removed certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal
to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So
the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme
Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America
I love still exits at the front desks of our public libraries.
And
still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are
now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so
uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I
will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger,
published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.
In
case you haven't noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in
Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily
disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud,
grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry
and unopposed.
In
case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and
millions of human beings simply because
of their religion and race. We wound and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison
'em all we want.
Piece
of cake.
In
case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of
their religion or race but because of their low social class.
Send
'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.
Piece
of cake.
The
O'Reilly Factor.
So
I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based
magazine you are reading, In These Times.
Before
we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there
were weapons of mass destruction there.
Albert
Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives,
even though Twain hadn't even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV
entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two
American inventions, Barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by
an Englishman of the same name, Don't you wish you could have something named
after you?
Like
my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people
too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have
surrendered to a pitiless war machine.
My
last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."
Napalm
came from Harvard. Veritas!
Our
president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.
What
can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is
to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have
taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and
made it all their own?
BY
DIRK
DUNNING
I
am stunned almost to speechlessness.
The
northeast passage across the Siberian polar ice is open. The glaciers on
Ellesmere Island and the northern and northeastern shores of Greenland are
collapsing within a matter of days. The channel between Greenland and
Ellesmere Island is open. And only about 250 miles of ice remain on the north
shore of Greenland connecting it to the polar ice. And that is breaking up.
Vast
stretches of polar ice are pulverized and floating fee in the Artic ocean.
Thousands of square miles of ice are pulverized and on the edge of breaking up
into a billion ice bergs.
An
immense rent has formed in the ice north of Queen Victoria Island. An even
larger tear reaches up from Siberia poking at the north pole itself. The
entire north shore of Alaska is ice free, as is all of the northern Siberian
shore – all the way to the New Siberian Islands and beyond. The last of the
ice blocking the Northwestern passage at the east end of Queen Elizabeth
Island is breaking up.
In
short, the north pole is falling apart. And some claim global warming isn't
real!?
Within
week, the refreeze should begin. Depending on how long it is before that
happens, massive changes may occur at the pole before the freeze. The polar
ice may well break free from land on ALL sides!!
This
is one of the most astounding events in all of human history. And where is it
on the news????
5. FORT BRAGG PTSD RATES COMPARABLE TO VIETNAM ERA
BY
JOURNALISTS
FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Fort
Bragg paratroopers coming back from serving in Iraq suffer from
post-traumatic-stress-disorder (PTSD) at almost the same rate as Vietnam War
veterans, according to a military survey.
The
survey of about 1,300 paratroopers from the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd
Airborne Division that have returned from a year of service found 17.4 percent
of soldiers have PTSD symptoms.
The
3,000 solider brigade was part of the invasion force and spent most of its
time in Baghdad.
The
numbers are similar to those published in a New England Journal of Medicine
study that found that 16 percent of Iraq veterans reported symptoms of PTSD,
major depression or severe anxiety.
"The
numbers are looking more and more like Vietnam," said Capt. Jill
Breitbach, chief of psychology services for the 82nd.
A
national study of Vietnam veterans determined in 1988 that the prevalence of
PTSD was about 15 percent at that time. In all, 30 percent had experienced the
disorder at some point since returning home.
Symptoms
of PTSD include nightmares, extreme anxiety, inappropriate anger and feelings
of disconnection from family and friends. Headaches, dizziness, chest pain and
anxiety attacks also are common.
Crowds,
stoplights or even Wal-Mart shopping bags can trigger anxiety, Breitbach said.
The
Wal-Mart bags resemble those used by insurgents in Iraq to hide roadside
bombs. Stopping at a light in Iraq could lead to an ambush, so it's standard
for military convoys to speed through intersections with little regard for
traffic lights.
Another
survey showed that paratroopers of the 3rd Brigade – which spent
eight months in Iraq – suffer from stress disorder. The survey of 1,900
soldiers found about 9.6 percent had symptoms of the disorder, putting them in
line with rates from the general population.
The
numbers don't represent actual diagnoses by doctors, Breitbach said.
The
surveys were distributed to paratroopers after they had been home for three
months.
Stress
disorder was the most common problem, but the survey indicates soldiers also
suffer from depression and anxiety.
Fort
Bragg doctors have received training on treating combat stress and
paratroopers take part in group and individual counseling sessions to help
them cope, Breitbach said.
"You
dictate how you cope with things," Breitbach said.
Many
soldiers go untreated, though. Some worry about he stigma of seeking mental
health care. Platoon leaders and sergeants also make it difficult to put
together group sessions because they want their paratroopers to train,
Breitbach said.
But
she said it's important that soldiers get help.
"If
you let it fester, you start losing soldiers," she said. " They are
not crazy. They are just having trouble adjusting."
6. DICK CHENEY, HUGO CHAVEZ AND BILL CLINTON'S BAND
(Why
Venezuela has Voted for Their 'Negro e Indio' President)
BY
GREG
PALAST
There's
so much BS and baloney thrown around about Venezuela that I may be violating
some rule of US journalism by providing some facts. Let's begin with this: 77%
of Venezuela's farmland is owned by 3% of the population, the 'hacendados.'
I
met one of these farmlords in Caracas at an anti-Chavez protest march. Oddest
demonstration I've ever seen: frosted blondes in high heels clutching designer
bags, screeching, "Chavez – dic-ta-dor!" The plantation owner
griped about the "socialismo" of Chavez, then jumped into his Jaguar
convertible.
That
week, Chavez himself handed me a copy of the "socialist" manifesto
that so rattled the man in the Jag. It was a new law passed by Venezuela's
Congress which gave land to the landless. The Chavez law transferred only
fields from the giant haciendas which had been left unused and abandoned.
The
land reform, by the way, was promoted to Venezuela in the 1960s by that Lefty
radical, John F. Kennedy. Venezuela's dictator of the time agreed to hand out
land, but forgot to give peasants title to their property.
But
Chavez won't forget, because the mirror reminds him. What the affable
president sees in his reflection, beyond the ribbons of office, is a
"Negro e Indio" – a "Black and Indian" man, dark as a
cola nut, same as the landless and, until now, the hopeless. For the first
time in Venezuela's history, the 80% Black-Indian population elected a man
with skin darker than the man in the Jaguar.
So
why, with a huge majority of the electorate behind him, twice in elections and
today in a referendum, is Hugo Chavez in hot water with our
democracy-promoting White House?
Maybe
it's the oil. Lots of it. Chavez sits atop a reserve of crude that rivals
Iraq's. And it's not his presidency of Venezuela that drives the White House
bananas, it was his presidency of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
countries, OPEC. While in control of the OPEC secretariat, Chavez cut a deal
with our maximum leader of the time, Bill Clinton, on the price of oil. It was
a 'Goldilocks' plan. The price would not be too low, not too high; just right,
kept between $20 and $30 a barrel.
But
Dick Cheney does not like Clinton nor Chavez or their band. To him, the oil
industry's (and Saudi Arabia's) freedom to set oil prices is as sacred as
freedom of speech is to the ACLU. I got this info, by the way, from three top
oil industry lobbyists.
Why
should Chavez worry about what Dick thinks?
Because, said one of the oil men, the Veep in his bunker, not the
pretzel-chewer in the White House, "runs energy policy in the United
Sates."
And
what seems to have gotten our Veep's knickers in a twist is not the price of
oil, but who keeps the loot from the current band-busting spurt in prices.
Chavez had his Congress pass another oil law, the "Law of
Hydrocarbons," which changes the split. Right now, the oil majors –
like PhillipsConoco - keep 84% of the proceeds of the sale of Venezuela oil;
the nation gets only 16%.
Chavez
wanted to double his Treasury take to 30%. And for good reason. Landless,
hungry peasants have, over decades, drifted into Caracas and other cities,
building million-person ghettos of cardboard shacks and open sewers. Chavez
promised to do something about that.
And
he did. "Chavez gives them bread and bricks," one Venezuelan TV
reporter told me. The blonde TV newscaster, in the middle of a publicity
shoot, said the words "pan y ladrillos" with disdain making it clear
that she never touched bricks and certainly never waited in a bread line.
But
to feed and house the darker folk in those bread and brick lines, Chavez would
need funds and the 16% slice of the oil pie wouldn't do it. So the President
of Venezuela demanded 30%, leaving Big Oil only 70%. Suddenly, Bill Clinton's
ally in Caracas became Mr. Cheney's -- and therefore, Mr. Bush's – enemy.
So
began the Bush-Cheney campaign to "Floridate" the will of the
Venezuela electorate. It didn't matter that Chavez had twice won election.
Winning most of the votes, said a White house spokesman, did not make Chavez'
government "legitimate." Hmmm. Secret contracts were awarded by our
Homeland Security spooks to steal official Venezuela voter lists. Cash passed
discreetly from the US taxpayer, via the so called 'Endowment for Democracy,'
to the Chavez-haters running today's "recall" election.
A
brilliant campaign of placing stories about Chavez' supposed unpopularity and
"dictatorial" manner seized US news and op-ed pages, ranging from
the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times.
But
some facts just can't be smothered in propaganda ink. While George Bush can
appoint the government of Iraq and call it "sovereign," the
government of Venezuela is appointed by its people. And the fact is that most
people in this slum-choked land don't drive Jaguars or have their hair tinted
in Miami. Most look in the mirror and see someone "negro e indio,"
as dark as their President Hugo.
The
official CIA handbook on Venezuela says that half the nation's farmers own
only 1% of the land. They are the lucky ones, as more peasants owned nothing.
That is, until their man Chavez took office. Even under Chavez, land
redistribution remains more a promise than an accomplishment. But today, the
landless and homeless voted their hopes, know that their man may not, against
the armed axis of local oligarchs and Dick Cheney, succeed for them. But they
are convinced he will never forget them.
And
that's a fact.
BY
JOHN
HOOPER AND TANIA BRANIGAN
The
Pope will call on leaders of the Roman Catholic church today to attack
feminist ideologies which assert that men and women are fundamentally the
same.
The
Vatican is concerned that this belief is eroding what it regards as women's
maternal vocation. But a paper on the subject which was published July 31st,
2004 – the Vatican's third major pronouncement on women's role in the
quarter century of John Paul's papacy – has drawn scornful criticism from
feminists and academics.
The
document accuses feminists of
"blurring the biological difference between man and woman".
But
it also breaks new ground by appealing to governments to give help to women so
they can cope with their broader modern responsibilities.
It
emerged yesterday that the Vatican itself had taken a further step towards
incorporating women into the previously all-male leadership of the Roman
Catholic church. A nun, who was not named in Italian media reports, was said
to be working as a high-level aide to the Pope's "foreign minister",
Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo.
The
statement of doctrine on gender issues is the first serious attempt by the
Vatican to come to grips with a world of working women. But it is just as
clearly intend to prevent an erosion of the church's resolute opposition to
gay marriage, the incorporation of women into the priesthood, and trends in
gender studies which the Pope has damned as "misleading conceptions of
sexuality".
The
Vatican's sights are trained in particular on the view that while people's sex
is anatomically determined their gender identity and roles are entirely a
product of conditioning. In a letter to bishops on the participation of men
and women in the church and the world, the Pope's chief theological spokesman,
the German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, stresses, as the pontiff has done on
several occasions, that the book of Genesis is unambiguous on this point.
The
letter was drawn up inside Cardinal Ratzinger's Vatican "ministry",
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. However, as a statement of
doctrine, it would not have been sent for publication without the consent of
the Pope.
The
Vatican's letter acknowledges that the emancipation of women, which the
pontiff applauded in his earliest pronouncements on the subject, has given
them a vastly increased presence in the labour market.
Recent
decades have seen a plunge in birth and fertility rates, particular in the
Roman Catholic heartland of southern Europe, as women struggle to combine jobs
with their traditional roles as mothers, and homemakers.
Church
representatives have argued that this is symptomatic of a breakdown in values,
and particularly a greater selfishness among young couples more interested in
consumer goods than creating life. Feminists have long held that it is a
result of the reluctance of men to share household tasks and the failure of
governments to provide adequate support for families.
Cardinal
Ratzinger's document appears to have embraced implicitly the feminist view on
this point, though in language unlikely to win over many feminists.
According
to the German tabloid Bild Zeitung, his letter to bishops calls on
governments to "create conditions that enable women not to neglect their
family duties when they enter into a job".
Dr.
Helena Cronin, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics,
said: "It's absolutely true that we are different, in a variety of
ways." She said that in all mammals, females showed a greater propensity
to caring for the young than males did. But she added: "That's not saying
that women have not other vocations or that they should be devoted [to
motherhood]."
The
feminist author Natasha Walter questioned whether there were essential
differences between men and women at all.
"We
have centuries and centuries of acculturation towards vocation of maternity,
and men have only had a couple of generations of acculturation towards active
paternity. Until we encourage men [to do more] it's too early to call on
whether there are innate differences. The weight of tradition is so strong
that it precludes the freedom to choose."
However,
Eva Figes, whose book Patriarchal Attitudes was one of the major works
of feminism's "second wave" in the 70s, said: "I have always
thought men and women were different – we have better linguistic skills, for
instance – but it wasn't politic to say so when I was writing 30 years
ago."
She
added: "The trouble is we all know the Pope's opinions on issues such as
abortion and contraception.
"There
is another agenda there: he will think maternity is more important than public
life. I don't see why women should not have both – and it should be their
choice."
8. A BIRTHDAY PRESENT FOR PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO
(Editor's
Note: article truncated: See [email protected]
for complete article)
BY
PORTIA
SIEGELBAUM
The
Venezuelan referendum is the top story on Cuban TV and radio overshadowing
even reports on the clean-up of damage from the Hurricane.
Chávez
smiles as he speaks to supporters from the balcony of the Presidential Palace
in Caracas.
Unlike
his arch enemy, President Bush, Fidel Castro is known for his nocturnal work
habits. So it is not hard to imagine that
he stayed awake late Sunday awaiting the results of the Venezuelan
recall referendum that would determine the fate of his friend and ally,
President Hugo Chávez.
No
Surprise then that the early Monday edition of Cuba's official Communist Party
daily, Granma, English edition, heralded
the Venezuelan president's win with a bold red front-page headline, "Chávez's
Decisive Victory".
Although
President Fidel Castro has not yet commented on the referendum results, he
announced last week that he was postponing the celebration of his 78th
birthday for two days, because he wanted it to coincide with Chávez's
election "triumph."