SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
cambodia
As US Approves Landmines for Ukraine, Victims Demand 'Mine-Free World' at Global Summit
"Every landmine planted is a child, a civilian, a woman, who is just waiting for their legs to be blown off, for his life to be taken," said one survivor who lost a leg to a landmine in 2005.
Nov 26, 2024
"Look what anti-personnel landmines will do to your people," read a sign displayed by two of the protesters who gathered in Siem Reap, Cambodia this week to confront delegates at a conference on the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty.
The people holding the sign were among those who took part in the demonstration while using wheelchairs or crutches due to the amputations and serious injuries they have suffered from landmine attacks.
More than 100 people lined a walkway leading to the conference venue on Sunday as the Siem Reap-Angkor Summit on a Mine-Free World opened.
The conference began days after the Biden administration announced a reversal of its own policy and approved a plan to provide anti-personnel landmines to Ukraine—a decision that was condemned by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and other human rights groups.
As Amnesty International USA advocacy direct Ben Linden said last week, the weapons are "inherently indiscriminate" because they cause explosives to scatter across a wide region, putting people at risk long after conflicts end. The majority of landmine victims are children.
In 2023, at least 5,757 people were killed or maimed by landmines, 84% of whom were civilians. Over one-third were children.
Alex Munyambabazi, who lost a leg to a landmine in 2005 in Uganda, was among those who assembled at the landmines summit.
"We don't want to see any more victims like me, we don't want to see any more suffering," he told Agence France-Presse (AFP). "Every landmine planted is a child, a civilian, a woman, who is just waiting for their legs to be blown off, for his life to be taken. I am here to say we don't want any more victims. No excuses, no exceptions."
The U.S. and Russia are not signatories to the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, but Ukraine is. According to U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Ukraine "asked" for anti-personnel landmines.
Tamar Gabelnick, director of ICBL, told AFP that Ukraine's use of U.S.-supplied landmines would signify a "blatant disregard for their obligations under the mine ban treaty."
Ukrainian delegates were present at the Siem Reap conference this week.
In a message delivered to delegates in Siem Reap, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres acknowledged the "important progress" made by the treaty, "with over 55 million anti-personnel devices destroyed across 13,000 square kilometers in over 60 countries, and thousands of people receiving lifesaving awareness education and victim assistance services."
"I call on states parties to meet their obligations and ensure compliance to the convention, while addressing humanitarian and developmental impacts through financial and technical support," he said. " I also encourage all states that have not yet acceded to the convention to join the 164 that have done so."
"A world without anti-personnel mines is not just possible," Guterres said. "It is within reach."
Keep ReadingShow Less
On Kent State Massacre Anniversary, Progressives Decry Repression of Student Protests
"The militarized repression of young people speaking out against a terrible war was shameful then and it's shameful now," said one state lawmaker.
May 04, 2024
As U.S. Republicans push for the deployment of National Guard troops to quell nationwide student demonstrations against the Gaza genocide, progressive lawmakers marked the anniversary of the 1970 Kent State Massacre by condemning police repression of peaceful protesters and reaffirming the power of dissent.
"On the 54th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre, students across our country are being brutalized for standing up to endless war," Congresswoman Cori Bush (D-Mo.) said on social media. "Our country must learn to actually uphold the rights of free speech and assembly upon which it was founded."
Fellow "Squad" member Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said that "54 years ago, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed students at Kent State."
"Students have a right to speak out, organize, and protest systemic wrongs," she added. "We can't silence those expressing dissent, no matter how uncomfortable their protests may be to those in power."
On May 4, 1970, 28 Ohio National Guard troops fired 67 live rounds into a crowd of unarmed Kent State students rallying against the expansion of the U.S.-led war in Vietnam into Cambodia. They murdered students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and William Knox Schroeder—all aged 19 or 20. Nine other students were wounded, including one who was permanently paralyzed.
"The militarized repression of young people speaking out against a terrible war was shameful then and it's shameful now," New York state Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher (D-50) said on Saturday.
Protests against Israel's assault on Gaza—which according to Palestinian and international officials has killed, maimed, or left missing more than 123,000 Gazans—have spread to dozens of campuses across the U.S. and around the world. Police have been called in to break up protest encampments at numerous schools. Hundreds of students, faculty, and journalists have been arrested, sometimes violently.
At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), police stood by this week as a pro-Israel mob attacked a campus protest encampment before officers arrested peaceful protesters and supporters.
As law enforcement officials have tried to justify the crackdown by claiming "outside agitators" are behind the protests, some observers noted historical parallels.
"Watching what is happening at UCLA," Virginia state Sen. Mamie Locke (D-2) said on social media. "Old enough to remember Kent State, Jackson State, South Carolina State, and the dog whistles of 'law and order,' 'outside agitators.' So reminiscent of 1968."
On February 8, 1968, police shot 31 students—most of them in the back—at a protest against Jim Crow segregation at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, murdering three young Black men: Samuel Hammond Jr., Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith.
Eleven days after Kent State, police opened fire on a crowd of Black students protesting the bombing of Cambodia at Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi, killing Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green and injuring 12 others.
"Our institutions must learn from these past mistakes to not use militarized responses against unarmed, peaceful student protesters by calling in the National Guard, bringing in state troopers, or deploying police in riot gear," Laurel Krause, the sister of slain Kent State protester Allison Krause, said in a statement marking the ignominious anniversary.
"We must not repeat the horrors of Kent State 54 years later," she added.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Real Harvard Scandal: A Henry A. Kissinger Professorship of Statecraft and World Order
Beyond the war crimes that impacted untold millions, perhaps Kissinger’s most abiding legacy was this: the failure of accountability.
Feb 06, 2024
As conservative pundits cry crocodile tears over the alleged decline of excellence and integrity at Harvard, symbolized by former University President Claudine Gay, there’s a more significant scandal worth addressing. Recently announced by the University is the Henry A. Kissinger Professorship of Statecraft and World Order.
As specified in the job description, a successful candidate “will be a distinguished analyst of diplomacy, strategy and statecraft,” and have an “excellent record of academic achievement and of contributing to public policy debate on how to build a stable international order.” The presumption is that the late Henry Kissinger exemplified these virtues.
Over the past five decades, the evidence has steadily accumulated that Kissinger was a secretive, fiercely competitive, habitually dishonest, ruthless promoter of American dominance in the world, irrespective of the cost to tens of millions of people. His policy recommendations regarding Chile, Argentina, East Timor, Pakistan, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were as destabilizing, as they were cruel. Some of these human rights calamities must surely be known by the authorities at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Yet at Harvard—as for numerous U.S. institutions and mainstream media—Kissinger’s crimes and failed policies were of no consequence. Certainly not a reason to preclude a named chair, an honored spot-on TV news, a special column for the Washington Post, or invitations to the White House and State Department.
No matter how much harm you cause, or how unwise your recommended policies, if you inhabit a certain stratum in the American hierarchy—and have made yourself a celebrity—you can get away with it.
Henry Kissinger played an instrumental role in a surprisingly long list of international tragedies. However, it is worth remembering that in none of these cases, did he act alone. Most of his recommendations were offered in tandem with Presidents Nixon and Ford, and were for the most part in line, with the preferences of people in the “national security” bureaucracies, notably the CIA and military.
Most unusual was Kissinger’s public face during the time he held public office and afterward. In the early Nixon presidency, he lost no opportunity to be in front of a camera, and after the Nixon White House became shadowed by Watergate, Kissinger’s media omnipresence was an administration asset.
In the decades that followed, Kissinger remained prominent, writing thousands of pages of self-justification, offering theories of international relations, and often dispensing unwise advice—notably his vocal support for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The Vietnam War was of course the “original sin.” Although Kissinger readily accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to negotiate the 1973 Paris Peace agreement, he knew it to be fraudulent: once all U.S. military forces departed Vietnam, the fighting would resume, with Hanoi the likely victor.
So long as government records remained classified, it was possible to imagine that Kissinger was the author of “Vietnamization”—Nixon’s policy of removing large increments of U.S. troops, while handing over greater responsibility for the fighting to the South Vietnamese. Yet ironically, this was the one Nixon policy, which Kissinger opposed. His disdain for the South Vietnamese government and its army (ARVN) was ongoing. And by contrast to Nixon, and some other administration colleagues he was undeterred by the sacrifice of American soldiers. His advice was habitually in the service of escalation when it came to Cambodia, Laos, the bombing of North Vietnamese cities, and the more aggressive use of U.S. air power in the South.
This blood-stained history returns us to Harvard’s morally obtuse decision to create a Chair in his honor. Indeed, this perhaps is Kissinger’s most abiding legacy: the failure of accountability. No matter how much harm you cause, or how unwise your recommended policies, if you inhabit a certain stratum in the American hierarchy—and have made yourself a celebrity—you can get away with it.
This personal story exemplifies the more far-reaching phenomenon: the failure of the United States to ever take responsibility for the human suffering it has caused in other nations, or to affect the institutional changes which might prevent this. Here we are once again: giving billions of dollars in weapons to Israel, as its military massacres thousands of defenseless Palestinian women and children. Many young Americans find this incomprehensible.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular