Writing in the New Yorker, Henrik Hertzberg noted that “Within hours of the [Iraq] war’s beginning, the Cuban government began systematically arresting its nonviolent opponents […] There’s a war on, and Fidel Castro knows it. Absent Iraq, what the Commandante is doing would be front-page news throughout Europe and the Americas; most likely he would not be doing it at all. […] In Zimbabwe last week, hundreds of opponents of the Robert Mugabe regime were arrested or beaten. There is similar news from Belarus, but it is little seen or heard. The fog of war is thick, and it covers the globe.” And what abut Venezuela?

April 21, 2003 | home

COMMENT COLLATERAL DAMAGE Issue of 2003-04-07 Posted 2003-03-31

One of the characteristic horrors of what Raymond Aron called the century of total war was the expansion of the battlefield to encompass whole societies. In many of the twentieth century’s conflicts, from the Philippines to Algeria to Vietnam and beyond, the distinction between soldiers and civilians offered the latter scant protection. In the bloodiest of all, the Second World War, both sides adopted a strategy of deliberately killing civilians and destroying cities—usually by means of aerial bombing, and always with the aim of breaking an enemy nation’s will, or, failing that, its physical ability, to continue. The “good war,” in this sense, was bad in the extreme. The damage inflicted upon London and Dresden, Rotterdam and Tokyo, Leningrad and Hiroshima was anything but collateral. It was the whole point.

Whatever else can be said about the war against the Iraqi dictatorship that began on March 19th, it cannot be said that the Anglo-American invaders have pursued anything remotely resembling a policy of killing civilians deliberately. And, so far, they have gone to great tactical and technological lengths to avoid doing it inadvertently, too. Collateral damage is one of those antiseptic-sounding euphemisms that are sometimes more chilling than plain language, so hard do they labor to conceal their human meaning. It would be indecent to belittle the agony that has already been inflicted; you have only to imagine yourself, for example, as the parent or child of one of the dozens of people who were blown apart or maimed last Wednesday, and again last Friday, when stray bombs plowed into Baghdad marketplaces. But this kind of “damage” is indeed “collateral,” not only in that there is a serious effort to avoid it but also in that the intended purpose of the bombing of Baghdad, which so far has apparently been aimed only at military and government installations, has been to break not the will of the Iraqi people but the connections between them and their tyrannical rulers. Indiscriminate bombing would actually strengthen those connections, as we know from the experience of the Second World War and Vietnam. What we do not yet know is whether a different intention, backed by technologies of precision, will produce a different political result. And we do not yet know whether even the intention can survive the transition—which suddenly seems more likely than not—from a quick war of shock and awe to a grinding, protracted struggle, hand to hand and house to house.

The war in Iraq is a new kind of total war. The immense anxiety it is provoking throughout the Western world, perhaps most keenly in the United States, is more than a matter of compassion for the sufferings of people far away. The dread is a kind that hits closer to home. It is bound up with a set of fears that, in the runup to the war, had been invoked in different ways by both supporters and opponents of the impending conflict. One such fear is that “weapons of mass destruction,” especially portable ones, will find their way into the hands of undeterrable terrorists. Another is that what began as a measured campaign against terrorist bands and the handful of rogue states that may or may not try fitfully to use them for their own purposes will morph into a globe-spanning, escalating struggle between the Islamic world and the United States. The Bush Administration maintains that in the end this war will lessen both of these dangers; so, more conditionally, does the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair. Many others—in good faith, here and abroad—fear that in the end this war will do just the opposite.

The clash of arms is sharply limited in space, in time, and in the number of actual participants; but it is unlimited in its psychic presence in the lives of virtually every sentient person in the developed and half-developed world. The satellites that orbit the earth and the hundreds of millions of television sets that dot it insure that this is so. The fighting may not be total, but the audience is total; and in this sense the war is total. It is a world war. The war as it is seen here is not quite the same as it is seen elsewhere—elsewhere the screen shows more corpses and fewer retired generals with maps and pointers—but everywhere the war fills the field of vision. And this, too, brings its own kind of collateral damage.

One small example: Within hours of the war’s beginning, the Cuban government began systematically arresting its nonviolent opponents and confiscating their papers, typewriters, and other records. Although the handful of leaders whose names are best known abroad have (for that reason) been left alone, those who have been seized make up the bulk of the active civic opposition, which, on account of the option of exile, is as small as it is courageous. Seventy-seven men and one woman were behind bars as of the end of last week, including the poet Raúl Rivero, once the Moscow bureau chief of Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency, now an independent journalist; Oscar Espinosa Chepe, an economist and ex-foreign-service officer; and Marcelo López Bañobre, a former tugboat captain, now spokesman for the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation. The predicament of these people, who are guilty only of bearing witness to facts the regime wants to suppress, is enviable compared with that of those who are suffering and dying in Iraq today, and also of those who have suffered and died there through the decades of Saddam’s rule. There’s a war on, and Fidel Castro knows it. Absent Iraq, what the Commandante is doing would be front-page news throughout Europe and the Americas; most likely he would not be doing it at all. “Human rights in Cuba can therefore be viewed as one of the first cases of collateral damage in the second Gulf war,” Robert Ménard, secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders, said on March 21st. “Human rights in other countries could also soon suffer the same fate.” Mr. Ménard is French; even so, he was soon proved right. In Zimbabwe last week, hundreds of opponents of the Robert Mugabe regime were arrested or beaten. There is similar news from Belarus, but it is little seen or heard. The fog of war is thick, and it covers the globe. — Hendrik Hertzberg

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

Primero Justicia (PJ) deputy Julio Borges says the "We are all responsible for each other" program has collected 83.237 tonnes of foodstuffs worth 91 million bolivares. 

"It's a joint program with the Catholic Church, non-government organizations (NGOs) and private individuals ... the collaboration of 89,000 persons raised the funds and 300 nationwide institutions will be the beneficiaries, handing out food to the families most in need in exchange for community service." 

Roman Catholic Church organizations, Caritas (development), Fe y Alegria (schools) and local NGOs have made a commitment to hand out food baskets to people who join in local work programs. 

Borges hits out at the government's policy of importing, distributing and marketing food already processed, eliminating the middleman, harming national industry and provoking more unemployment. 

"The State has dedicated $836 million to food imports, which will only cover 20% of the demand ... precooked maize powder is being smuggled out into Colombia at black market dollar prices because the government has imposed price controls."

Our editorial statement reads: VHeadline.com Venezuela is a wholly independent e-publication promoting democracy in its fullest expression and the inalienable  right of all Venezuelans to self-determination and the pursuit of sovereign independence without interference. We seek to shed light on nefarious practices and the corruption which for decades has strangled this South American nation's development and progress. Our declared editorial bias is pro-democracy and pro-Venezuela ... which some may wrongly interpret as anti-American. --  Roy S. Carson, Editor/Publisher  Editor@VHeadline.com

Downing Street strongly criticised the BBC yesterday after a radio report claimed that looters had left Iraqis more frightened than Saddam Hussein's regime. After weeks of private sniping at the corporation's war coverage, Tony Blair's aides decided to go public, saying that the BBC appeared quickly to have forgotten the brutalities of the past two decades. They singled out a report by Andrew Gilligan, who, in his dispatch from the capital, said that residents in Baghdad were living in greater fear than they had ever known.

The Prime Minister's spokesman said: "To lurch, as someone people appear to have done, into the idea that the situation in Baghdad is worse than before the coalition arrived is to try to rewrite history of one of the brutal regimes we have had in the 20th century. Try telling that to relatives of those people who were fed head first into shredders. Try telling that to the residents of Baghdad who saw someone beaten to death with their tongue cut out. I don't think even the Iraqi Information Minister would have justified that."

In the report on looting, broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Gilligan said: "People here may be free, but they are passing their first few days of freedom in more fear than they have ever known before, actually. I mean the old fear was, you know, habitual, low-level. This is a much greater fear, that their property is going to be invaded, their daughters will be raped and they will be killed." The BBC said: " Andrew has been in Baghdad since before the war started and has witnessed events there at firsthand. On Friday's Today programme he was drawing attention to the heightened fears of immediate violence that he now detects among the people of Baghdad he has been speaking to. Andrew reported the lawlessness that has developed on the streets of the city, including the beating to death of a young boy. Similar reports have been carried out by many other news organisations."

Frustration at BBC war reporting has been growing in Downing Street. Reporters had failed to reflect that, before the fall of Baghdad this week, most of their contact was with supporters of the regime and as a result they overestimated the resistance that coalition forces would face, advisers said.

The Business Journal-South Florida Stephen Van Drake  

A former employee of Miami-based Banco Industrial de Venezuela (BIV Miami) can sue the bank for more than $1 million in legal fees and costs, the 3rd District Court of Appeal ruled April 9.

The three-judge panel's unanimous decision reversed Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Bernard S. Shapiro's dismissal of Esperanza de Saad's reimbursement suit after being found not guilty of 10 money laundering charges and one conspiracy charge. De Saad was arrested while working for BIV Miami, where she had a written employment contract.

Florida law allows employees, who successfully defend themselves in such criminal actions, to seek reimbursement for "actual and reasonable" legal defense costs.

Since BIV Miami was a foreign corporation, the bank alleged Florida law did not apply.

The 3rd DCA flatly rejected that argument, stating any foreign corporation registered and authorized to do business in Florida shall be treated the same as any other corporation.

The 3rd DCA reinstated de Saad's suit and allowed her lawyer, Joseph David Wentworth Beeler of Miami's Ferrell Schultz, to intervene as a co-plaintiff in the suit, since de Saad assigned her reimbursement claim to him.

Beeler claims more than $1 million in legal fees and expenses, public records show.

By Lisa J. Adams, Boston.com-Associated Press, 4/14/2003 18:09

MEXICO CITY (AP) Mexican officials promised Monday to investigate a report that the personal data of Mexican voters and drivers was being sold to the U.S. government, without Mexicans' knowledge or permission.

Nicaragua's president also called for an investigation of the sale of citizens' identity files to a suburban Atlanta company, ChoicePoint Inc., which provides it to U.S. government agencies as reported by The Associated Press. The story made headlines in the region on Sunday.

''This is a particularly grave action, to sell confidential information and what's even more grave is that it has been sold to a foreign government,'' said Rep. Ricardo Moreno Bastida, a Mexican congressional liaison to the Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE, which oversees voter records.

Alberto Alonso, executive director of the IFE's Federal Voter Registry, said that if the report proves true the agency would ask the attorney general to investigate.

The AP had reported that the driving records of 6 million Mexico City residents and the country's entire voter registry 65 million people were sold to U.S. government agencies, allowing officials to track Mexicans entering and living in the United States.

The Nicaraguan president, Enrique Bolanos, said he ordered the Interior Ministry to investigate ''if a crime is being committed, and if so, to stop it.'' He said anyone found to have sold the data could be subject to severe penalties.

The Nicaraguan and Mexican databases were just a portion of digital dossiers that ChoicePoint told the AP it has collected on hundreds of millions of residents of 10 Latin American countries and sold to the U.S. government in the past 18 months.

ChoicePoint maintains it bought the data legally, under contracts with subcontractors who certified they followed privacy laws. The company will cooperate with any investigations by Mexico or other Latin governments, said James Lee, ChoicePoint's chief marketing officer.

The company also buys identity files from subcontractors in Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. It also sells some data from Brazil and Argentina. It refuses to name the sellers or say where those parties obtained the data.

U.S. officials say the data from Mexico and elsewhere could help law enforcers and the travel industry identify potential terrorists, or simply unmask fake identity documents. Immigrant advocates in the United States have said the files could make entering the United States more difficult for Latin Americans.

In Mexico, a similar accusation that private voter information was being sold to foreign governments arose in 1998, but an investigation was inconclusive, Alonso of the voter registry said.

Both federal and Mexico City laws prohibit public distribution of personal data contained on voter rolls and driver registration lists, noted Rep. Ranulfo Marquez, a congressional liaison to the IFE.

Marquez called for an investigation and a formal diplomatic protest with the United States. He said authorities of all of the Latin American countries involved should launch an international investigations.

Marquez said he suspected the United States leaked the information as ''part of a diplomatic strategy'' to pressure Mexico at a time when relations have been strained by Mexico's refusal to back the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, he said.

Moreno noted that later this week, Mexico will be watched when it votes on an annual U.N. resolution censuring the government of Cuban President Fidel Castro for its oppression of political movements.

In past years, Mexico, a longtime ally of Cuba, has abstained from the vote. But last year, the pro-U.S. administration of President Vicente Fox supported the resolution.

''This information (on personal data) has been made public precisely at a time when relations are difficult and when the vote on Cuba is approaching,'' Moreno said.

AP Technology Writer Jim Krane in New York contributed to this report.