Month: September 2009

Source: Green Left Weekly

I was angry that Timorese president and peace laureate Jose Ramos Horta used the 10-year anniversary of the United Nations-supervised ballot in East Timor on August 30 to declare: “There will be no international tribunal.”

On this same day in 1999, the people of East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia – their brutal occupier for 24 years.

The Timorese Truth, Reception and Reconciliation Commission estimated that about 1500 people were killed by the Indonesian military and its militias in the period leading up to and immediately after the September 4 announcement of the ballot’s results in 1999. The vote revealed that 78.5% wanted independence. read more

Source: The New Internationalist

It isn’t really a factory. The ‘finishing unit’, where garments are stacked in boxes ready for shipment to Britain and America, is in the lower story of an extensive private house enclosed by a high stone wall in the Mirpur district of Dhaka. The stairs are piled with cardboard containers, so it is almost impossible to reach the upstairs apartment.

Here, the last touches are put to ready-made apparel for export. The workshop is a plain, windowless room, about 12 or 15 metres square. There are 45 workers, a majority girls, about half of them under 14. A boy is at a machine sewing buttons. Girls stand at a table, trimming loose threads and checking that the buttons are firm and the zip-fasteners work smoothly. Others stand at old-fashioned domestic ironing boards, from which steam rises in little mushroom-clouds. At a trestle, each garment is carefully folded and then passed to a line of young women who seal it in transparent polythene. Other girls stack them in cardboard cartons. They handle each piece as though it were a tray of eggs. From here, all the material will go to shipping containers for delivery to GAP and Primark in Britain, to Wal-Mart and K-Mart in North America. read more

Source: In These Times

The United States was founded as an “infant empire,” in the words of George Washington. The conquest of the national territory was a grand imperial venture. From the earliest days, control over the hemisphere was a critical goal.

Latin America has retained its primacy in U.S. global planning. If the United States cannot control Latin America, it cannot expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world,” observed President Richard M. Nixon’s National Security Council in 1971, when Washington was considering the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile. read more