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sexta-feira, 15 de fevereiro de 2019

Elliott Abrams: tudo em nome da democracia, mesmo massacre

The massacre Trump’s envoy to Venezuela wants us to forget


“I fail to understand,” the congresswoman said at a hearing Wednesday, “why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful.”
The politician in question was freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Her interlocutor was Elliott Abrams, the veteran national security official recently installed by the Trump administration as Washington’s special envoy to Venezuela. Omar, who weathered a storm of controversy this week over her tweets about the financial influence of a pro-Israel lobby group, was now heaping scrutiny on the diplomat’s checkered career.
Abrams, Omar reminded the hearing, had pleaded guilty in 1991 to two counts of withholding information from Congress — essentially lying over the Iran-contra affair in the late 1980s while serving as an official in the Reagan administration. In 1992, though, he was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush and later joined the younger Bush’s National Security Council. Out of office, he has remained a fixture in Washington’s foreign policy establishment as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
But Omar was not so impressed. She pushed him on an earlier chapter of his career, when, as a prominent State Department official in the Reagan administration, Abrams led the American coverup of a hideous massacre in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote. In December 1981, the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army, locked in a struggle with leftist guerrillas, slaughtered at least 800 civilians in the town as part of its brutal counterinsurgency. On Wednesday, Abrams balked at Omar’s line of questioning, deeming it “ridiculous.”
“The back-and-forth refocused a spotlight on controversies that have trailed Abrams, 71, during a half-century in public life,” wrote The Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker. “And it revealed the moral trade-offs involved in the hawkish role that he has advanced for the United States — a global posture that Trump once purported to reject but has increasingly embraced, including by maintaining that military intervention in Venezuela is ‘an option.’ ”
As footage of the exchange went viral on social media, Beltway insiders and foreign policy veterans rallied in defense of Abrams, arguing that a dark chapter nearly four decades ago need not negate a lifetime of public service. “Elliott Abrams is a devoted public servant who has contributed much of his professional life to our country,” tweeted Nicholas Burns, a former senior State Department official. “It’s time to build bridges in America and not tear people down.”
Francisco Toro, a dissident Venezuelan writer, wheeled on Omar for focusing on the death squads of a long-defunct regime, rather than the current abuses of the one in Caracas. “Showcasing astonishing insensitivity to the victims of a human rights catastrophe that is still ongoing today, she disgraced her perch in Congress and scored an invaluable propaganda victory to the regime sponsoring the exact type of human rights abuses she imagines herself to be opposing,” Toro wrote for The Post’s Global Opinions.
Many others, though, commended Omar for raising the ghosts of the past. Abrams’s lengthy career, argued Esquire’s Charles Pierce, seemed proof that in Washington “there is no limit to the number of peasants on your butcher’s bill that would keep you from government work."
“If you are going to appoint someone who has a history of lying to Congress about human rights abuses to be the special envoy for a brewing humanitarian crisis," noted Dan Drezner in PostEverything, “it is entirely fair to question him about prior acts of bad faith.”
The massacre at El Mozote occurred just before Abrams assumed his post as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs in the Reagan administration. News of the brutal killings and rapes that took place there and in surrounding hamlets — considered some of the worst atrocities in modern Latin American history — reached the United States via the front pages of the New York Times and The Washington Post.
The Post’s Alma Guillermoprieto, who reached El Mozote in January 1982, found “dozens of decomposing bodies,” left to molder for a month in the ruins of the flattened village and adjacent fields. In a central square, she entered a church where many of the village’s men had been taken and executed. “The walls of the smaller sacristy beside it also appeared to have had its adobe walls pushed in,” she wrote. “Inside, the stench was overpowering, and countless bits of bones — skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column — poked out of the rubble.”
Later reports uncovered other acts of barbarism. “We could hear the women being raped on the hills,” one witness told journalist Mark Danner, author of “The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War.” “And then, you know, the soldiers would pass by, coming from there, and they’d talk about it. You know, they were talking and joking, saying how much they liked the 12-year-olds.”
Men were beheaded with machetes, women raped and left to die, children had their skulls crushed in under the boots of soldiers.
At the time, Abrams worked to suppress news of the massacre, dismissing the news reports as not “credible” and enabling the propaganda of the guerrillas. “He was the point of the spear of the Reagan administration in denying a massacre had taken place at El Mozote,” Danner said in an interview with Today’s WorldView. He added that, for Abrams, human rights violations like this “were really nothing” compared with the grave danger perceived by the Reagan administration of left-wing, pro-Soviet victory in Central America.
This Cold War thinking would underlie Abrams’s actions and decision-making in Latin America through the 1980s. He called for the lifting of an arms embargo on Guatemala, supporting the regime of Efrain Rios Montt, who in 2013 was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity against the country’s indigenous Mayan population. In El Salvador, the full details of the massacre at El Mozote would only start to emerge a decade later, in part through the painstaking excavations of forensic scientists. It was just one episode in a hideous decade of violence, carried out largely by the Salvadoran army and right-wing death squads supported by the United States.
“It was a bloody, brutal, and dirty war,” wrote Raymond Bronner, who reported on the massacre for the New York Times, in a recent piece for the Atlantic. “More than 75,000 Salvadorans were killed in the fighting, most of them victims of the military and its death squads. Peasants were shot en masse, often while trying to flee. Student and union leaders had their thumbs tied behind their backs before being shot in the head, their bodies left on roadsides as a warning to others.”
The traumas of that era in Central America, Bronner argued, prefigured the mass exodus of asylum seekers that President Trump now insists amounts to an emergency on the U.S. southern border.
In an email to The Post’s Stanley-Becker, Abrams defended his record and angrily rejected Omar’s interrogation. “It’s a remarkable record of support for Latin democracy, of which Rep. Omar is obviously unaware and in which she is uninterested,” he said. “That was clear from her conduct, which constituted attacking rather than questioning a witness.”
But Danner pointed to the power of amnesia in Washington. "If you stay in D.C. long enough, no matter how dirty your bedsheets, they are going to be bleached clean simply by the corrosive force of forgetfulness,“ he said. That is, unless a congresswoman decides to remind everyone.
“Omar performed a public service,” Danner said.

sexta-feira, 30 de janeiro de 2015

Os grandes crimes da humanidade: companheiros turcos fazem genocidio contra os armenios

Com a desculpa dos "companheiros", aqui vai uma recomendação de livro sobre o primeiro genocídio do século 20 (bem, os companheiros turcos já tinham massacrado um bocado de gregos no istmo que une, ou separa, os dois países, mas não na escala praticada contra os armênios 3 anos depois), aquele cometido pelo Estado e pelo exército turcos contra dezenas de milhares, centenas de milhares de inocentes armênios, no curso da Grande Guerra.
A revista francesa L' Histoire, deste mês de janeiro, também traz um dossiê especial sobre esse genocídio.
O jornal Le Monde também publicou um dossiê a respeito.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: 
http://carnegieendowment.org/2015/01/27/great-catastrophe-armenians-and-turks-in-shadow-of-genocide/i0ph?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRolv6vMZKXonjHpfsX66%2B0qXqOg38431UFwdcjKPmjr1YAFRcd0aPyQAgobGp5I5FEIQ7XYTLB2t60MWA%3D%3D

L'Histoire:

Arméniens : le premier génocide du XXᵉ siècle

Il y a cent ans le gouvernement des Jeunes-Turcs commettait le premier génocide du XXe siècle décimant la communauté arménienne, pourtant bien intégrée à l’Empire ottoman. On comprend mieux aujourd’hui l’idéologie qui a motivé les responsables et la mécanique implacable du massacre.
Par Boris Adjemian, Taner Akçam, Annette Becker, Hamit Bozarslan, Pierre Chuvin, Vincent Duclert, François Georgeon, Raymond Kévorkian, Claire Mouradian, Mikaël Nichanian et Yves Ternon.http://www.histoire.presse.fr/mensuel/408


sexta-feira, 23 de maio de 2014

China: 25 anos do massacre da Praca da Paz Celestial, um depoimento ex-post - Murong Xuecun




Photo
CreditSam Island


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SYDNEY, Australia — On May 6 three of my friends were arrested in Beijing on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” They are Xu Youyu, a scholar and former researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Prof. Hao Jian of the Beijing Film Academy, and Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent human rights attorney.
Three days earlier my three friends and a dozen other people had gathered at Hao Jian’s home to discuss the Tiananmen Square crackdown 25 years ago, when a huge number of students and other protesters took to the streets calling for democracy and an end to dictatorial rule and official corruption. The peaceful protests lasted nearly two months, but in the end the government sent troops and tanks, killing several hundred — possibly several thousand — unarmed citizens. Hao Jian’s cousin was among the dead.
I wanted to attend the gathering, but I had to travel to Australia, where I am a writer in residence at Sydney University. One of those present read out an essay I wrote about the Tiananmen crackdown. Hard as it may seem to believe — I have a law degree, and I myself can hardly believe it — reciting such an essay at a private gathering can violate China’s laws. By the government’s logic, I too have committed the crime of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
I am going to turn myself in.
For me, the Tiananmen crackdown was the beginning of a gradual awakening. I was only 15 in 1989, a middle school student in a remote mountain hamlet in China’s far northeastern province of Jilin. Everything I knew about the events of that year came entirely from China’s state-run television station, CCTV: The demonstrators were counter-revolutionary rioters. The People’s Liberation Army exercised great restraint and did not open fire, whereas some rioters burned soldiers alive. I believed it all. I was even grateful to the government and the army for rescuing the nation.
Gradually, the events of 1989 receded from center stage. Everyone was busy earning university degrees or getting rich, as if nothing had ever happened. Even today, the Tiananmen crackdown remains one of the biggest taboos in modern China. Beijing has been attempting to expunge our collective memory through the worship of a soaring economy. But this most traumatic of memories has never truly faded. It continues to live among the people, despite Beijing’s determined efforts to suppress its history.
Soon after I entered university in 1992, a senior student came to our dormitory, sat down and demanded a cigarette. He then asked if we knew what had happened at the school in 1989. We said we didn’t know. He took a deep drag, then told us solemnly that during the Tiananmen incident students from our school, the China University of Political Science and Law, were the first to take to the streets. They were, he said, the first to coordinate links with protesters from other universities. The first president of the Beijing Students Autonomous Federation was from our school. Our university, he told us, had “19 firsts.”
Since then, I came to understand what really happened in 1989 and its significance to China and the world. The government may have condemned the participants as “criminals,” but we students considered it a glorious moment. We regard it as a great honor to have had even the slightest connection with the democracy movement.
My university’s “19 firsts” may not have been entirely accurate, but they became a legend, passed down from one student body to the next. In 1994, when I was the wise senior who visited the new students’ dormitory, I too drew deeply on my cigarette and solemnly intoned: “During the Tiananmen incident of 1989 this university had 19 firsts ... ”
By then, all traces of blood on Tiananmen Square had been scrubbed clean and the bullet holes cemented over, but in the nooks and crannies of the city the story passed from person to person. Around 2003, a friend bought a documentary about the crackdown in Hong Kong. In no time we all made copies. One day I watched it with some friends in a bar in the southern city of Guangzhou. One scene in particular struck me. A youth lay prone on a broad avenue amid the sound of intermittent gunfire. We thought he was dead, but then he suddenly began crawling in a circle. He did not dare stand up, but he didn’t want to stay where he was, pretending to be dead. Crawling was better than doing nothing. “If I were there,” said a migrant worker from Sichuan Province who was standing behind us, “I’d have carried him to safety.”
Whenever I’m asked about China’s future I recount this anecdote of the migrant worker from Sichuan.
Now, in the age of the Internet, the government cannot possibly control all information. More and more people hold their own commemorations for the Tiananmen victims. Every year on the 4th of June virtual candles are lit. Photos are circulated online. Government censors put in a lot of overtime as they delete any combination of the numbers 6 and 4, as well as any reference to Tiananmen, the “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” Despite censorship, hundreds of thousands of people persist. If they are unable to include “6/4” in a post they try “5/35.” If the censors block a post with the number “1989,” they change it to “the last year of the 1980s” or “the year before 1990.” Can’t mention “tanks”? Then try “tractors.”
Beijing has been in denial for 25 years, and now President Xi Jinping’s administration appears more paranoid than its predecessors. The gathering in Hao Jian’s home was merely a “June 4th commemoration.” A similar gathering was held five years ago during President Hu Jintao’s reign, but no one was arrested.
On the surface the government appears to be stronger than ever, with over 80 million Communist Party members, millions of soldiers, and nearly $4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves — yet it is actually so fragile that its leaders lose sleep when a few scholars meet and talk in a private home.
After my friends were arrested I announced on the Internet that I would turn myself over to the authorities as soon as I return from Australia in July because I too had participated in “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Most of my friends have warned me to lay low for a while, but I have thought it through: If the situation in China continues to deteriorate, I cannot stand idly by. If I too am arrested, perhaps more Chinese people will awaken to the realities of their situation. My arrest will be my contribution to resisting government efforts to erase the nation’s memory.
I have seen China change. I have seen the Internet awaken its people. In 1989 one person was brave enough to stand before a column of tanks rolling through Beijing. If the same thing happens again, I am certain hundreds of ordinary citizens will defy the tanks, and if they come under fire, there will be thousands of other citizens with the courage to face the guns and say, “I will carry them to safety.”
Murong Xuecun, a novelist and blogger, is the author of “Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu” and “Dancing Through Red Dust.” This article was translated by The New York Times from the Chinese.

quinta-feira, 20 de março de 2014

Venezuela: perguntas e duvidas terminologicas...

Como se chama um país no qual pessoas são presas por indivíduos armados, encapuzados, não identificados, sem ordens judiciais de prisão, e que levam os detidos para lugares não reconhecidos, sem quaisquer possibilidades de assistência legal, sem quaisquer garantias?
Como se chama um país no qual prefeitos legitimamente eleitos são presos apenas por pertencer a um partido de oposição ao governo?
Como se chama um país que tolera, estimula, alimenta, financia e protege gangues de mercenários armados, com licença para matar (sem ser James Bond), e que se dedicam a espalhar o terror entre manifestantes pacíficos, ou não armados?
Como se chamam países e dirigentes políticos que assistem a tudo isso absolutamente indiferentes, ou até apoiando quem comete os atos descritos acima?
Como deveríamos chamar todos eles?
Eu sempre tenho dúvidas terminológicas, pois não quero me equivocar nas próximas postagens.
Sugestões para este blog.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

31 morreram em protestos na Venezuela, diz procuradora-geral

Há também 461 feridos e 121 pessoas presas, segundo números do governo

A procuradora-geral da Venezuela, Luisa Ortega, afirmou nesta quinta-feira que 31 pessoas morreram e mais de 400 ficaram feridas desde que começaram os protestos contra o governode Nicolás Maduro, em 12 de fevereiro. Entre os mortos, “25 são civis e seis policiais, militares e funcionários públicos”, disse a procuradora em um programa de rádio.
O número de feridos é de 461 pessoas, divididos entre 318 civis e 143 agentes policiais e militares, enquanto a quantidade de pessoas que permanecem detidas atualmente em conexão com protestos chega a 121, acrescentou Ortega. No total, já foram detidas 1.854 pessoas pelos incidentes ocorridos nos protestos que há um mês se sucedem no país, das quais 1.529 foram liberadas com penas substitutivas de liberdade.
Prefeitos presos – A oposição na Venezuela reagiu com indignação à nova ofensiva do chavismo contra prefeitos opositores, que resultou na prisão de dois políticos nesta quarta. “Isto tem apenas um nome: ditadura. Esse regime que estamos vivendo na Venezuela, onde não se respeitam os direitos de ninguém, simplesmente chegam alguns sujeitos armados e encapuzados e levam uma pessoa sem ordem de captura e depois ninguém fornece explicações”, disse o deputado Juan Guaidó. (Continue lendo o texto)

As vítimas dos protestos na Venezuela


Um dos principais incentivadores da onda de protestos contra Nicolás Maduro, o prefeito de San Cristóbal e dirigente do partido oposicionista Vontade Popular (VP) Daniel Ceballos foi preso na quarta-feira acusado de fomentar uma “rebelião civil”. Segundo membros do VP, Ceballos foi detido por agentes do Serviço Bolivariano de Inteligência Nacional que não apresentaram nenhum mandado de prisão.
Também nesta quarta, o Supremo Tribunal de Justiça da Venezuela julgou a favor da prisão e da destituição de outro prefeito opositor, Enzo Scarano, do município de San Diego. Ele foi condenado a 10 meses e 15 dias de detenção por desrespeitar uma medida cautelar que o obrigava a evitar o bloqueio de ruas durante as manifestações contra Maduro. As prisões se somam a de Leopoldo López, outro importante membro da oposição, que está há um mês em uma prisão militar.

Desde que, em 12 de fevereiro, uma marcha em Caracas terminou em incidentes que deixaram três mortos e danos a instituições públicas, a Venezuela vem sendo palco de manifestações diárias contra o governo, algumas pacíficas e outras com finais violentos. Os manifestantes protestam contra a altíssima inflação, a violência no país e por mais liberdade de imprensa. O governo denuncia que por trás dos protestos há uma tentativa de golpe, enquanto a oposição defende o direito de expressar seu descontentamento pacificamente e acusa a polícia de abusos.

quinta-feira, 6 de junho de 2013

China: 24 anos do massacre de Tian An Men: manifestacao em Hong Kong (claro, onde poderia ser?)

No próximo serão 25 anos, um quarto de século, ainda sem respostas sobre como os tanques do Exército Popular esmagaram algumas centenas de populares, estudantes em sua maioria...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
PS.: Fotos no link seguinte: http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/in-hong-kong-a-rain-soaked-celebration-of-democracy/?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

VIEW FROM ASIA 29 minutes ago Comment
In Hong Kong, a Rain-Soaked Celebration of Democracy
(foto)
Bobby Yip/Reuters
Protesters in Hong Kong yesterday, in front a backdrop showing Beijing’s Tiananmen Square as it was in June 1989.

BEIJING — There aren’t many, if any, places in China where a group of people can shout “down with the Communist Party” in public and not be punished for it. But in Hong Kong, which since 1997 has been part of China but is largely self-governing, they can, and do.
They did it again last night, when tens of thousands of people – including some from mainland China, as my colleagues Gerry Mullany and Chris Buckley reported – gathered in a park in the city’s Causeway Bay district to light candles, listen to speeches and chant slogans in support of democracy in China, on this anniversary of the crushing of the 1989 democracy movement.
Though yesterday’s rally was interrupted by heavy rain, organizers estimated 150,000 people attended; the police put the figure at 54,000 (such large discrepancies in counting have become increasingly common at political rallies in Hong Kong in recent years, perhaps reflecting what many political commentators say is a growing polarization of opinion in the city.)
Here’s what one person who attended wrote on House News, a Hong Kong news Web site:

A screenshot from the Web site of House News, a Hong Kong news site, describing Tuesday’s rally in Victoria Park to commemorate the June 4, 1989 Chinese democracy protests.
As Gerry and Chris reported, participants also shouted slogans calling for free elections in Hong Kong, a widespread demand that Beijing appears to be resisting.
“The protesters pressed a variety of agendas,” they wrote.
“A 17-year-old student named Zheng from Guangdong Province was among several holding a flag of the Republic of China, whose leaders fled to Taiwan as the Communists took over the mainland in 1949,” they reported.
“Wan Yun, 47, a Hong Kong resident formerly from the Chinese province of Hubei, laid out documents about a land dispute that she said had brought her a year in a labor camp.”
Here’s a photograph of a young woman lighting her candle at the event:
(foto)
Jerome Favre/European Pressphoto Agency
Participants light candles during the annual vigil.
And this one below shows the heavy rain as it swept over the large crowd, who sheltered under a colorful mosaic of umbrellas:
(foto)
Kin Cheung/Associated Press
Rain descending on the crowd at Victoria Park.
The rally was held as news reports said that a person long identified in the public eye as bearing guilt for the massacre, the former mayor of Beijing, Chen Xitong, died Sunday in Beijing of cancer.
The parents of Wang Nan, a 19-year-old shot dead that day, said Mr. Chen’s death wouldn’t change anything, the South China Morning Post reported. Mr. Chen, who later was tried and jailed for corruption, was only a small player in the tragedy, said Wang Fandi, a well-known pipa player.
(foto)
A screenshot from the South China Morning Post newspaper with a photograph of Wang Nan, 19, who was shot dead by the military during the assault.
“Wang Fandi, whose 19-year-old son Wang Nan was killed while taking photos on Changan Avenue on June 4, 1989, said that from an historical perspective, Chen had been only a tragic bit player in the crackdown,” the newspaper wrote. It quoted Mr. Wang: “He was just a small potato and a tool manipulated by others.”
“He just said and did what he was instructed to by people in the top echelon,” it quoted Mr. Wang as saying.
In recent years, Mr. Chen had sought to distance himself from the 1989 events, telling the scholar Yao Jianfu, in interviews published in a book, that the crackdown was “a regrettable tragedy,” the Post reported.