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January - March 2006.
Risking her life, Mukhtar Mai envisions a better future for women
Harry Belafonte on Bush, Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and having his conversations with Martin Luther King wiretapped by the FBI
Hugh Thompson's Crewmember Remembers Helping to Stop the My Lai Massacre

July - December 2005.
Diane Wilson, Texas shrimper, turns outlaw over chemical plant pollution
Cindy Sheehan reopened debate about war, and, boy, is she hearing about it
“Peace is not a field of flowers. It’s hard work.” - Despite personal tragedy, Aqeela Sherrills seeks peace on the mean streets of Los Angeles.

April - June 2005.
Bill Moyers: "The Radical Right Wing is Very Close to Achieving a Longtime Goal of Undermining the Independence of Public Broadcasting"
Mukhtar Mai: "I Will Go On Until I Have Even the Slightest Hope of Justice" - Rare Broadcast Interview with Pakistani Rape Survivor
Mike German, FBI Whistleblower: White Supremacists are Major Domestic Terrorist Threat
Aung San Suu Kyi:  Freedom from Fear
Marla Ruzicka - Town recalls lively spirit of activist killed in Baghdad

January - March 2005.
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist Laurie Garrett quits Newsday: "When you see news as a product...It's impossible to really serve democracy"
Aung San Suu Kyi
Sen. Boxer to Rice on Iraq Invasion: "Your Loyalty to the Mission... Overwhelmed Your Respect for the Truth"
Cynthia McKinney: "We Should Export Dignity Not Dictatorship"
Mike Weiss: Gavin Newsom - What shaped the man who took on homeless- ness, gay marriage, Bayview-Hunters Point and the hotel strike in one year
Shirley Chisholm, first black congresswoman, dies at 80; had sought presidency in 1972

October - December 2004.
Our Debt to Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers: On Receiving Harvard Medical School's Global Environment Citizen Award
The Life and Times of Noam Chomsky : A Brief History of America's Leading Dissident
15 To Life: Artist, prisoner and author Tony Papa tells how he painted his way to freedom
Noam Chomsky on the State of the Nation, Iraq and the Election
OPERATION LION HEART - An update - Saleh's family is about to join him in America

July - September 2004.
OPERATION LION HEART - Part One: An Iraqi boy's journey from the brink of death to a new life in California
  ~~ Part Two: As he recovers in Oakland from seemingly insurmountable injuries, Saleh longs for his homeland and the life he once knew
  ~~ Part Three: Saleh Khalaf and his father Raheem adjust to the prospect of permanent exile from Iraq
International War Whistleblowers, Katharine Gun and Maj. Frank Grevil, Tell Why They Exposed Their Governments
Arundhati Roy - Life Comes Between a Firebrand and Her Fiction
Helen Thomas Takes On White House Over Iraq
Celebrating Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda

April - June 2004.
Michael Franti and Spearhead
Moldova fights traffic in women for sex - Resident of Europe's poorest nation helps entrap, jail Turkish pimp who enslaved her
Her tale was brutal, sexual. No one believed a slave woman could be so literate. But now Harriet Jacobs has reclaimed her name
The vagina is so yesterday -- Eve Ensler says now it's all about her stomach
Jeanne Woodford, new director of state prisons believes in rehabilitating, not recycling, inmates
Kurdish Political Prisoner Leyla Zana Released after a Decade in Jail
Nobel Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi: "The Same People that Gave Saddam Hussein Chemicals to Make These Weapons Used it as an Excuse to Attack Him"    DemocracyNow!
Michael Ratner, presiden of the Center for Constitutional Rights
    - Interviewed on  DemocracyNow!: The Pinochet Principle: Bush Defends Torture in the Name of National Security
Noam Chomsky & Others Examine the Bush's Administration's Doctrine of Preventive Strikes    DemocracyNow!
Michael Moore Takes Top Prize at Cannes Film Festival    DemocracyNow!
Michael Moore, Bush scourge triumphs at Cannes
Arundhati Roy On the Indian Elections, Her Support for the Iraqi Resistance & the Privatization of War    DemocracyNow!
George Lakoff and Rockridge Institute - Rethinking Progressive Politics
Abuse photos spur Christian peace teams' return to Iraq - willing to die
Mukhtaran Mai, Rape survivor educates Pakistan - Victim of tribal sentence pushes for justice, builds school to fight status quo
Four authors: How the U.S. helped create its enemies
Larry Everest, author of Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda
Whistleblowers From Vietnam to 9/11: A Conversation with Daniel Ellsberg and Sibel Edmonds    DemocracyNow!
Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping
Mahmood Mamdani, author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim
John C. Bonifaz, author of Warrior-King: The Case for Impeaching George W. Bush
Bob Woodward, author of "Plan of Attack"
Mumia Abu Jamal Speaks to Democracy Now! From Death Row
Van Jones on Child Prisons in California

January - March 2004.
Sibel Edmonds, Fmr. FBI Translator: White House Had Intel On Possible Airplane Attack Pre-9/11    DemocracyNow!
Berkeley Monument to César Chávez - A memorial to Chávez's name
Craig Unger, author of "House of Bush, House of Saud"
     Details the complex negotiations on war, oil, illegal arms deals and murky
      banking deals conducted between the Bushes and the Saudis

David Cay Johnston, author of Perfectly Legal - The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else
Stephen Funk: Between anti-war hero and military villain
Percy Schmeiser: David to Monsanto's Goliath
Terry Waite: Former British Hostage Likens 5-Year Solitary Confinement in Lebanon To Guantanamo Bay    DemocracyNow!
Oscar-Winning Actress, Activist Vanessa Redgrave Calls For Justice, Legal and Human Rights For Guantanamo Prisoners    DemocracyNow! interview
State Attorney General Bill Lockyer rejects halt to S.F. nuptials
Newsom sheds wonk image -- takes it to the streets
Alexandra Robbins, author of Secrets of the Tomb: Skull & Bones, the Ivy League and the Hidden Paths of Power
Paul Krugman, author of The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century
Harriet Tubman
Chalmers Johnson, author of Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
Robert Jensen, author of Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity
Gary Sick, author of October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan
Rev. Jesse Jackson On "Mad Dean Disease," the 2000 Elections and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King    DemocracyNow! interview
Arundhati Roy: Do turkeys enjoy thanksgiving?
Ron Suskind, author of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, The White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill
MoveOn - Anti-Bush ad contest proves popular online

2003       
2002       

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“Peace is not a field of flowers. It’s hard work.”

Despite personal tragedy, Aqeela Sherrills seeks peace on the mean streets of Los Angeles.

By Tijn Touber

There are seals swimming in the bay in front of the hotel where Aqeela Sherrills is staying. The sun is struggling to chase away threads of mist hanging over the San Francisco hills in the distance. The hotel lobby smells of fresh coffee and pancakes. The sense of serenity that dominates this morning in Tiburon, an upscale town across the bay from San Francisco, in no way resembles the place where Sherrills comes from: a rough gang-dominated district of Los Angeles. In that place, you’re asking for trouble if you hit the street without packing some means of self-defence. It’s estimated that over the past 20 years, at least 10,000 murders have been committed in these Los Angeles neighbourhoods. That’s far more than all the victims of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

But Sherrills has managed to accomplish what has eluded negotiators in many international conflicts: getting two rival, violent groups to the negotiating table and then making sure that the terms of the ceasefire agreement stick. Ultimately, the Crips and the Bloods signed an honest-to-God peace treaty. Sherrills then created an entire structure involving 80 people dedicated to safeguarding the terms of the treaty and teaching the gang members self-respect and “life skills.” The treaty, signed in 1992, continues for the most part to be upheld and has become an example to other cities. But this is just the beginning for Sherrills. “I expect that the next major peace movement will come from these neighbourhoods,” he says.

The baggy sweater Sherrills wears this morning cannot hide his muscles, important for self-protection as a young man. He doesn’t need to fight today, but his eyes remain watchful. Sherrills is no longer fighting with others, or with himself. He is fighting deeply-ingrained patterns and prejudices: poverty, racism and feelings of inferiority. They are so deeply-rooted that most people don’t see them and even fewer dare to name them. “Black folks hate themselves,” Sherrills says plainly. “And they feel inferior. White folks have been conditioned to feel superior. It’s so deeply rooted that it’s subtle; people don’t even see it most of the time. But it’s there, and it really needs to be addressed.” The problems of violence aren’t limited to American ghettos, they’re everywhere. And if there’s someone who can point out these problems and has found a solution to them, it is Sherrills.

Watts was one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Los Angeles when Aqeela Sherrills was born there 35 years ago. The area was split in two by railroad tracks. One side was the territory of the Bloods and the other belonged to the Crips. Conflicts over territory and drugs were fought out on the street using state-of-the-art weapons. Executions and drive-by shootings were daily occurrences. In the early 1980s, Sherrills was just a kid at the time gang violence in American ghettos started to escalate.

Sherrills grew up as the youngest of 10 children surrounded by this horrific backdrop of violence. But in Watts, children never stay young for long. Sherrills had his first son when he was 14. That same year, his best friend, also 14, was shot to death. Sherrills looks back, “I went completely crazy. We wanted revenge and we hit the streets. Fighting. Shooting. Robbing.” By the time he was 16, 13 of his friends had already died in gunfire between the Bloods and the Crips.

The subculture of American gang life is dominated by violence and drugs. But it’s more than that. It is also where fantastic music, dance and clothing styles are created, which have a major impact on global pop culture. Just watching MTV for a half-hour makes it clear that gang culture has become hip. This makes Sherrills laugh. “It’s cool now to say you come from a ghetto. When I was young it wasn’t so cool; most of us wanted to get out as quickly as possible.”

But Sherrills eventually pulled back from the gang life. Fantasy is what saved him. “Together with my brothers and sisters I fantasized a lot about a better world,” he remembers. “My parents weren’t home much and we would tell each other never ending stories. It usually started with a Chinese master who gave us supernatural powers. We used those super powers to make the world a better place. Those stories made me trust, at a young age, that another world was possible and that I could do something about it. I knew I was destined to do something big. I just didn’t know what.”

Sherrills’ oldest sister was the first to get out of the neighbourhood. She was accepted to college and moved on campus. This sister had always been a major inspiration to Sherrills—albeit because she was the one who always told the best stories. With her help, Sherrills also got into college when he was 18, where he studied electrical engineering. It appeared to be his ticket out of the violence in his neighbourhood.

Initially, Sherrills didn’t want to return home, even on weekends. Although he didn’t show too much interest in his studies, he hung around campus. His first year was mostly spent partying and dating lots of girls. But that summer, something happened that changed Sherrills’ life. He read a book entitled The Evidence of Things Not Seen by eminent African American writer James Baldwin. The book describes what Baldwin saw as a plot against black people, involving the shipment of drugs and guns into poor neighbourhoods— with drugs and weapons. “The idea was, Baldwin wrote: let the black people kill each other off. I was furious and wanted to warn my brothers,” Sherrills recalls.

Sherrills joined the Nation of Islam, an American spiritual black separatist movement. When he rejoined his fellow students after the summer, some didn’t recognize him. He had lost 35 pounds (15 kilos) and had given up alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and sex. As befits a devout Muslim, he prayed five times a day. Meanwhile, he began acting as a kind of Robin Hood, stealing money from drug dealers and giving it to the neighbourhood’s poor.
The big task for which Sherrill was destined, started to take shape. He continued to pay little attention to his studies; he wanted instead to go back to the ‘hood” and help his brothers break out of the vicious circle of drugs and violence. Sherrills organized gatherings for fellow students around the theme of defending black rights. He reminded his fellow black students of their roots-–“People died so you could go to college!”—but he didn’t get many to the point of returning to the ghetto they came from. They simply didn’t want to be associated with their old neighbourhood, Sherrills discovered, and he slowly turned bitter.

Sherrills continued to have run-ins with the law and even landed in jail once for physically resisting a police officer who was beating on him. But what transformed Sherrill into a peace activist was not being arrested, joining Islam, or reading Baldwin, but by the love of a woman. “Before my celibacy stint,” he explains, “I had a girlfriend: Lisa. I was crazy about her, but very insecure about myself. I thought I was ugly and couldn’t believe that she really wanted me. I couldn’t handle her love and cheated on her—to break up the relationship and to prove that I was right. But I regretted it so much that for the first time in my life I did something noble: I confessed everything.”
That confession had a miraculous effect. He suddenly saw the world through different eyes. “Before that I didn’t trust anyone,” Sherrills explains. “If things weren’t going well for me there was always someone I could blame. Now I was looking at myself for the first time in my life. It was as if spirit came into me, as if I had become a new person.”

This rebirth gave Sherrills the wings and courage he needed to go into his neighbourhood with a few friends with the aim of making peace. He talked, discussed and listened on every street corner to members of the Crips and the Bloods. That was in 1989. A short time later, Sherrills got help from an American football legend, Jim Brown, who made his house in the Hollywood hills available as a neutral place where members of various gangs could meet. Sherrills looks back on those early days: “We held six meetings involving hundreds of cats from different neighbourhoods. We couldn’t bring off a ceasefire, but relations got better and better.”

Brown was generous enough to donate a monthly sum so that Sherrills and his buddies could rent a retail space and take their activities to the next level. The cooperation with Brown led to the founding of the Amer-I-Can project, which offers a program for “life skills.” Sherrills explains, “Jim had been offering this program to prisoners for awhile. It teaches you to develop self-respect, solve conflicts, create a life vision, make decisions—that kind of thing.” Sherrills followed the program himself and started giving lessons, something he would do for the next 11 years.

Brown’s fame, combined with Sherrills’ street credibility, turned out to be a golden formula for getting the unique peace process off the ground. But it remained a tall order; after all, how do you get young men who consistently confuse the concepts of “forgiveness” and “revenge” to take a seat around a negotiation table? Sherrills: “It’s not magic. It’s a step-by-step process. It’s about communication. I appeal to their deepest feelings. I try to touch their heart, so that each of them can get back in touch with their humanity. This process is based on relationships and cannot be motivated by anything but love. We simply talk about the important things in life: what makes people happy or sad, what are we afraid of, what can we do better? That kind of thing. Again and again it becomes clear that we ultimately believe in the same things.”

In 1992, Sherrills finally sees a breakthrough: the Crips and the Bloods sign a historic treaty. Sherrills describes that amazing day this way: “Everyone was happy, grandmothers were crying, everyone was calling each other, for the first time fathers were able to visit their children on the other side of the railroad tracks… Everyone was so excited. It totally changed the quality of our lives.”

After this success in Los Angeles, there was no stopping the initiative. What started out locally, expanded into an international organization active in 15 cities. At the highpoint of his peace activities, Sherrills’ Community Self-Determination Institute had 80 employees and its budget included $ 3 million U.S. (2.3 million euros) in government subsidies. For three and a half years, he lived like an urban nomad travelling from ghetto to ghetto to initiate peace negotiations and exact a ceasefire. The success of Sherrills’ approach is partly due to the fact that he does more than just treat the symptoms of gang violence. He wants to tackle the problem at its roots. “Violence on the streets is a symptom of a deeper problem,” he notes. “As long as there is poverty, we will never have peace. Poverty destroys families, neighbourhoods, countries.”
Sherrills doesn’t see the problems of violence and despair as confined to gang areas. “In fact there is no difference between what goes on in Watts or in Beverly Hills. The emotional pain that people experience is expressed in Watts by murder and in Beverly Hills by suicide.” Sherrills then reveals a staggering statistic: “Last year there were more suicides than murders in greater Los Angeles.”

Sherrills shifts effortlessly between street slang and clearly formulated spiritual and political statements. His charismatic energy is both tough and loving. You can just as easily imagine him both on a street corner in the ghetto and in a meeting with top level government officials.
Sherrills’ approach works, in part because he speaks the language of the street. “I honestly love my neighbourhood and my brothers,” he remarks. “There is so much beauty, so much talent. Sometimes in the roughest places, you find the most beauty. Aside from the violence, there are few other places in California where you find so much sense of community. That gang feeling is a part of it; it was always there, even before the violence escalated. A gang is like a kind of surrogate family. For young men, fighting is a way to be initiated. You can’t give up a gang without replacing it with something else. You have to keep them intact and help the members start living according to new values.”

The problem Sherrills runs into time and time again is the marginalization and criminalization of gang members. “The word ”gang member” is a way of dehumanizing someone. When someone gets killed people say: “Oh well, it was a gang member.” But that gang member was someone’s son, friend or loved one. The perception is that people in these neighbourhoods are hardened against this type of grief. That’s not true. They are deeply wounded and use this way to express it.”

Nearly everyone in South Central Los Angeles is suffering from a kind of post-traumatic stress, Sherrills believes. “We have got to address our own illnesses. How? You have to take a step back and look at the issue from a more fundamental perspective. In order to be able to do that, the heart has to be bust open. We try to do everything in life to keep our hearts from being broken. But there is so much beauty in having a broken heart –-there’s pain, but you discover things in yourself that you never thought about before.”

And then in 2004 came the horrible test of Sherrills’ beliefs. His oldest son, 18-year-old Terrell Sherrills, is shot while on vacation visiting his father in Watts. Terrell had gone out to a party with a friend, and around midnight a few gang members arrive. Terrell is shot in the back and dies a short time later in the hospital.

“Terrell led a peaceful life,” says Sherrills. “He didn’t have anything to do with gang violence. He was in college and was very popular—and not only with the girls. He came with me sometimes when I did my work. It was a huge blow.”

He falls silent for a moment, showing that none of us can ever defend ourselves against this pain. No one gets used to murder.

Sherrills says he had no choice but to choose love over revenge. “It’s not about who killed my son, but what killed him: a culture with no respect for life. I am not surrendering his life to death, but reclaiming it and giving it new meaning.”

The man who killed Terrell has not yet been caught. When that happens, Sherrills wants to talk with him and his parents. “I want to ask them what kind of pain drove the guy to commit this act. When did he become disillusioned? Where did it go wrong? Of course, my son’s killer deserves to be punished, but mainly I want to keep him alive. I want to invest in him towards a better future for us all. My dream is still that children can grow up in Watts safely and without fear.”

The main problem the United States is struggling with is that it is a country built around violence, according to Sherrill. “We can be angry with George Bush, but he’s doing just what his predecessors did. We have to wake up to our culture. We have killed millions of indigenous people. Our foreign policy still means death for millions around the world. We can say Bush is evil, but we are evil. We are trapped in a culture based on revenge.”

Sherrills sees the same thing in his neighbourhood of Watts. The treaty continues to be upheld, but not without problems and obstacles. Sherrill says, “When two brothers have problems with each other, everyone joins forces to take revenge. The treaty is broken!, they shout. But I say: ”Wait a minute: a certain person has a problem with someone else. That’s their problem, not all of ours.” I believe that conflicts are healthy, but you have to learn to deal with them in a constructive way.”

“Peace is a process, not a destination,” Sherrills continues. “Peace is not a utopian field of flowers you parade through together. It’s hard work. Sometimes the peacemakers lose their lives. The point is that we continually return to the peace talks and solve the problems. And we’re getting one step closer all the time.”

Sherrills’ work in various U.S. cities has made him an authority. Not only in the eyes of government officials and peace organizations, but gang members as well. It’s becoming increasingly easy to go into problem areas and start peace negotiations. Sherrills: “We’ve been given a kind of carte blanche to go into the neighbourhoods. Within a few days we have an idea of who is playing what role in the community and what’s going on. Then we make contact with the key figures to reach a ceasefire.”

When the peace treaty in Watts had been in place, and mostly followed, for 10 years, Sherrills launched a 10-year plan entitled The Passage to Peace to completely put an end to gang violence. “We appointed key figures in neighbourhoods to keep the peace in their community. We make people responsible for their own neighbourhood, for their own problems. I say: ‘I don’t want to move to a better neighbourhood. This is a better neighbourhood.’ Instead of seeing it as a ghetto, we have to see the beauty and the potential. We have to get together; then we have a chance.”

Sherrills conveys that same message at conferences and seminars where he is invited to speak. “Whether it’s environment movements, peace movements or cultural creative movements, they all want the same thing: respect for life. My suggestion would be to get together and create one big movement I would call Reverence Movement. After all, the violence we inflict on ourselves and one another is the same violence we are using to destroy the planet. If every movement continues to treat the symptoms, we won’t get anywhere. We’re only wasting time and energy.”

“We have to create a culture where authentic emotions are allowed to be expressed. That would create a real release. If the head of the Los Angeles police department would apologize for the injustice we have suffered under the guise of justice, it would create a landslide. If George Bush would apologize for the slavery in this country, it would give so much release. You can only conquer hate with love.”

The hotel lobby has now filled up with people coming to attend the conference in which Sherrills is participating. Every few minutes someone gives him a hug. The conference is set to begin. We’ve only spent one morning together, but it feels like a couple of days. For Sherrills, this intense solidarity has become a way of life. He has learned that every meeting can be the last and that every strong connection between people can set something major in motion. The meetings he has are seldom informal. There is usually a lot at stake. The intensity of his presence can mean the difference between forgiveness and revenge, between war and peace.

Outside, the seals are still swimming happily. The wisps of fog hanging over San Francisco in the distance have cleared. The impressive Golden Gate bridge sparkles in the sun, a symbol of American accomplishment. This is a country where newcomers founded a culture that became an example to the world—a model of freedom, democracy and limitless possibilities. Aqeela Sherrills stands squarely in that American tradition. He, too, is working to establish a new culture—a culture promoting reverence for life.

For more information about the Community Self-Determination Institute: 9101 South Hooper Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90002, USA, telephone +1 323 586 8791, www.wattsrecords.com, e-mail: aqeelas@msn.com.

Ode Magazine

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Lakeport mourns its loss - Town recalls lively spirit of activist killed in Baghdad

Jim Doyle, Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writers

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Lakeport , Lake County -- Marla Ruzicka would slip into town to recharge herself, physically and emotionally. For the human rights crusader, this was home -- light-years away from the world's deadliest flash points, the machinery of war, the corridors of power.

The relentless woman with a trailblazing smile would dive into Clear Lake and swim alone to a far buoy and back again. She'd water-ski or wakeboard with friends, go for a run, dance to reggae music at a family gathering, skate down Main Street. Then just as quickly, she'd vanish -- revved up for her next far-flung campaign.

On Saturday, the 28-year-old activist and the Iraqi citizen with whom she was working on the campaign that had consumed her since the start of the war - - helping the innocent victims of that conflict -- were killed by a suicide bomber near the Baghdad airport.

All day Monday, people in this conservative rural town of 4,900 dropped by the home where Ruzicka grew up and where her parents still live. Others called to let her parents and five brothers and sisters know how much of an impression Ruzicka had made.

"She wasn't always popular in this town, but people respected her," said her twin brother, Mark. "Some people might think she wanted attention, but it was from her heart."

About 45 minutes before her death, Ruzicka had e-mailed photographs to her parents, introducing them to a young Iraqi girl whom her war victims' relief organization was helping.

Her father, Clifford, a civil engineer, was making arrangements to have his daughter's body flown back to Lake County for a funeral Saturday.

"She had some rebel in her," he said. "She didn't like the status quo and wanted to change injustices where she found them. But she learned that she could be more effective by working with the U.S. She wowed the people in Washington and spurred them to do more."

From an early age, Ruzicka showed signs of an adventurous, and at times, defiant, spirit. One night, when she was 9 years old, she walked away from her family at a local restaurant and sat down next to an old man, her mother said. "He looked lonesome," the girl told her relatives.

Ruzicka was elected student body president in middle school, where she led a walkout to protest the first Gulf War.

"It didn't surprise me that she was the ringleader," said Ruzicka's eighth-grade history teacher, David Laven. "She couldn't understand there was so much poverty in the world, with so much wealth here. Most kids in eighth grade have no consciousness of social issues."

Steve Gentry, principal of Clear Lake High School, recalled how Ruzicka started the school's environmental club, coached younger kids to play basketball, goaded the school into doing more to help abused children, and successfully lobbied for a girls soccer team.

"She had a lot of passion and compassion and led with her heart," Gentry said. "I certainly had to say 'no' to her on more than one occasion. She would go from being angry with me to giving me a hug."

As a teenager, Ruzicka aligned herself with San Francisco activist group Global Exchange. When the Iraq war started, she formed the Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict, or CIVIC, deciding that she could accomplish more through less-partisan efforts. She started spending weeks at a time trying to track down the stories of Iraqis killed and wounded in the conflict.

Overseas, CIVIC was essentially a two-person operation, run by Ruzicka and Faiz Ali Salim, an Iraqi citizen. April Pedersen, who coordinated work in Washington, D.C., for CIVIC, said the pair found needy victims through Salim's contacts and through Ruzicka's hospital-by-hospital tallyings.

Ruzicka was a constant gadfly to the U.S. military, visiting officers again and again. People who worked with her described her methods as alternately wheedling, stern and flirtatious.

Her pressure campaign eventually won her friends in the military, and several high-ranking officers came to rely on her information as they doled out ever-increasing amounts of cash to victims' families.

"I don't know of anyone who is doing this type of work in Iraq right now, " said Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute, a New York foundation funded by financier George Soros that has given $60,000 to CIVIC each of the last two years.

"She had the ability to connect with the victims and to talk with the U.S. military and be acceptable and authentic to both," Neier said. "I think that was because she was concerned with the victims. It wasn't about the morality of the war, or the politics."

Ruzicka, however, began to show her own battle wounds.

Her mother, Nancy, said Ruzicka "was self-confident, but not always on an 'up.' We were worried about battle fatigue with her. She came home in June to build herself up."

Marla's older sister, Joy, added: "This last year it seemed like the stress was adding up. She didn't seem as relaxed. I told her, 'Please don't go back to Iraq.' "

In recent weeks, Ruzicka was interviewing Iraqi women detained in Abu Ghraib and other prisons and was trying to firm up evidence she said she had found that the U.S. military was keeping count of the number of civilian casualties in Iraq.

"The information she received related only to a brief period in the Baghdad area," according to a statement from Human Rights Watch, "but was important in establishing that the U.S. did in fact record civilian injuries."

She was working on getting compensation for 10 families of war victims and had made contacts with untold numbers of others -- but much of that information was "wrapped up in her head," said Justin Alexander, a volunteer with the Christian Peacemakers Team in Iraq.

She may have committed some of it to her laptop computer before she and Salim were killed on the Baghdad airport road. The State Department is sending it home to her family in California.

That Ruzicka accomplished so much was testament to her indefatigable energy. The organization had "pretty much no money," Pedersen said, and before Open Society's most recent grant came through last week, she had turned to her parents for cash. Since her death, more than $15,000 in donations has come in.

"Although there have been many nice things said about Marla, I don't think she would want to be held up as this unattainable ideal," Alexander said from Iraq. "She would want people to know that if she, this California girl, came to Iraq with no money and no contacts, and made a difference in a conservative Middle Eastern country, then anyone could. Anyone who is inspired by her work -- and has the gumption to come over here -- should honor her by doing that."

Ruzicka's parents are collecting donations for CIVIC in her memory. Checks may be sent to CIVIC, P.O. Box 1189, Lakeport, CA 95453.

Jim Doyle reported from Lakeport and Joe Garofoli from San Francisco. Staff writer Robert Collier contributed to this report.E-mail the writers at jdoyle@sfchronicle.com and jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com.

San Francisco Chronicle

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Moldova fights traffic in women for sex

Resident of Europe's poorest nation helps entrap, jail Turkish pimp who enslaved her

Lauren Gard, Special to The Chronicle
Thursday, June 24, 2004

Balti, Moldova -- Olesea slid a half-dozen photos across the table in her lawyer's sunlit office in this northern Moldovan city.

One image showed the slim 21-year-old in a cotton tank top and shorts, lounging on a flowery futon. "This was the apartment in Turkey," she said.

In another photo, she's on a boat in the Mediterranean, iridescent fish flopping in her hands. "I was with a client in this one."

Olesea, a redhead with a pixie haircut and catlike, sparkling eyes, then stared silently at a photo of Mehmed Cara, the dark-eyed Turkish pimp who forced her into prostitution in his native land.

"He gave me these photos so I would remember him," she said, her lips squeezing into a thin smile. "I used them to put him behind bars."

Olesea's quest for justice began when she returned from Turkey five months ago and sought out the Center for the Prevention of Trafficking in Women, a Moldovan nonprofit legal organization, supported by the U.N. Development Program and the U.S. State Department, that was set up three years ago to help victims of trafficking and build community networks to combat it.

The lawyers at the center's outpost in Balti -- Moldova's second- largest city -- have become Olesea's closest allies. Thanks to their efforts -- and Olesea's courage -- Cara was convicted of trafficking in March and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Olesea's case is one of about 50 the center has taken up in Moldova, a tiny agricultural country of about 4 million sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine. Sex traffickers have found fertile ground in Europe's poorest nation, where economic collapse is rampant, the average monthly income a mere $56 and the unemployment rate for women ranges as high as 68 percent.

Taking advantage of the women's desperate need to make money, the traffickers have since the mid-1990s lured astonishing numbers of Moldovan women and girls -- the number is between 200,000 and 400,000 -- to the Balkans, Russia, Turkey and places farther afield like Dubai.

The women are usually told they are heading for legitimate paying jobs, then find themselves far from home, without resources and at the mercy of professional criminals who force them to sell their bodies to survive.

Sociologists say that domestic violence, a major problem in Moldova, is another factor that makes women dangerously vulnerable.

"These girls are getting beaten at home for free," said one nonprofit worker. "They figure, 'If it happens abroad, at least I'll be getting paid for it.' "

Moldova had no laws on the books against sex trafficking until 2001, and none mandating minimum prison sentences for traffickers until 2003. Before that, convicted traffickers merely paid fines, then walked free.

Prosecuting them has proved extremely difficult.

Some traffickers pay off their victims so they won't testify. But most young women save the traffickers money because they simply won't talk or go to the police -- much less show up in court -- to tell their stories for fear of ruining their reputations and those of their families. The stigma of having worked as a prostitute is enormous.

"It is difficult to build a case because they keep it all inside," said Olesea's lawyer, Nelly Babcinschi. "They're very damaged. It's hard for a girl to make a statement in court because her lawyer, her trafficker's lawyer, the judge and her parents may all be there."

The government's top priority in dealing with the issue is not putting traffickers away but raising awareness of the practice so that girls don't get duped into it in the first place.

Mounting comprehensive educational campaigns warning women not to accept what appear to be innocent job offers abroad is a daunting task in a country where a fifth of the population already has left in search of a better life.

The road that led Olesea into virtual slavery starts from a bright, grass- colored house set back on a rutted road a mile from the center of Glinjeni, a village of 4,000 outside of Balti. Rainbow-striped rugs cover the floors and walls, and the windows are sealed with duct tape to block out the cold.

Over lunch, Olesea's mother Maria, 53, described a family life that morphed from comfort to poverty after her husband died of a heart attack 15 years ago. Maria works on a collective farm from May until November but receives no money for her efforts -- only meager amounts of food.

Last November, she toiled in the fields in the snow, even after her fingernails fell off. "We may get a bucket of flour or a handful," she said. "We don't see money here. We sell a chicken or a pig if we need it."

Pulling on her faux fur-lined coat and stepping outside later for a walk, Olesea said her sojourn in Turkey was driven by the desire to escape the village's crushing poverty -- "I wanted to be rich. I wanted to buy my mom an apartment in Balti."

But her job in Balti as a seamstress for a Turkish pajama firm paid just $40 a month, and she found an offer by her landlady to arrange a bartending gig in Turkey too tempting to resist.

It is a common ploy that reflects the destitution many Moldovans are experiencing. The International Organization for Migration, a nonprofit advocacy group, estimates that half of Moldovan women who have been trafficked know their recruiter personally.

Telling her mother that she was going to Moscow to work, as many villagers do, Olesea took a minivan to Ukraine and from there boarded a ship to Istanbul. She was met at the dock by Cara, who took her to Fethiye, a popular resort town.

Olesea shoved her hands in her pocket and braced herself against the wind, lighting a cigarette.

"I refused to work as a prostitute," she said. "So he beat me and then raped me while a client waited outside in his car. He made me shower, and then I went with the client."

Cara beat her and slept with her every night after that, and when she attempted to run away after two weeks, she was given the worst beating yet. She returned to Moldova minus one tooth.

Olesea slept with hundreds of men during her four months in Turkey. She earned her pimp about $25,000: up to 10 clients a day, $25 an hour, seven days a week. When her visa expired in November, Cara sent her back to Moldova with $150 and the menacing promise that he would soon pay her a visit.

As she passed a squat gray building, she said, "I had an abortion here when I came home," her eyes suddenly as flat as her voice. Her clients almost never used protection, so she had no idea who the father was.

Olesea promised herself that she would not return to Turkey. Shortly after Cara arrived in January, she secretly contacted the police and arranged an entrapment scheme.

After sharing a bed with him for three weeks to win his trust, she helped him recruit two local girls who agreed to work as prostitutes in Fethiye.

As the pimp and the two girls were driving toward Chisinau, Moldova's capital, on January 13, police pulled the car over and arrested him.

Her testimony in court convicted Cara, and he is now a prisoner in a foreign land where he knows neither the language nor the culture -- precisely the situation he had put Olesea in.

"If he had been free, he would have killed me," she said at her lawyer's office, recalling the way her pimp had looked at her during the trial. But when she testified, she stared him fearlessly in the eye and finally felt relief.

"He must have felt the same way I did when I was in Turkey."

Nonprofits attempting to combat the traffickers, meanwhile, are pouring their resources into grassroots education.

In Dorotcaia, a riverside village 90 miles east of Glinjeni, 60 teenagers slouched in small wooden chairs in a school auditorium, their attention riveted on a story unfolding on a television onstage.

In it, a teenage girl named Lilya eagerly travels abroad with a new boyfriend. Then she is locked in a room, beaten and raped, and forced into prostitution. In the end, the distraught young woman jumps off a freeway overpass to her death.

The movie, "Lilya 4-Ever," is being promoted by the International Organization for Migration and by another nonprofit called La Strada with the help of a $100,000 grant from the U.S. State Department. Officials hope such films will eventually slow the trafficking trade by spurring discussion among policy-makers and teenage girls alike.

Ana, a college student who was presenting the film, offered basic information about trafficking, then asked: "Are there any other possibilities to make a living other than going abroad?"

"Yeah," a scruffy boy called out, "become a prostitute here!"

"Families can't afford to buy food and clothing. They would rather risk dying abroad than die here," said another student.

A teenage girl who has not seen her mother in a year because she is working abroad to keep the family afloat, concluded, "There is no future in this country."

Angela Sirbu contributed to this story.

San Francisco Chronicle

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Her tale was brutal, sexual. No one believed a slave woman could be so literate. But now Harriet Jacobs has reclaimed her name.


Harriet Jacobs wrote a slave narrative, thought to be the obscure work of a white writer until two decades ago.

Annie Nakao, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004

"Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is like to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another. You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant; you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps, and trembled within hearing of his voice."

When North Carolina slave Harriet Jacobs penned those words in "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," a book she self-published in 1861, she became the first black woman to write a slave narrative. As recently as two decades ago, the book was considered an obscure literary oddity written by white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Today, with Jacobs' authorship authenticated, her dramatic narrative provides new generations with a revealing look at a often-hidden side of slavery: the sexual exploitation of women.

The brutalization of black girls and women by white slave-masters, who justified their dehumanizing treatment by viewing them as "sexual savages," was a daily fact of life under slavery. Stripped, beaten, raped and forced to "breed" more slaves, black women suffered a double burden of slavery because of their sexual vulnerability.

"Jacobs wrote what nobody dared to write," said literary scholar Jean Fagan Yellin, 73, who toiled for six years to uncover the identity of Jacobs as the true author of the book in the late 1980s. Yellin has recently published a biography of Jacobs, titled "Harriet Jacobs, A Life," and is working on publishing Jacobs' papers. A PBS series, "Slavery and the Making of America," now in production, will also feature Jacobs' story.

The growing recognition now given to Jacobs is long overdue, said Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University professor of literature and noted biographer of such African American figures as W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes.

"It's a very important slave narrative because it takes into account directly the experience of being a woman in slavery," said Rampersad. "It raises the question of whether slavery was worse for women than it was for men, which was not really talked about much."

Slave narratives have been a critical part of the telling of African American history. But unlike other narratives dictated to others by illiterate slaves, Jacobs' own eloquent recounting of her remarkable life -- she hid for seven years in an attic to escape her white slave master before escaping north and becoming an anti-slavery activist who wrote dispatches for famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's the Liberator -- makes her, in Yellin's view, as heroic a figure as 19th century African American giants Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.

"We know of the heroic Harriet Tubman and her work during the war as a Union spy," Yellin wrote in Jacobs' biography. "We know of the heroic Sojourner Truth and of her relief efforts. But because of slavery's anti- literacy laws, neither Tubman nor Truth could write her own story. ... Astonishingly, Jacobs managed both to author her own book and to get it published before Emancipation."

Beneath the soaring atrium of the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero -- she'd recently addressed the American Literature Association in San Francisco on the Jacobs papers -- Yellin, a small woman with short gray hair and deep-set brown eyes, looked even tinier. But she had an air of a woman used to plowing ahead, which probably served her well in the years she, a lone white academic, spent poring over an obscure slave narrative that few other scholars seemed to care about.

"Listen, my hair was a different color when I started on this years ago," quipped Yellin, a professor emerita at New York's Pace University, where she taught English for 30 years.

It was her Irish Catholic father's and Jewish immigrant mother's Old Left influences and the changing times that sparked an interest in what she called "the nontraditional" and "oppositional." "In the 1960s, the civil rights movement influenced everybody. So I started looking at things I could study that made sense in terms of the changes going on in the country."

While researching her dissertation on black figures in American literature, she came across Jacobs' narrative, which at the time was published under the pseudonym Linda Brent. She was fascinated. But it wasn't until the feminist movement of the 1970s that Yellin went back to "Incidents" as she tried to draw connections between race and gender.

"At the time, nobody was interested because the book makes people uncomfortable," she said. "It tells the terrible story of sexual exploitation."

Yet from abolitionist times, many of the details of that history remain veiled. White anti-slavery advocates avoided the topic so they wouldn't shock their Victorian audiences. And despite the handing down of stories of sexual oppression over generations of black families and the now substantial body of eloquent writings by black female authors about the struggles of women during slavery, the magnitude of the sexual exploitation of millions of black women slaves remains muted.

Reminders are unavoidable as revelations surface that the late senator and segregationist Strom Thurmond at age 22 fathered a child with a 16-year- old black maid who worked for his parents, or that one of the fathers of our country, Thomas Jefferson, also sired a child with his slave, Sally Hemings. Poles apart when it comes to their places in history, Jefferson and Thurmond were nevertheless participants in a system of sexual oppression that for Jefferson was codified in the law of the land, and for Thurmond was a vestige of social custom.

Central to that system of oppression was the centuries-old perceived sexual availability of black women that even today fosters stereotypes and assumptions about their sexuality.

"The whole myth of black women's sexuality, availability and compliance is ingrained into the culture," Yellin said.

The issue surfaces in complicated ways -- provoking, for example, uneasiness among some African Americans about Halle Berry's Oscar win two years ago for "Monster's Ball." There was happiness that a black woman finally won as best actress but pain that her highly sexualized role was viewed as stereotypical.

It's there, too, in the anger of some blacks about the criticism heaped on Janet Jackson earlier this year after Justin Timberlake ripped her bodice during a Super Bowl performance and exposed her right breast. Granted, this is a woman who, like many other female entertainers, black and white, is marketed for her sexually suggestive persona. Yet, would an equally suggestive Madonna have received more sympathy?

"I'm not a student of popular culture, but that does seem reasonable," Yellin said. "The fact is, there's a public role out there and someone walks into it."

That public role, she said, stems directly from chattel slavery, which used rape as a form of terror against every black woman, including Jacobs.

Born in 1813, Jacobs lived a peaceful childhood until she turned 13 and her mistress, who had taught her to read and write, died. She was willed to the baby daughter of an Edenton, N.C., doctor named James Norcom.

Norcom, a tyrant who had already had 11 children by other slaves, quickly began stalking Jacobs as a sexual prize. He did not rape her but constantly harassed and threatened her about having sex and even had a cottage built for that purpose far from the house.

"He told me I was his property; that I must be subjected to his will in all things," she wrote.

That she was not raped was unusual, given that slave masters either bribed their slaves with extra rations or better treatment for their children, or beat or starved them into submission.

"That always comes up -- why didn't he rape her?" Yellin said. "I am told that there are men who want acquiescence. But that's not the issue. It's that she resisted him, defied him."

To escape Norcom, Jacobs -- ironically -- used her sexuality to find a protector in a white lawyer with a higher social standing, with whom she had two children.

"At 15, she was no fool," Yellin said. "She chose the lesser of two evils. "

Yet she was later haunted by her choice. Years later, it pained her to reveal her story to her activist friends. Determined, in her words, to "try and be useful in some way," however, Jacobs wrote the book, using the pseudonym.

Still pursued by the doctor, who remained her owner, Jacobs hid in a tiny crawl space in her grandmother's attic for nearly seven years before escaping north. Her two children eventually joined her. Even in New York, the doctor and later his heirs continued their search for years, until an abolitionist friend finally bought her freedom.

Jacobs became an anti-slavery activist and Civil War relief worker and correspondent for Garrison. She also opened a school for free blacks in Alexandria, Va.

After she died in 1897, Jacobs was largely forgotten and her book given short shrift by critics who discounted the work as inauthentic.

"Some of us say those critics were unable to accept the idea of a literate black woman held in slavery," Yellin said.

Nearly 107 years after Jacobs died, Yellin had the satisfaction of having the listed author of "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" changed to Jacobs at the Library of Congress.

"I wanted her to be there, in American cultural history," she said.

Jacobs was a large presence in Yellin's life as well.

"I have lived with Harriet Jacobs for a very long time and am eager to get her presence out of my head, her papers out of my house and her story into the hands of readers," she wrote on the preface of her biography. "But I truly cannot imagine life without her."

San Francisco Chronicle

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Berkeley Monument to César Chávez

A memorial to Chávez's name and virtue

Santiago Casal
Wednesday, March 31, 2004


There is an old saying that "to speak the name of our ancestors is to keep them alive." Today, on his birthday, I speak the name of labor leader and environmentalist César Estrada Chávez. He was a man who died prematurely at 66 in 1993, his life marked by dedicated service, personal sacrifice and constant threats to him and his family, as well as the formidable efforts of agribusiness, Teamsters and government agents to derail everything he tried to accomplish.

Those of us who lived during his time on this earth have a special obligation to speak his name today and to find enduring ways to remind our children and ourselves of his legacy. Over the years, Chávez, more than any other person, was able to bring light, energy and forward movement to the struggle of farmworkers in this country. He tirelessly brought attention to society's detachment from the source of our nourishment, the faceless farmworkers who labor in the fields to put food on our tables and who suffer the vicissitudes of a yearly harvest.

Inspired by Mohandas K. Gandhi, Chávez set an example for the nation in his nonviolent leadership. He used Gandhi's notion of "moral jujitsu" to describe its effect on the opposition. He fasted for enlightenment as well as to protest against intransigent growers or grocery chains or to restrain his own followers when the impulse to violence reared its ugly head.

Chávez's successes were many, including the signing of the first agricultural worker agreements, passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, banning use of the dreaded and disabling short-handled hoe and raising the public's awareness about the dangers of chemicals and pesticides used in modern farming.

In the vernacular of my youthful street self and the many Chicanos who grew up in the barrios of California and the Southwest, Chávez was "the Vato" -- the man who stood up to "The Man," the one who met danger without giving way to fear. He was courageous and it gave us courage. He was determined and it made us determined. He practiced tolerance and nonviolence and it made us more tolerant and nonviolent. He was persistently hopeful, and it gave us hope. Though he rejected the rhetoric of the defiant La Raza Movement, he was still ours and he made us proud.

Chávez combined a set of virtues to sustain the struggle he led, relentlessly championing those who have no voice and resisting the allure of a society propelled by a consumer definition of happiness. So how do we perpetuate the speaking of his name, to perpetuate his virtues -- determination, courage, tolerance and hope? How do we adapt them to the challenges of the future as Chávez might have?

In Berkeley, the César Chávez Memorial Solar Calendar Project has chosen a dual approach, with an educational curriculum (K-12) integrated with a unique memorial that would serve as a field classroom. The project, more than five years in the making, aims to create a major work of "site-specific" public art in the form of an ancient solar calendar, a fitting monument to a man who devoted his life to the earth and to the farmworkers who have always lived by understanding the cycle of the seasons. Think of Stonehenge if you are searching for an image -- or check the Web site (www.solarcalendar.org) if you want to see the proposed design in detail.

The Berkeley City Council has provisionally reserved 1.5 acres at César Chávez Park for the memorial, a site with a sensational 360-degree panoramic view of the horizon and a perfect place for reflection. The project connects art, science, culture and history. The memorial calendar will incorporate the four Chávez virtues into the four cardinal directions of the site. When the memorial is completed, it will be both contemplative and educational. The companion educational curriculum will link the legacy of Chávez with the pressing need for environmental stewardship and service to the community.

There are many ways to honor an exceptional leader. One is to speak his name and to tell his story. The César Chávez Memorial Solar Calendar and educational curriculum will ensure that we speak his name, reflect on his life and serve his legacy through service to our community. There are few major monuments to individual Latinos in this country. May this be the first one for Chávez here in the Bay Area.

Santiago Casal is director of the Chavez Memorial Solar Calendar Project and Rhythm of the Seasons Curriculum (chavezmemorial@earthlink.net).

San Francisco Chronicle

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Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman was a runaway slave from Maryland who became known as the "Moses of her people." Over the course of 10 years, and at great personal risk, she led hundreds of slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad, a secret network of safe houses where runaway slaves could stay on their journey north to freedom. She later became a leader in the abolitionist movement, and during the Civil War she was a spy for the federal forces in South Carolina as well as a nurse.

Harriet Tubman

Notes from the underground - Biographer paints a portrait of Harriet Tubman from scant sources

Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom

The Life of Harriet Tubman

 

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Do turkeys enjoy thanksgiving?

A Global Resistance to Empire

By Arundhati Roy

 

LAST JANUARY thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Allegre in Brazil and declared — reiterated — that "Another World is Possible". A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.

Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs — to further what many call The Project for the New American Century.

In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of Imperialism and the need for a strong Empire to police an unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to `debate' the issue on `neutral' platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodelled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single Empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There isn't a country on God's earth that is not caught in the cross hairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF chequebook. Argentina's the model if you want to be the poster-boy of neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you're the black sheep.

Poor countries that are geo-politically of strategic value to Empire, or have a `market' of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, god forbid, natural resources of value — oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal — must do as they're told, or become military targets. Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented, or war will be waged. In this new age of Empire, when nothing is as it appears to be, executives of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign policy decisions. The Centre for Public Integrity in Washington found that nine out of the 30 members of the Defence Policy Board of the U.S. Government were connected to companies that were awarded defence contracts for $ 76 billion between 2001 and 2002. George Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of State, was Chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group. When asked about a conflict of interest, in the case of a war in Iraq he said, " I don't know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody looks at it as something you benefit from." After the war, Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for reconstruction in Iraq.

This brutal blueprint has been used over and over again, across Latin America, Africa, Central and South-East Asia. It has cost millions of lives. It goes without saying that every war Empire wages becomes a Just War. This, in large part, is due to the role of the corporate media. It's important to understand that the corporate media doesn't just support the neo-liberal project. It is the neo-liberal project. This is not a moral position it has chosen to take, it's structural. It's intrinsic to the economics of how the mass media works.

Most nations have adequately hideous family secrets. So it isn't often necessary for the media to lie. It's what's emphasised and what's ignored. Say for example India was chosen as the target for a righteous war. The fact that about 80,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, most of them Muslim, most of them by Indian Security Forces (making the average death toll about 6000 a year); the fact that less than a year ago, in March of 2003, more than two thousand Muslims were murdered on the streets of Gujarat, that women were gang-raped and children were burned alive and a 150,000 people driven from their homes while the police and administration watched, and sometimes actively participated; the fact that no one has been punished for these crimes and the Government that oversaw them was re-elected ... all of this would make perfect headlines in international newspapers in the run-up to war.

Next we know, our cities will be levelled by cruise missiles, our villages fenced in with razor wire, U.S. soldiers will patrol our streets and, Narendra Modi, Pravin Togadia or any of our popular bigots could, like Saddam Hussein, be in U.S. custody, having their hair checked for lice and the fillings in their teeth examined on prime-time TV.

But as long as our `markets' are open, as long as corporations like Enron, Bechtel, Halliburton, Arthur Andersen are given a free hand, our `democratically elected' leaders can fearlessly blur the lines between democracy, majoritarianism and fascism.

Our government's craven willingness to abandon India's proud tradition of being Non-Aligned, its rush to fight its way to the head of the queue of the Completely Aligned (the fashionable phrase is `natural ally' — India, Israel and the U.S. are `natural allies'), has given it the leg room to turn into a repressive regime without compromising its legitimacy.

A government's victims are not only those that it kills and imprisons. Those who are displaced and dispossessed and sentenced to a lifetime of starvation and deprivation must count among them too. Millions of people have been dispossessed by `development' projects. In the past 55 years, Big Dams alone have displaced between 33 million and 55 million people in India. They have no recourse to justice.

In the last two years there has been a series of incidents when police have opened fire on peaceful protestors, most of them Adivasi and Dalit. When it comes to the poor, and in particular Dalit and Adivasi communities, they get killed for encroaching on forest land, and killed when they're trying to protect forest land from encroachments — by dams, mines, steel plants and other `development' projects. In almost every instance in which the police opened fire, the government's strategy has been to say the firing was provoked by an act of violence. Those who have been fired upon are immediately called militants.

Across the country, thousands of innocent people including minors have been arrested under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) and are being held in jail indefinitely and without trial. In the era of the War against Terror, poverty is being slyly conflated with terrorism. In the era of corporate globalisation, poverty is a crime. Protesting against further impoverishment is terrorism. And now, our Supreme Court says that going on strike is a crime. Criticising the court of course is a crime, too. They're sealing the exits.

Like Old Imperialism, New Imperialism too relies for its success on a network of agents — corrupt, local elites who service Empire. We all know the sordid story of Enron in India. The then Maharashtra Government signed a power purchase agreement which gave Enron profits that amounted to sixty per cent of India's entire rural development budget. A single American company was guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development for about 500 million people!

Unlike in the old days the New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge around the tropics risking malaria or diahorrea or early death. New Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism.

The tradition of `turkey pardoning' in the U.S. is a wonderful allegory for New Racism. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation presents the U.S. President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. (Soon they'll even speak English!)

That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys — the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) — are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically they're for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO — so who can accuse those organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee — so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalisation? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?

Part of the project of New Racism is New Genocide. In this new era of economic interdependence, New Genocide can be facilitated by economic sanctions. It means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people. Dennis Halliday, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between '97 and '98 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than half a million children's lives.

In the new era, Apartheid