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When I was in Japan recently I had the opportunity to explain about Malaysia’s Non-Governmental Organisation’s campaign to make war a punishable crime.

The Japanese had been guilty of perpetrating brutalities during their Manchurian Incident and war against China and also during the Pacific War.

On the other hand they were the only people in the world to experience the first ever nuclear war, of having their citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reduced to ashes by atomic bombs, with the loss of 200,000 lives and thousands more struck down by radiation sickness later.

For the Japanese the realities of war and the killings have been fully understood from their experience. I believe they can be expected to support a campaign to make war a crime.

I spoke about the horrors of war to three separate groups i.e. the Nikkei Future of Asia Forum, breakfast meeting with the head of Nikkei and his senior staff and before a full audience at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club, Tokyo.

While in England in April I was invited by the Ramadhan Foundation to speak about the Criminalisation of War at the Imperial College in London.

An interesting incident was the attempt by Jewish students to stop me from speaking at the Imperial College because I am regarded as being anti-Semitic. The authorities were embarassed by this demand and almost decided to stop me.

I was waiting for them to do so. Then I could go there to see if they would stop me. If they did I would be able to say that there is no freedom of speech in England.

However, the authorities decided that only students from the Imperial College would be allowed to attend. Still the hall was full with standing room only.

At all these meetings I was able to explain why war should be regarded as a crime. I pointed out that it is ridiculous to regard murder as a crime punishable with the most extreme penalty yet the deliberate killings of thousands of people, mostly innocent men, women and children are regarded as proper and legal.

There is a contradiction here which does not fit in with human values in a civilised world.

Today trillions of dollars are being expended on the development and production of ever more lethal weapons of mass destruction. Poor countries are forced to buy these weapons by playing on their false sense of pride. They buy these expensive weapons so as not to be less well-equipped than their neighbours. Yet these weapons are often not used at all. Still they have to be upgraded or replaced with newer versions at tremendous cost.

Malaysia has been drawn into this game. We have bought two submarines costing over RM3 billion. When are we going to use them? Are we contemplating going to war with our neighbours? I can think of other ways of spending RM3 billion in Malaysia.

We need a defence force to preserve our independence. But do we have to be involved in an arms race? Only the suppliers of arms would benefit from an arms race.

War is not a solution for our foreign policy agenda. A stiff backbone is far more important. Unfortunately at the moment we don’t have that.

The campaign against war and the criminalisation of war has gained momentum. This is going to be a long-drawn struggle. But it has to begin somewhere if we are going to achieve this radical change in the mindsets of people. God-willing insya’allah this struggle will eventually succeed.

Via this blog I would like to apeal to all Malaysians to support this campaign. We may feel safe from war now. But we must remember and think about all those people who now face the prospect of being bombed and rocketed, of having their heads and limbs torn from their bodies, of being killed. That they are non-combatants and have done no one any harm does not seem to matter to the warmongers. They will suffer all the same.

When war broke out in Europe in 1939 we in Malaysia thought we were safe. But we were not. In a world war we too will be subjected to attack. Our forces will not be able to do much.

We don’t foresee this happening to us. But it can happen if war is still regarded as a way to settle conflicts between nations.

That is why I believe that it is important to make war a crime and so to stop it from being the way to settle conflicts between nations.

AT THE JAPAN FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS’ CLUB

TOKYO, JAPAN

FRIDAY, 23 MAY 2008

1. I would like to thank you for this invitation to speak on the role of Malaysia and Asia on international affairs involving politics, economic and the environment.

2. By itself I do not think Malaysia can do much. But Asia is perhaps more able to contribute to these fields.

3. Asia is not homogenous like Europe. The people of Asia range from dark-skinned people to brown skinned to yellow and to white Caucasians. It is not possible for all these different people inhabiting different parts of Asia to collaborate in voicing identical views on anything. It is not possible at this point in time to think of an Asian Union with the same clout as the European Union.

4. Obviously Asia’s contribution would differ greatly between the ethnic and the regional groupings. This will render Asia less able to influence international affairs.

5. However certain parts and certain countries of Asia, particularly those in the East and India have gained a level of development, which would make their voices heard and respected by the rest of the world. They would therefore be able to play a role in international affairs.

6. Unfortunately they are not doing so. They are very reticent and unwilling to take a prominent role. This is because Asians have not got over their having been dominated in the past by the West.

7. Because of this Asia is always trying to understand and accommodate Western ideas and creeds. Asia has tried to adopt European ideologies, European systems of Government, European perceptions of things and values, European regimes for trade and finance etc. etc.

8. There has never been an Asian initiative for the world in any field. When globalisation was promoted by the West, Asians merely try to adjust to a new concept of international relations, particularly in trade, commerce and finance. Asians failed to recognise the inevitability of a New World Order resulting from the advances in speed of travel and instant communication and so to propose new regimes for the world.

9. If Asia wants to play a role in international affairs it must first liberate its minds from Western mental hegemony. This must be through deliberate effort. Asians can fall back on their greatness in the past and learn how to reassert themselves. After all Asians discovered Europe before the Europeans discovered Asia. Spain, the Mediterranean lands and Eastern Europe were ruled for centuries by Asians. So Asian involvement in international affairs is not new.

10. Asian countries have shown that when they have the political will they can excel in all the activities once dominated by the Europeans. Asian countries have now become developed, have been able to set up effective governments and have replaced the European countries in the production of all kinds of goods and services.

11. Many have now developed inventive skills and introduced new products to the world.

12. But Asians have shied away from formulating new ideas and ideologies, new systems and new trading and financial regimes for the world. Yet I am quite sure that if Asians put their minds to it they can offer better solutions to international problems.

13. There is no doubt that the international trade and financial regime as formulated by the west have now been shown to be disastrous for the world. The US Dollar is no longer stable for use as the benchmark for other currencies. Trading in currencies have now undermined the value of the currencies of the world including the United States. Free trade has resulted in many poor countries becoming unable to export their products and earn foreign exchange. Mergers and acquisitions by giant corporations have created monsters that have killed the small man and created serious social and economic problems for the many countries.

14. While all these disasters are happening Asian countries have either been bystanders or they have tried to struggle for survival. They have not proposed anything original or shown any initiative to overcome these problems. Yet they are in a position to do something not just to mitigate the effect of these Western conceived systems and regimes but to propose entirely new ideas and proposals that can replace the old regimes and usher in a new and fairer World Order.

15. Asians can propose fair trade instead of free trade; the replacement of the US Dollar by a new trading currency, the stoppage of currency trading, replacing it with a new Bretton Woods kind of agreement that can restore stability in the valuation of currencies, imposing limits on mergers and acquisitions and the formulation of an international anti-trust laws etc. etc.

16. I would like to mention a particular effort initiated by Malaysia. The world still accepts that one way of solving conflicts between nations is to kill people and see who can kill the most. This is called war but war is about killing people.

17. In human society killing is a serious crime meriting the most severe punishment. Yet killing thousands of people in a war is not considered a crime. This is absurd. You must not kill one person but you can kill hundreds of thousands.

18. Malaysia is trying to make killing people in war as much a crime as murder in any human society. This is to be a total change in human values. Whoever initiates wars must be condemned as criminal killers and must be punished by the international community.

19. Asia can back this effort by Malaysia. This can be a major initiative by Asia. If Asia succeeds in stopping the killings, in making war a crime, it will mark a powerful contribution of Asia to human civilisation. It will mean that the human race has become truly civilised.

The Perdana Global Peace Organisation (PGPO) strongly condemns the recent opening of Halliburton’s manufacturing centre in Iskandar Malaysia, Johor. The American oil and gas company which is linked to the current United States Vice President, Dick Cheney, has been raking in billions of dollars in profit from the American invasion of Iraq which has entered its fifth bloody year.

It is appalling that we have allowed this war-profiteering company to invest in Malaysia. Iskandar Malaysia Chief Executive Officer Datuk Ikmal Hijaz Hashim has been quoted defending Haliburton and even expressed his happiness at the willingness of the company to invest in Johor.

Are we so void of our humanity that we have to allow these war criminals to come in and thrive in our economy? Do we really need the blood money of a neo conservative entity that has played a role in the murder of innocent Iraqis to fund our development?

Cheney and George Bush are oil men and war criminals who have profited tremendously from the war in Iraq. Cheney is a major stockholder in Halliburton whose stocks have increased from USD 10 before the war to around USD 46 today. The phenomenal increase in value of its stocks is due to Halliburton continuously winning no-bid contracts in Iraq amounting to almost 20 billion dollars.

As a nation that has firmly opposed the invasion and colonisation of Iraq right from the beginning, it is a painful change in direction to allow Halliburton to operate in Malaysia. As a nation that has played a lead role in the Organisation of the Islamic Conference since its conception, it is deplorable that we have opened our doors to these war criminals that have plundered and destroyed Iraq, a sovereign nation that was invaded on false pretexts.

Today, more than a million Iraqis have died in the war that has been supported by firms such as Halliburton; which have benefited from the U.S being able to control the flow of oil in West Asia.

Surely in our endeavor to progress, we can still afford to be humane and conscientious. We must be sensitive to the sufferings of our brother humans elsewhere before we agree to accept even a single cent from these murderers.

The dead in Iraq need their justice. These warmongers who made the decision to destroy Iraq must be condemned and brought to justice for their crimes against humanity. Bush and Cheney must be put on trial for the blood on their hands as well as for all the money they have made from Iraq in the past five years.

We at PGPO reiterate our fervent objection and strongly denounce the setting up of Halliburton’s 200 million ringgit manufacturing centre at Iskandar Malaysia in Johor. The Malaysian government must not allow these war profiteers to put their ill-gotten profits to operate in any way in our beloved country.

On another note, we wish to express our utter disappointment with the decision of the Dewan Rakyat to dismiss the motion by Dato’ Seri Abdul Hadi Awang to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the tragedy of Nakba.

The action of the Dewan Rakyat does not reflect the aspirations and the sentiments of the Malaysian people who share in the suffering of their Palestinian brothers and sisters. To reject this motion on the basis that it is not urgent is a negation of the very ideals that we hold sacred such as peace and the sanctity of life.

It is bad enough that countries such as the United States, Britain and Australia are celebrating Israel’s 60 years of statehood, the least we can do is for our parliamentary sitting to show empathy and solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Tun Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad
Chairman
Perdana Global Peace Organisation

THE CONTINUING SAGA OF “CHUTZPAH” BY THE ISRAELIS

Sixty years ago, on May 14, 1948, the formal proclamation of the state of Israel took place. This was in actuality the culmination of a grand plan hatched more than a hundred years ago to create a homeland for the Jews carved out from the heart of Palestine. The Zionists propagated the view that a land without people should be given to a people without land and went all out to blot out the Palestinian people and their centuries old civilization.

The establishment of this state of Israel was seen as illegitimate in the eyes of all Palestinians and fair-minded people in the world, but nothing was done to deter the Israelis from expelling some 700,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949. Israel claims that the Palestinians were opposed to the UN partition plan and started a war against Israel, hence they had to leave because they were trouble makers. Nothing could be further from the truth! In the first place, this partition plan was erroneous and fundamentally flawed. Over the last sixty years, the Israelis have succeeded in portraying their state as a beleaguered nation facing the onslaught of Arab aggression. Surely this is a case of the ultimate ?chutzpah’!! This was the beginning of ethnic cleansing, which has perpetuated to this day. This was also the beginning of aggressive Israeli occupation of what was left of the old Palestine. The total fragmentation of Palestine, replete with oppressive walls and countless checkpoints is a reality today.

Sad to say, on May 11 1949, the United Nations General Assembly unconditionally approved Israel’s membership, but the state of Palestine and its people had disappeared into oblivion. When a wrong becomes acknowledged by an august world body, to the detriment of the sovereignty of a nation and its people that had existed for centuries, nothing more needs to be said. The Palestinians from then on were seen as just a problem, which the UN agency, UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) could very well manage and handle.

But how could such an absurdity in logic reflecting perverse injustice get perpetrated? This must be seen within the context of the dominant role of the European powers, which throughout the colonial era, had arrogated the right of might to seize, plunder and loot anything within their horizon and reach of military power.

The irony of it all is that while Israel and its supporters celebrate the 60th year of the creation of their state, three to four generations of Palestinians remember 60 years of forced dispossession and displacement and continue to be threatened with new forms of aggressive forced displacement and intimidation. The lives the Israeli aggressors steal from the living and not just from the dead!! The Palestinians are continually being admonished to forget the past and start afresh, but every day is a living hell for them, be they exiled refugees or oppressed and subjugated communities under Israeli occupation. To date no Israeli leader has ever called for atonement. Yet the Israelis will not allow the world to forget the Holocaust and ironically the Palestinians have been made to pay the heavy price.

So the Nakba continues even today as George Bush celebrates Israel’s birthday in Tel Aviv. How could the US be considered the honest broker when Bush himself will not even give a token visit to the Palestinians under siege? It has now been reported that with the creation of another Jewish settlement, Jerusalem is totally cut off from the West Bank.

Most humiliating and painful is the fact that the remaining Palestinians who continue to cling to the remnants of their homeland, are slowly but surely being strangled and suffocated through a process of physical, economic and cultural genocide. A parallel injustice is the 4.5 million refugees, many of whom live in squalor in neighbouring Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, who are still awaiting their right of return. Even UNRWA is displaying reluctance to carry on its mandated obligations to the Palestinians. If fatigue has set in for aid agencies, imagine the consequences of this 60 year catastrophe on the Palestinians!!

Al Nakba is the continuing saga of the Palestinian people up to today. Al Nakba illustrates the condition where the credo of might is right leads to the corruption of the soul of those who are guilty of perpetuating the dispossession of Palestinians from their rightful homeland.

Zulaiha Ismail
14th May 2008

-For 60 years, the Palestinians have had to struggle for their right to exist in their own land.
-For 60 years, the PalestinianS have suffered the violent uprooting of their society, dispossession, displacement, exile, occupation, discrimination, degradation and deprivation.
-For 60 years, Palestinian pleas to return home, and for justice andcompassion have been ignored.
-For 60 years, international law, human rights conventions and United Nations resolutions have
been transgressed to deny the Palestinians their rights.
-For 60 years, Palestinian refugees have yearned to return home.
-For 60 years, the Palestinians have waited to hear the word “SORRY”
-For 60 years, the world has been silent.

BY SONJA KARKAR
WOMEN FOR PALESTINE, AUSTRALIA
www.womenforpalestine.com

Source: The Guardian
George Monbiot

When we learned last week that Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi had blown himself up in Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented this as a vindication of its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate of the detention camp at Guant?namo Bay. The Pentagon says his attack on Iraqi soldiers shows both that it was right to have detained him and that it is dangerous ever to release the camp’s prisoners. On the contrary, it shows how dangerous it was to put them there in the first place.

Al Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least 30 former Guant?namo detainees who have “taken part in anti-coalition militant activities after leaving US detention”. Given that the majority of the inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they were detained, that’s one hell of a recidivism rate. In reality, it turns out that “anti-coalition militant activities” include talking to the media about their captivity. The Pentagon lists the Tipton Three in its catalogue of recidivists, on the grounds that they collaborated with Michael Winterbottom’s film The Road to Guant?namo. But it also names seven former prisoners, aside from al-Ajmi, who have fought with the Taliban or Chechen rebels, kidnapped foreigners or planted bombs after their release. One of two conclusions can be drawn from this evidence, and neither reflects well on the US government.

The first is that, as the Pentagon claims, these men “successfully lied to US officials, sometimes for over three years”. The US government’s intelligence gathering and questioning were ineffective, and people who would otherwise have been identified as terrorists or resistance fighters were allowed to walk free, despite years of intense and often brutal interrogation. Should this be surprising? Without a presumption of innocence, without charges, representation, trials, or due process of any kind, there is no reliable means of determining whether or not a man is guilty. The abuses at Guant?namo not only deny justice to the inmates, they also deny justice to the world.

Al-Ajmi, the authorities say, initially confessed in the prison camp to deserting the Kuwaiti army to join the jihad in Afghanistan. He admitted that he fought with Taliban forces against the Northern Alliance. He later retracted this confession, which had been made “under pressure and threats”. When the Americans released him from Guant?namo, they handed him over to the Kuwaiti government for trial, but without the admissible evidence required to convict him. Among his defences was that neither he nor his interrogators had signed his supposed testimony. The Kuwaiti courts, without reliable evidence to the contrary, found him innocent.

All evidence obtained in Guant?namo, and in the CIA’s other detention centres and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable, because it is extracted with the help of coercion and torture. Torture is notorious for producing false confessions, as people will say anything to make it stop. Both official accounts and the testimonies of former detainees show that a wide range of coercive techniques - devised or approved at the highest levels in Washington - have been used to make inmates tell the questioners what they want to hear.

In his book Torture Team, Philippe Sands describes the treatment of Mohammed al-Qahtani, held in Guant?namo and described by the authorities (like half a dozen other suspects) as “the 20th hijacker”. By the time his interrogators started using “enhanced techniques” to extract information from him, al-Qahtani had been kept in isolation for three months in a cell permanently flooded with light. An official memo shows that he “was talking to nonexistent people, reporting hearing voices, [and] crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end”. He was abused, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of sleep for a further 54 days of torture and questioning. What useful testimony could be extracted from a man in this state?

The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed conflict after their release had not in fact been involved in any prior fighting, but were radicalised by their detention. In the video he made before blowing himself up, al-Ajmi maintained that he was motivated by his ill-treatment in Guant?namo. “Twelve thousand kilometres away from Mecca, I realised the reality of the Americans and what those infidels want,” he said. He claimed he was beaten, drugged and “used for experiments” and that “the Americans delighted in insulting our prayer and Islam and they insulted the Qur’an and threw it in dirty places.” Al-Ajmi’s lawyer revealed that his arm had been broken by guards at the camp, who beat him up to stop him from praying.

The accounts of people released from Guant?namo describe treatment that would radicalise almost anyone. In his book Five Years of My Life, published a fortnight ago, Murat Kurnaz maintains that one of the guards greeted him on his arrival with these words. “Do you know what the Germans did to the Jews? That’s exactly what we’re going to do with you.” There were certain similarities. “I knew a man from Morocco,” Kurnaz writes, “who used to be a ship captain. He couldn’t move one of his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs.” The young man - scarcely more than a boy - in the cage next to Kurnaz’s had just had his legs amputated by American doctors after getting frostbite in a coalition prison in Afghanistan. The stumps were still bleeding and covered in pus. He received no further treatment or new dressings. Every time he tried to hoist himself up to sit on his pot by clinging to the wire, a guard would come and hit his hands with a billy-club. Like every other prisoner, he was routinely beaten by the camp’s Immediate Reaction Force, and taken away to interrogation cells to be beaten up some more.

Fathers were clubbed in front of their sons, sons in front of their fathers. The prisoners were repeatedly forced into stress positions, deprived of sleep and threatened with execution. As a senior official at the US Defense Intelligence Agency says, “maybe the guy who goes into Guant?namo was a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He’s going to come out a fully fledged jihadist.”

In reading the histories of Guant?namo, and of the kidnappings, extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the United Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become clear. The first is that these practices do not supplement effective investigation and prosecution; they replace them. Instead of a process which generates evidence, assesses it and uses it to prosecute, the US has deployed a process that generates nonsense and is incapable of separating the guilty from the innocent. The second is that far from protecting innocent lives, this process is likely to deliver further atrocities. Even if you put the ethics of such treatment to one side, it is surely evident that it makes the world more dangerous.

Slightly abridged from http://www.johnpilger.com

Beyond the sound and fury of its conquest of Iraq and campaign against Iran, the world’s dominant power is waging a largely unreported war on another continent , Latin America.

Using proxies, Washington aims to restore and reinforce the political control of a privileged group calling itself middle class, to shift the responsibility for massacres and drug trafficking away from the psychotic regime in Colombia and its mafiosi and to extinguish hopes raised among Latin America’s impoverished majority by the reform governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.

In Colombia, the main battleground, the class nature of the war is distorted by the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which provides an instrument with which to smear those who have distinguished Latin America’s epic history of rebellion by opposing the proto-fascism of US President George Bush’s regime.

“You don’t fight terror with terror”, said Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as US warplanes bombed to death thousands of civilians in Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 attacks. Thereafter, he was a marked man.

Yet, as every poll has shown, he spoke for the great majority of human beings who have grasped that the “war on terror” is a crusade of domination. Almost alone among national leaders standing up to Bush, Chavez was declared an enemy and his plans for a functioning social democracy independent of the United States a threat to Washington’s grip on Latin America.

“Even worse”, wrote the Latin America specialist James Petras, “Chavez’s nationalist policies represented an alternative in Latin America at a time (2000-2003) when mass insurrections, popular uprisings and the collapse of pro-US client rulers (Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia) were constant front-page news.”

It is impossible to underestimate the threat of this alternative as perceived by the “middle classes” in countries which have an abundance of privilege and poverty. In Venezuela, their “grotesque fantasies of being ruled by a ?brutal communist dictator’”, to quote Petras, are reminiscent of the paranoia of the white population that backed South Africa’s Apartheid regime.

Like in South Africa, racism in Venezuela is rampant, with the poor ignored, despised or patronised, and a Caracas shock jock allowed casually to dismiss Chavez, who is of mixed race, as a “monkey”.

This fatuous venom has come not only from the super-rich behind their walls in suburbs called “Country Club”, but from the pretenders to their ranks in middle-level management, journalism, public relations, the arts, education and the other professions, who identify vicariously with all things American. Journalists in the media have played a crucial role ? acknowledged by one of the generals and bankers who tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Chavez in 2002. “We couldn’t have done it without them”, he said. “The media were our secret weapon.”

Many of these people regard themselves as liberals, and have the ear of foreign journalists who like to describe themselves as being “on the left”. This is not surprising. When Chavez was first elected in 1998, Venezuela was not an archetypical Latin American tyranny, but a liberal democracy with certain freedoms, run by and for its elite, which had plundered the oil revenue and let crumbs fall to the invisible millions in the barrios.

A pact between the two main parties, known as puntofijismo, resembled the convergence of new Labour and the Tories in Britain and Republicans and Democrats in the US. For them, the idea of popular sovereignty was anathema, and still is.

Take higher education. At the taxpayer-funded elite “public” Venezuelan Central University, more than 90% of the students come from the upper and “middle” classes. These and other elite students have been infiltrated by CIA-linked groups and, in defending their privilege, have been lauded by foreign liberals.

With Colombia as its front line, the war on democracy in Latin America has Chavez as its main target. It is not difficult to understand why. One of Chavez’s first acts was to revitalise the oil producers’ organisation OPEC and force the oil price to record levels.

At the same time he reduced the price of oil for the poorest countries in the Caribbean region and Central America, and used Venezuela’s new wealth to pay off debt, notably Argentina’s, and, in effect, expelled the International Monetary Fund from a continent over which it once ruled. He has cut poverty by half ? while GDP has risen dramatically. Above all, he gave poor people the confidence to believe that their lives would improve.

The irony is that, unlike Fidel Castro in Cuba, he presented no real threat to the well-off, who have grown richer under his presidency. What he has demonstrated is that a social democracy can prosper and reach out to its poor with genuine welfare, and without the extremes of “neoliberalism” ? a decidedly un-radical notion once embraced by the British Labour Party.

Those ordinary Venezuelans who abstained during last year’s constitutional referendum were protesting that a “moderate” social democracy was not enough while the bureaucrats remained corrupt and the sewers overflowed.

Across the border in Colombia, the US has made Venezuela’s neighbour the Israel of Latin America. Under “Plan Colombia”, more than US$6 billion in arms, planes, special forces, mercenaries and logistics have been showered on some of the most murderous people on earth ? trained by the US.

“We not only taught them how to torture” a former US trainer of the military of various Latin American countries told me, “we taught them how to kill, murder, eliminate”.

That remains true of Colombia, where government-inspired mass terror has been documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and many others. In a study of 31,656 extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances between 1996 and 2006, the Colombian Commission of Jurists found that 46% had been murdered by right-wing death squads and 14% by FARC guerrillas.

The paramilitaries were responsible for most of the three million victims of internal displacement. This misery is a product of Plan Colombia’s pseudo “war on drugs”, whose real purpose has been to eliminate the FARC. To that goal has now been added a war of attrition on the new popular democracies, especially Venezuela.

US special forces “advise” the Colombian military to cross the border into Venezuela and murder and kidnap its citizens and infiltrate paramilitaries, and so test the loyalty of the Venezuelan armed forces. The model is the CIA-run “contra” campaign in Honduras in the 1980s that brought down the reformist government in Nicaragua.

The defeat of the FARC is now seen as a prelude to an all-out attack on Venezuela, if the Venezuelan elite ? reinvigorated by its narrow referendum victory last year ? broadens its base in state and local government elections in November.

America’s man is Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. In 1991, a declassified report by the US Defence Intelligence Agency revealed the then-senator Uribe as having “worked for the Medellln Cartel” as a “close personal friend” of the cartel’s drugs baron, Pablo Escobar. To date, 62 of his political allies have been investigated for close collaboration with paramilitaries.

A feature of his rule has been the fate of journalists who have illuminated his shadows. Last year, four leading journalists received death threats after criticising Uribe. Since 2002, at least 31 journalists have been assassinated in Colombia. Uribe’s other habit is smearing trade unions and human rights workers as “collaborators with the FARC”. This marks them.

Uribe was personally championed by former British PM Tony Blair, reflecting Britain’s long-standing, mostly secret role in Latin America.

“Counter-insurgency assistance” to the Colombian military, up to its neck in death-squad alliances, includes training by the SAS of units such as the High Mountain Battalions, condemned repeatedly for atrocities. On March 8, Colombian officers were invited by the foreign office to a “counter-insurgency seminar” at the Wilton Park conference centre in southern England. Rarely has the foreign office so brazenly paraded the killers it mentors.

The Western media’s role follows earlier models, such as the campaigns that cleared the way for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the credibility given to lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The softening-up for an attack on Venezuela is well under way, with the repetition of similar lies and smears.

On 3 February, the Observer devoted two pages to claims that Chavez was colluding in the Colombian drugs trade. Similarly to the paper’s notorious bogus scares linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda, the Observer’s headline read, “Revealed: Chavez role in cocaine trail to Europe”.

Allegations were unsubstantiated; hearsay uncorroborated. No source was identified. Indeed, the reporter, clearly trying to cover himself, wrote: “No source I spoke to accused Chavez himself of having a direct role in Colombia’s giant drug trafficking business.”

In fact, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has reported that Venezuela is fully participating in international anti-drugs programmes and in 2005 seized the third-highest amount of cocaine in the world.

The drugs smear has recently been reinforced with reports that Chavez has an “increasingly public alliance [with] the Farc” (see “Dangerous liaisons”, New Statesman, 14 April). Again, there is “no evidence”, says the secretary general of the Organisation of American States.

At Uribe’s request, and backed by the French government, Chavez played a mediating role in seeking the release of hostages held by the FARC. On March 1, the negotiations were betrayed by Uribe who, with US logistical assistance, fired missiles at a camp in Ecuador, killing Raul Reyes, the FARC’s highest-level negotiator.

An “email” recovered from Reyes’s laptop is said by the Colombian military to show that the FARC has received $300 million from Chavez. The allegation is fake. The actual document refers only to Chavez in relation to the hostage exchange.

And on April 14, Chavez angrily criticised the FARC. “If I were a guerrilla”, he said, “I wouldn’t have the need to hold a woman, a man who aren’t soldiers. Free the civilians!”

However, these fantasies have lethal purpose. On March 19, the Bush administration announced that it had begun the process of placing Venezuela’s popular democracy on a list of “terrorist states”, along with North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Sudan and Iran, the last of which is currently awaiting attack by the world’s leading terrorist state