Editor’s Note: This podcast was originally published by MintPress News.
The MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
On May 24, an 18-year-old gunman fatally shot 22 people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Police reportedly refused to confront the killer, locked him in a room full of children, physically prevented parents from getting involved, and even allegedly rescued their own children first.
The massacre has once again brought the United States’ unique obsession with firearms to the fore, with renewed calls to ban assault rifles. But even among gun-control advocates, few realize the connections between the Second Amendment and white supremacy.
Today’s guest is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Originally from Oklahoma, Dunbar-Ortiz is a writer, historian and activist, possibly best known for her 2014 classic book, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.” She argues that the context behind the Second Amendment is that the newly-independent United States needed “well-regulated militias” of white men to “kill Indians and take their land,” or to form slave patrols that would hunt down Black people fleeing their captivity. It was out of these slave patrols that the first police departments were formed.
Ultimately, she argues, the need for such armed militias arose from the fact that the white colonists were on recently stolen land, surrounded by hostile groups who were trying to get their land back. As she notes, it was a crime to give or sell a gun to a Native American.
An activist for over 50 years, Dunbar-Ortiz has argued that for any progress to be made, Americans must stop worshiping a 234-year-old document written by slaveholders. Today with Lowkey, she also discussed how it was that the National Rifle Association was taken over by reactionary political actors and how it came to be that the United States is a country with 4% of the world’s population but half of the world’s guns.
“The Constitution is so embedded in white supremacy that there is no way to amend it to change that. It is everywhere…This is so obvious if you just face what U.S. history is and not leave so much out,” she told Lowkey.
A revolutionary and a feminist, Dunbar-Ortiz’s life’s work has taken her across the world, including to Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua, where she documented the U.S.-sponsored Contra War against indigenous groups. She is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University, East Bay. Among her other notable books include, “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment”; “The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America”; and “Not ‘a Nation of Immigrants’: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion.”
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
On left: Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti. On right: Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic. Cars with the Kosovo license plate (center left) and the Serbian license plate (credit: Nikola Mikovic) / photo illustration: Toward Freedom
KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Kosovo—A fight over license plates in the Balkans has gotten the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) involved.
Posters and graffiti can be seen throughout the Serbian-dominated part of the town of Kosovska Mitrovica in northern Kosovo that say, “No surrender—Serbian license plates and ID remain.”
Despite the European Union moderating bilateral talks, ethnically Albanian-dominated authorities in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, plan on September 1 to re-register vehicles featuring Serbian plates. However, recent protests jammed up border crossings between Kosovo and Serbia. Plus, a poll shows the majority of Kosovo-based Serbs plan to continue using Serbian-issued license plates.
“They will certainly provide resistance if Pristina attempts to ‘nationalize’ thousands of cars if their owners refuse to replace Serbian-issued license plates with Kosovan ones,” said Milica Andric Rakic. The project manager of Kosovska Mitrovica-based non-governmental organization New Social Initiative told Toward Freedom that Serbs may bow to a certain degree to pressure from Belgrade, but will not accept ultimatums from Pristina.
This dispute comes amid Serbia’s resistance to the European Union’s and the United States’ pressure to recognize the 2008 secession of Kosovo. But, as Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic recently pointed out, both entities refuse to acknowledge breakaway republics in Ukraine’s Donbass region.
A map of the Balkans region of Europe showing the boundary between Serbia and Kosovo / credit: caingram.info
Serbia-Kosovo Relations
Following the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, the Serbian police and army were forced to withdraw from the country’s southern province, Kosovo. Then NATO troops entered Kosovo in June 1999, having remained since. Nine years later, Pristina declared independence, a move recognized by most Western countries. In southern Kosovo, ethnic Albanians make up over 90 percent of the population.
Serbia’s defeat, however, did not mark the end of the presence of Serbian institutions in Kosovo. In the north, as well as in certain places in the south, Serbs make up the majority of the population. Despite the secession, Serbia has continued issuing license plates and identification cards (IDs) to Serbs living in northern Kosovo.
“For Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti, those car plates are illegal,” Rakic said. “But for the local Serbs, they are the only ones they have.”
She said Serbs do not want to integrate into Kosovo’s legal and political system, despite occasional pressure that comes from Belgrade. For them, Kosovo is part of Serbia. That is Belgrade’s official position, too.
However, amid Western pressure over the years, Serbia has had to make concessions to Kosovo. For example, in 2011, Serbia agreed to create de facto border crossings with Kosovo, while Serbian police officers were integrated into the Kosovo police force. In 2013, Belgrade called on Serbs living in northern Kosovo to take part in Pristina-run local elections. Two years later, Serbia’s judicial authorities in northern Kosovo were integrated into the Kosovo legal framework.
“The Serbs in northern Kosovo never supported such actions. That is why Belgrade was always either ‘bribing’ them or pressuring them to integrate into Kosovo’s institutions,” Rakic said, referring to various deals Belgrade has offered Serbs over the years to de-escalate the situation.
‘New Generation Will Not Put Up with Terror’
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic expressed solidarity with ordinary Serbians at an August 17 joint press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
“A new generation of young men in northern Kosovo will not put up with the terror that comes from Pristina,” Vucic said.
Kosovo-based Serbian shopowner Sinisa Radovic told Toward Freedom he’d get Kosovo license plates to avoid being fined / credit: Nikola Mikovic
But, Sinisa Radovic, who owns a small souvenir shop in Kosovska Mitrovica, said he has no choice but to re-register his vehicle.
“Otherwise, they will confiscate it. Right now, if I drive a car with Serbian-issued plates south of Kosovska Mitrovica, the police can fine me and I would have to pay 250 euros,” Radovic explained.
In northern Kosovo, drivers have used stickers to cover Serbian state symbols on license plates. It is a temporary solution to the dispute.
On August 18 in Brussels, Vucic and Kurti failed to reach a deal, although EU High Representative for Foreign Policy and Security Josep Borrell claimed they have until September 1 to resolve the burning issue.
Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti has stated Serbian license plates are considered illegal. Rakic said it’s possible Kosovo’s authorities will force Serbs into Kosovo’s legal system without an agreement with Serbia.
“Such an attempt will undoubtedly lead to an escalation,” she pointed out.
‘Pristina Will Have a Big Problem’
Moreover, Pristina now requires Serbs living in northern Kosovo to replace their Serbian-issued identification cards with Kosovo documents.
Some challenges Serbians in Kosovo face are that Pristina neither recognizes Serbian-issued driver’s licenses nor Serbian-issued IDs.
Some Serbians hold Kosovo’s IDs, while others cannot get them for technical reasons. In order to apply for a Kosovo ID, one would have to attach a birth certificate. Serbians living in Kosovo would want a Kosovo-issued ID to be able to get Kosovo-issued driver’s licenses and plates to be allowed to drive south of the Serbian-dominated areas. Plus, to get paid by a Kosovo-based employer, they would need a Kosovo ID to be able to open bank accounts to receive direct paycheck deposits.
“But Pristina does not recognize birth certificates issued by Serbia’s authorities after June 1999, which means that someone who was born in Kosovska Mitrovica in 2000 does not legally exist for Pristina and cannot even apply for an ID,” Rakic explained.
Serbian pensioner Mirko Trajkovic told Toward Freedom he’d resist “illegal” Kosovo authorities’ instructions / credit: Nikola Mikovic
Yet, some holdouts remain. One of them is local pensioner Mirko Trajkovic.
“This is Serbia. Why should I have any documents issued by illegal institutions in Pristina?” Trajkovic said, adding Belgrade will not betray Serbs in northern Kosovo.
This reporter found it difficult to find many Serbs who would comment. Many fear both the Serbian and Kosovo governments would retaliate.
Neither Belgrade nor Pristina effectively control northern Kosovo. The territory is a “gray zone,” where NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR) mission is expected to intervene in case of potential clashes between Serbs and the Albanian-dominated Kosovo Security Forces.
Meanwhile, panic has spread on social media and in Western media. Plus, the Kosovo prime minister speculated about an escalation leading to a new war in the Balkans.
Rakic thinks that’s unlikely, though. But she did suggest one possibility: Because Kosovo has rejected all Serbian proposals for a resolution, what could happen if no deal is reached by September 1 is Belgrade may call on the Serbian community in the north to boycott Kosovo-issued documents and license plates.
“Then Pristina will have a big problem, since it is logistically very difficult to confiscate thousands of vehicles.”
Nikola Mikovic is a Serbia-based contributor to CGTN, Global Comment, Byline Times, Informed Comment, and World Geostrategic Insights, among other publications. He is a geopolitical analyst for KJ Reports and Enquire.
On July 9, security guards shot a 24-year-old man on the premises of forestry company Forestal Mininco in the city of Carahue in Chile’s Araucanía region in what the Chilean media described at the time as an “armed confrontation.”
Pablo Marchant Gutiérrez, a Chilean anthropology student who had joined the indigenous Mapuche people’s struggle for autonomy and recuperation of ancestral lands, was found dead after what appeared to be an execution.
Marchant’s killing is the latest incident in the conflict between Mapuche communities and Forestal Mininco, which has been accused of human-rights abuses during violent land evictions in Wallmapu. That is the Indigenous name of the Mapuche people’s ancestral home, which encompasses the southern cone of South America that is divided between the modern states of Chile and Argentina. Because Mapuche culture is tied to the land, its medicinal plants, as well as geographical elements such as lakes, rivers and forests, denying the Mapuche people the right to live there is tantamount to genocide, per the United Nations’ definition.
However, between former U.S.-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet’s terror laws being used to criminalize Mapuche elders and activists, the United States and the United Kingdom arming Chile’s security forces, and the failure of international agencies to treat the Mapuche conflict with urgency, the West appears complicit in the genocide of the Mapuche people.
Questioning Authorities
Not satisfied with the official accounts of events, Marchant’s family requested forensic investigations, from which a sinister picture emerged of what had happened on Forestal Mininco’s premises.
Pablo Marchant Gutiérrez with his mother, Myriam Gutiérrez / credit: Myriam Gutiérrez
The investigation found Marchant was shot in the back, contradicting the police’s account that Marchant had threatened officers with a M16 assault rifle. The report stated he was killed “on his knees” with his head inclined towards the floor, and that his injuries were consistent with that of an execution.
Neither the police nor prosecution services informed Myriam Gutiérrez, Marchant’s mother, of her son’s death. Instead, the Mapuche community relayed the news. Afterward, Legal Services of Temuco—another city in the Araucanía region—called Gutiérrez, saying she needed to be present at the autopsy. However, when Gutiérrez arrived, she wasn’t allowed in the facility.
“To this day, five months on, there has been no form of justice against those who have protected my son’s murderers,” Gutiérrez told Toward Freedom. “I must also point out that these cases are never resolved because the state does not recognize these [recuperation] acts as legitimate—instead, they qualify them as ‘terrorist actions.’”
Toward Freedom contacted Forestal Mininco, the Chilean consulate in London, and Chile’s Interior and Security Ministry, but they did not respond as of press time.
Not long after Marchant’s death, President Sebastian Piñera announced on October 12 a state of emergency in response to escalating tension in the southern regions of the Andean country. Over 1,000 troops are deployed in the Araucanía region, armed with drones, tanks and anti-riot weaponry. The central Chilean region is known for its virgin forests.
Less than a month into the military occupation, security forces opened fire at a roadblock, killing one Indigenous man and injuring several others, including a 9-year-old girl.
Despite the frequency and severity of the violence, political persecution and racism Mapuche communities face have failed to prompt an appropriate response from international agencies. Free from international intervention, Chilean security forces have been able to kill, evict and arrest Mapuche people with complete impunity, all with an eye to protect the interests of industries operating out of contested Indigenous land. This comes despite Chile being a signatory to the 1989 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of the International Labour Organization (ILO Convention 169) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Chile is the only Latin American country that does not recognize the existence of Indigenous peoples in its constitution.
“What the state is doing is colonial domination against the Mapuche people via a repressive genocidal political agenda, in turn denying their right to exist as an autonomous Mapuche nation,” Gutiérrez said. “Pablo knew and understood that people were being repressed and that they had been banished from their land in a brutal and repressive manner.”
Subsidizing Corporations
Chile currently holds the largest planted area of Pinus radiata, or Monterey pine trees, in the world. These fast-growing, medium-density softwood trees are known for their versatile uses, ranging from constructing homes, cabinets, boats and furniture to acting as a noise buffer in residential areas.
The Mininco and Arauco forestry companies own over 2 million hectares (4.94 million acres) of forest and supply 400 different products in approximately 80 countries, including wood chips for paper pulp production.
The forestry sector’s success can be attributed to state subsidies and land grabs facilitated during Augusto Pinochet’s time as the U.S.-backed dictator following the 1973 coup. Pinochet’s extractivist policies ensured more than $800 million in Chilean tax money funded the sector. Large swathes of land previously belonging to the Mapuche people, peasant farmers and state-owned agencies, such as CORFO (Chile’s economic development agency), were seized and handed to Pinochet’s inner circle, including Julio Ponce Lerou, his son-in-law.
“Though most political parties recognize that the conflict with Mapuche people is political and not military, they continue to ignore demands for restitution of their lands, autonomy and self-determination,” Mariqueo said.
Lago Conguillio in 2017 in Chile’s Araucanía region, known for its virgin forests / credit: Flickr/Sarah and Iain
Western Complicity
The military occupation of Araucanía would not be possible without the support of the international arms industry. Multiple human-rights NGOs, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, decrying human-rights abuses that took place during the 2019-20 social unrest dubbed “El Estallido.” Yet, countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom have continued to supply arms to Chile, whose military expenditure is one of the highest in the world, making up around 1.9 per cent of GDP.
In February, the Biden administration’s first foreign arms sale was to Chile. The $85 million package included:
16 SM-2 block IIIA rail-launched missiles,
two MK 89 Mod 0 guidance section adapters,
one target-detection device kit,
Mod 14 naval guns systems, and
associated training and supplies.
The UK also has armed Chile’s repressive military forces. A Freedom of Information request by British newspaper Byline Times found 50 percent of the £164 million ($217 million USD) worth of arms licenses sold to Chile since 2008 had been granted during 2019-20. This included so-called “non-lethal” weapons, such as smoke canisters, tear gas and other riot-control agents. Those tools were turned on more than 500 Chilean people who lost sight in one or both eyes. A similar tactic had been deployed during the 2019-20 Yellow Vests uprisings in France.
Genocide for Profit
None of the Chilean government administrations since the 1989 transition to democracy have challenged the might of forestry companies in Araucanía.
Whether left-leaning like Michelle Bachelet or extreme-right like Sebastian Piñera, the conflict rages on to the detriment of Indigenous people. It was Bachelet who commissioned the FBI to investigate the existence among Mapuche activists of terror cells linked to guerrilla groups like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA). And it was Bachelet who conceived special unit Comando Jungla, a special military force trained in the Colombian jungle to combat alleged terrorism and narcotics operations in Chile.
“The militarization of the region continues, giving carte blanche to commit all kinds of atrocities against those communities peacefully struggling for the right to live on ancestral land,” Mariqueo said.
Meanwhile, Gutiérrez said her son only sought to help defend Wallmapu.
“He wanted to be among, collaborate and live like a Mapuche.”
Carole Concha Bell is an Anglo-Chilean writer and Ph.D. student at King’s College London.
A U.S. court’s ruling sends a clear message to Israel organizations intent on suppressing advocacy for Palestinian rights / credit: Alejandro Alvarez / SIPA USA
A court in Washington, D.C., has entirely dismissed a lawsuit against the American Studies Association over its support of an academic boycott of Israel.
The lawsuit, which was filed in 2016 by Israel advocates, has now failed three separate times in court – a significant defeat for the Israel lobby’s attempt to punish scholars who back Palestinian rights.
“The court found that the claims primarily arose from advocacy on an issue of public interest and were not likely to succeed,” stated the Center for Constitutional Rights.
In a 2013 referendum, members of the American Studies Association overwhelmingly endorsed an academic boycott of Israel.
The vote followed an endorsement of the boycott by the association’s governing body.
Declaring the boycott an ethical stance, the ASA said that it “represents a principle of solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their academic freedom and an aspiration to enlarge that freedom for all, including Palestinians.”
Israel advocates within the association, however, jumped into action to persecute colleagues who dared to criticize Israel.
Using a tactic known as lawfare, in which Israel lobby groups use legal means to harass and silence supporters of Palestinian rights, the plaintiffs claimed that the boycott resolution was brought by “insurgents” within the association who attempted to “subvert and change the ASA’s purpose” into a political advocacy organization.
The plaintiffs alleged that a “cabal” of leaders from the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) surreptitiously took over the ASA and used their positions on its executive committee and national council to foist the boycott resolution on the association’s unsuspecting membership, misspending ASA money in the process.
A federal court threw out a key claim in the lawsuit in 2017, ruling that the ASA’s endorsement of the boycott was not contrary to the association’s charter.
After the lawsuit was initially dismissed in 2019, the plaintiffs filed an appeal, and opened a second case in the Washington, DC Superior Court.
Later that year, the Superior Court granted the defendants’ motions to dismiss in part, but denied their anti-SLAPP motion.
SLAPP suits are intended to suppress free speech and force people or organizations into spending money defending themselves in court.
But defendants appealed the denial of that anti-SLAPP motion.
The DC Court of Appeals ordered the court to reanalyze the case, resulting in the most recent ruling, notes the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The force behind the lawsuit was the Louis D. Brandeis Center, an Israel advocacy organization that has for years worked to smear Palestine solidarity activism as anti-Semitism, and attempts to suppress it with frivolous lawsuits and bogus civil rights complaints.
The organization’s former president, attorney Kenneth Marcus, represented the plaintiffs until February 2018 – when he was appointed as the Trump administration’s top civil rights enforcer at the US Department of Education.
“The purpose of lawsuits like these are really to harass and intimidate activists who support rights anywhere, but freedom and justice in Palestine in particular,” Astha Sharma Pokharel, staff lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, told The Electronic Intifada.
Along with the anti-SLAPP laws that are designed to deter these kinds of attacks, the court’s dismissal “sends a message to Palestinian rights advocates that they are supported and that the law is on their side,” Sharma Pokharel added.
‘A Losing Strategy’
The Center for Constitutional Rights represented Steven Salaita, one of the defendants targeted by this lawsuit.
In 2014, Salaita was fired by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for social media comments criticizing Israel’s assault on Gaza that year.
Salaita then found himself targeted by the lawsuit against the American Studies Association.
He told The Electronic Intifada this week that he was relieved that the DC court dismissed the lawsuit against the American Studies Association.
“It was something hanging over my head and I dislike being obliged to deal with people who deny my humanity,” Salaita said.
“I don’t know what message [Israel lawfare groups] will hear – probably nothing – but it should send them the message that it’s a losing strategy,” he said.
“More importantly, it should send them the message that even if their nonsense were to be effective according to judicial bodies in the United States, it still won’t stop anybody from agitating against the Israeli state.”
Boycotts, he added, are “designed to bypass and subvert state institutions.”
