LATEST NEWS FROM PERDANA GLOBAL PEACE ORGANISATION

This is a message from the Not In Our Name (NION) Statement of Conscience

We have now come to a defining moment, where before the world’s eyes the U.S. Congress is poised to legalize torture. We reject such a course outright. It does not represent us.

We remember the images from Abu Ghraib prison — photos of depravity, even death. And what of the images we have never been shown from a world of even more disturbing and more “professional” horrors that have been concealed in secret prisons around the world?

To anyone of conscience, this is unacceptable. But this is exactly what your government will be making legitimate. With bi-partisan support, the “Military Commissions Act of 2006″ will be made law unless people act to stop it.

Sold as a “compromise”, this bill is fundamentally worse than what has gone before.

The bill takes what has existed in the shadowy world of clandestine action and now gives it the openly declared mantle of official, legal approval. While the compromise is being sold as complying with the Geneva Conventions, it gives the President huge freedom to, by executive order, define “special methods” of interrogation that HE feels “fit” that Convention. It removes the right of anyone to raise the Geneva Conventions in federal court to challenge government action against them.

The compromise allows the government the power to use confessions and other testimony derived from torture as evidence in criminal proceedings. The compromise officially, and legally, puts Congress on record approving that the president may, at his own discretion, declare anyone an “enemy combatant”. This means the president can name anyone anywhere as such and remove them from the reach of family or legal counsel and hold them indefinitely without trial. It ends the Constitutional right of habeas corpus.

All this is now to be done openly, and in our name. All these actions –and the Bush Regime which has commissioned war crimes — must be brought to a halt. What is being met with silence in the halls of power must be manifested as a real opposition in the streets. At stake here is what kind of country and what kind of people we choose to be.

Let it not be said that the people did nothing when their government moved to make torture lawful. Let the world know that the people of this country did not acquiesce, but instead stood up and said :

TORTURE DOES NOT REPRESENT US!
THIS REGIME DOES NOT REPRESENT US!
WE WILL DRIVE IT OUT!

Send this message with your comments to comments@whitehouse.gov with a cc: to notorture@worldcantwait.org

and contact key members of the Senate Armed Forces Committee:

Sen. John Warner (Chairman), VA, Phone: (202) 224-2023 Fax: (202) 224-6295
Sen. John McCain, AZ, Phone: (202) 224-2235 Fax: (202) 228-2862
Sen. Carl Levin, MI, Phone: (202) 224-6221 Fax: (202) 224-1388
Sen. Susan Collins, ME, Phone: (202) 224-2523 Fax: (202) 224-2693
Sen. Edward Kennedy, MA, Phone: (202) 224-4543 Fax: (202) 224-2417
Sen. Lindsey Graham, SC, Phone: (202) 224-5972 Fax: (202) 224-3808
Sen. Robert Byrd, WV, Phone: (202) 224-3954 Fax: (202) 228-0002
Sen. Hillary Clinton, NY, Phone: (202) 224-4451 Fax: (202) 228-0282

Send this letter to all your friends and have them send it to their friends. Tell them THIS MUST NOT PASS and that you are pledging to be in the streets on October 5 because The World Can?t Wait. Drive Out the Bush Regime!

In the next week we intend to send over 50 thousand of your responses to President Bush and the Congress. Send a copy of your messages to notorture@worldcantwait.org

In a world scarred by violent conflicts and ideological confrontations, made worse by religious misinterpretations and cultural extremism and bigotry, the global community is threatened with endless conflicts and wars. The United Nations, set up to prevent wars and to achieve peaceful solutions to world conflicts has been denigrated by the very nations which founded it. Now peace is getting ever further from becoming a reality. We are still primitive because we believe in killing people to solve our problems.

Emasculated though the United Nation may be, it is still the only hope of mankind. Setting up another institution would do no better. Like it or not humanity must once again make a commitment to the U.N. We need to appeal to the ordinary people in every country to reject leaders who ignore the U.N. and who reject its missions.

We now have this Declaration of the International Day of Peace every 21st day of September which “is meant to be a day of global ceasefire, when all countries and all people stop all hostilities for the entire dayā€¦” If the leaders will not, then the people should. They should for one day in a year stop all hostilities. The media should cease for one day from inflaming passions and hatred in the name of peace.

In modem war leaders and generals stay far behind the lines and are in no danger of being killed or wounded. The supreme sacrifice must be made by the young people. Knowing this, the leaders and generals still see war as an option in settling conflicts between nations. By their soldiers ceasing hostilities for one day, the leaders and generals will be forced to appreciate that they have no right to sacrifice young people in wars which will solve nothing.

If this annual International Day of Peace could be a small step forward in addressing and raising global awareness on the inhuman afflictions caused by war, it would certainly be a most laudable endeavour. If this UN call for cessation of hostilities for just one day on September 21st is observed by all warring factions in the world, then we can say that the global peace agenda is starting to get dividends. Of course the ultimate objective is for all nations and their leaders to one day agree that for humankind to survive, for modem civilization to be meaningful there must be a unified effort to criminalize all wars!

Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad
Global Peace Forum
Kuala Lumpur

Sep. 20, 2006

International Business Conference 2006

The International Business Students of Multimedia University (Malacca Campus) are proud to announce that we will be organizing an International Business Conference entitled ā€œGlobalization = @ ā‰  World War IVā€. This conference combines a loud voice for truth presented by the people who know best.

The speakers for this conference would be:

Datoā€™ Mukhriz Mahathir (Coordinator, Peace Malaysia Foundation)

Mr Mathias Chang (Lawyer, Former political secretary to Dr Mahathir)

Mr Abdul Halim bin Abdul Hamid (Lecturer of Faculty Business and Law, Multimedia University)

The details of the conference are as follows:
Date : 21st September 2006
Time : 9 am to 5 pm
Venue : Main Hall (Multimedia University, Melaka Campus)

Attendees stand a chance to win colour screen handphones, mp3 players & 1GB thumb drives.
Light refreshments will be provided.

So, join us and be part of this special event!!! You can make all the difference. See you there!!

“All we are saying is: give peace a chance.” ā€“ John Lennon

‘Gaza is a jail. Nobody is allowed to leave. We are all starving now’
By Patrick Cockburn in Gaza Published: 08 September 2006 ,The Independent

Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the world’s attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq.

A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade. It has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown nets.

Many people are being killed by Israeli incursions that occur every day by land and air. A total of 262 people have been killed and 1,200 wounded, of whom 60 had arms or legs amputated, since 25 June, says Dr Juma al-Saqa, the director of the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City which is fast running out of medicine. Of these, 64 were children and 26 women. This bloody conflict in Gaza has so far received only a fraction of the attention given by the international media to the war in Lebanon.

It was on 25 June that the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was taken captive and two other soldiers were killed by Palestinian militants who used a tunnel to get out of the Gaza Strip. In the aftermath of this, writes Gideon Levy in the daily Haaretz, the Israeli army “has been rampaging through Gaza - there’s no other word to describe it - killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately”. Gaza has essentially been reoccupied since Israeli troops and tanks come and go at will. In the northern district of Shajhayeh they took over several houses last week and stayed five days. By the time they withdrew, 22 Palestinians had been killed, three houses were destroyed and groves of olive, citrus and almond trees had been bulldozed.

Fuad al-Tuba, the 61-year-old farmer who owned a farm here, said: “They even destroyed 22 of my bee-hives and killed four sheep.” He pointed sadly to a field, its brown sandy earth churned up by tracks of bulldozers, where the stumps of trees and broken branches with wilting leaves lay in heaps. Near by a yellow car was standing on its nose in the middle of a heap of concrete blocks that had once been a small house.

His son Baher al-Tuba described how for five days Israeli soldiers confined him and his relatives to one room in his house where they survived by drinking water from a fish pond. “Snipers took up positions in the windows and shot at anybody who came near,” he said. “They killed one of my neighbours called Fathi Abu Gumbuz who was 56 years old and just went out to get water.”

Sometimes the Israeli army gives a warning before a house is destroyed. The sound that Palestinians most dread is an unknown voice on their cell phone saying they have half an hour to leave their home before it is hit by bombs or missiles. There is no appeal.

But it is not the Israeli incursions alone that are destroying Gaza and its people. In the understated prose of a World Bank report published last month, the West Bank and Gaza face “a year of unprecedented economic recession. Real incomes may contract by at least a third in 2006 and poverty to affect close to two thirds of the population.” Poverty in this case means a per capita income of under $2 (Ā£1.06) a day.

There are signs of desperation everywhere. Crime is increasing. People do anything to feed their families. Israeli troops entered the Gaza industrial zone to search for tunnels and kicked out the Palestinian police. When the Israelis withdrew they were replaced not by the police but by looters. On one day this week there were three donkey carts removing twisted scrap metal from the remains of factories that once employed thousands.

“It is the worst year for us since 1948 [when Palestinian refugees first poured into Gaza],” says Dr Maged Abu-Ramadan, a former ophthalmologist who is mayor of Gaza City. “Gaza is a jail. Neither people nor goods are allowed to leave it. People are already starving. They try to live on bread and falafel and a few tomatoes and cucumbers they grow themselves.”

The few ways that Gazans had of making money have disappeared. Dr Abu-Ramadan says the Israelis “have destroyed 70 per cent of our orange groves in order to create security zones.” Carnations and strawberries, two of Gaza’s main exports, were thrown away or left to rot. An Israeli air strike destroyed the electric power station so 55 per cent of power was lost. Electricity supply is now becoming almost as intermittent as in Baghdad.

The Israeli assault over the past two months struck a society already hit by the withdrawal of EU subsidies after the election of Hamas as the Palestinian government in March. Israel is withholding taxes owed on goods entering Gaza. Under US pressure, Arab banks abroad will not transfer funds to the government.

Two thirds of people are unemployed and the remaining third who mostly work for the state are not being paid. Gaza is now by far the poorest region on the Mediterranean. Per capita annual income is $700, compared with $20,000 in Israel. Conditions are much worse than in Lebanon where Hizbollah liberally compensates war victims for loss of their houses. If Gaza did not have enough troubles this week there were protest strikes and marches by unpaid soldiers, police and security men. These were organised by Fatah, the movement of the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, which lost the election to Hamas in January. His supporters marched through the streets waving their Kalashnikovs in the air. “Abu Mazen you are brave,” they shouted. “Save us from this disaster.” Sour-looking Hamas gunmen kept a low profile during the demonstration but the two sides are not far from fighting it out in the streets.

The Israeli siege and the European boycott are a collective punishment of everybody in Gaza. The gunmen are unlikely to be deterred. In a bed in Shifa Hospital was a sturdy young man called Ala Hejairi with wounds to his neck, legs, chest and stomach. “I was laying an anti-tank mine last week in Shajhayeh when I was hit by fire from an Israeli drone,” he said. “I will return to the resistance when I am better. Why should I worry? If I die I will die a martyr and go to paradise.”

His father, Adel, said he was proud of what his son had done adding that three of his nephews were already martyrs. He supported the Hamas government: “Arab and Western countries want to destroy this government because it is the government of the resistance.”

As the economy collapses there will be many more young men in Gaza willing to take Ala Hejairi’s place. Untrained and ill-armed most will be killed. But the destruction of Gaza, now under way, will ensure that no peace is possible in the Middle East for generations to come. (more…)

UMNO Youth International & NGO Relations Bureau / Peace Malaysia Dialogue with the British High Commission

 Theme: The West Asia Crisis – Causes and Solutions

Speakers: 

Dato’ Mukhriz Mahathir
Dr. Chandra Muzaffar
High Commissioner Boyd McCleary
Mr. Edward Hobart

Date: 4 September 2006

Time: 8pm

Venue: Securities Commission Auditorium 

Program

7.30 pm: Arrival of guests
8.00pm: Introductory Remarks by Master of Ceremony
8.10pm: Speakers Presentations
9.00pm: Speakers Question & Answer Session
9.30pm: Public Question & Answer Session
10.00pm: Summaries
10.10pm: End

This event is free and is open to the public.

Entrance is on a first come, first serve basis as seats are limited.