Features

BURMA: OPEN FOR BUSINESS OF GENOCIDE

by Burkely Hermann, World War 4 Report

"It's not ethnic cleansing. The world needs to understand that the fear is not just on the side of the Muslims, but on the side of the Buddhists as well."

No high-ranking US State Department official spoke these words. It was Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, in an interview with BBC, dismissing credible claims of the genocide of Burma's Muslim Rohingya people, put forward by Genocide Watch, Foreign Policy in Focus, UN Dispatch, Der Spiegel writer Jürgen Kremb, the Kassandra Project, Ramzy Baroud of the Pakistani publication The Nation, and many others. Suu Kyi continued, saying that she condemns "any movement that is based on hatred and extremism," that "the reaction of Buddhists is also based on fear," that the government should deal with these extremists so it isn't her responsibility, and finally that "Burma now needs real change…a democratic society." These comments are deeply disturbing coming from someone given the Nobel prize in 1991 for "her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights." Some have even asked if she should be stripped of her Peace Prize for statements such as this one.

The struggle of the two stateless peoples in Burma—the Rohingya and Shan—and broader geopolitical issues such as the race for dirty energy tie into one central question: is Burma really open for the business of exploitation and genocide?

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GLOBAL WARMING AND THE END OF GROWTH

Earth
by Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero, World War 4 Report

Two landmark scientific reports on climate change have just been published. File them under "H" for "horror."

The first one is a digest of the most recent findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was formed in 1988 to advise the United Nations on all scientific information relevant to the implementation of the UN Climate Change Convention. The Panel periodically publishes a summary of the latest climate science for policymakers, which is subject to line-by-line approval by the 195 participating governments.

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INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE RECOVERY IN PERU

An Interview with Miryam Yataco
Miryam Yataco
by Bill Weinberg, Indian Country Today Media Network

Miryam Yataco—educator, language rights advocate and an expert in intercultural bilingual education—has been involved in crafting language recovery efforts for the Indigenous Parliamentary Group in the Peruvian Congress, and as a consultant to Peru's Vice-Ministry of Intercultural Affairs. The daughter of a Quechua-speaking mother originally from the Áncash region and a Spanish-speaking father of Quechua background from Ica region, she grew up in Lima, where her experiences with language discrimination shaped her life's work. She currently divides her time between Peru and New York. ICTMN spoke with her at her apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

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TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP: STRICT SECRECY

by Pete Dolack, Systemic Disorder

The secret Trans-Pacific Partnership is about to become even more secret, perhaps seen as a necessity in light of plans to make it easier for tobacco companies to sue while making health care more difficult to obtain.

Stop TPPThe governments negotiating the draconian TPP still don’t want you to know what’s in it. Many of them issued cheery press releases congratulating themselves for the "progress" they made last week in Brunei. But you will search in vain for any information on what TPP negotiators are up to. They will now end their practice of "consultation"—the August 23 to 30 negotiations (the 19th round) are the last scheduled. Instead, negotiators will begin to meet in unannounced meetings.

In other words, not only is the text of the TPP to remain a secret, the negotiations themselves are to now be secret.

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GLOBAL WARMING'S ARCTIC FEEDBACK LOOP

Supertankers to Ply the Great White Slushie

by Michael I. Niman, ArtVoice

Global warming has triggered an array of environmental feedback loops, such as one starting with the melting of permafrost, which exposes frozen bogs, unleashing ancient methane—a greenhouse gas with 20 times the climate impact of carbon dioxide—whose subsequent increase in the atmosphere accelerates warming, causing more permafrost to melt, exposing more bogs, releasing more methane.
 
While the speed at which some of these environmental loops have kicked in has caught scientists by surprise, predictions of their emergence has long been central to climate science. Less predictable, however, are the insane human behavior feedback loops, where the warming climate triggers a self-destructive pathological greed within corporate culture, ultimately driving humans to find new ways to accelerate climate destruction, and ultimately, the destruction of their own societies.

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GUANTANAMO JUSTICE: NO JUSTICE AT ALL

by Caitlin McNamara, Jurist

This year will mark the twelfth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, yet the five men accused of planning those attacks may not go to trial for years. At Guantánamo, where a military commission has been created to try the accused, the prosecution and defense are still arguing basic procedural issues, like how the defense lawyers can communicate with their clients.

In August, I watched at Guantánamo as days of argument were devoted to preliminary issues such as which witnesses should be compelled to testify, to what types of information parties are entitled, and whether the military commission itself violates the US Constitution. But the proceedings were dominated by constant complaints from defense counsel about a lack of access to important information and attempts to resolve procedural issues.

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SYRIA: IT'S STILL A REVOLUTION, MY FRIENDS

Syrian civil resistance

by Mohja Kahf, Fellowship of Reconciliation

No matter what your position on the potential US strikes on Syria (I'm against), all I ask is, DON'T be a hater who denies the existence of the grassroots youth who began the Syrian revolution out of hope for real freedom and out of their rising expectation for real change, hope that had nearly died in the fifty-year police state that has ruled Syria. Try to remember to have some compassion for a Syrian who might be in the vicinity, before you mouth off in the abstract on the issue; we face news every day of our friends and our relatives being killed and imprisoned. Take time to get to know about a few of them, the Syrian rev youth activists who started it all, in hundreds of towns across Syria, before you speak about Syria based on what happened in Iraq or Lebanon or Country X.

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SOLIDARITY BETRAYED

How Sections of the Left Came to Abandon Syria

by Martin Pravda, International Socialist Network, UK

On the same day as it was announced that the ousted Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak will be released from prison following the massacres of hundreds of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, reports circulated that the Syrian regime under the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad had embarked on a chemical attack on its population. Disturbing footage quickly emerged of hundreds of dead and dying people in the opposition-controlled area of Ghouta just outside of Damascus. Images of some of the bodies showed skin turning yellow with visible white foaming at the mouth, proving the reports to be accurate. As the hours went on it emerged that over a thousand people had died as a result of being gassed. This was immediately broadcast across Western media outlets as international pressure once again built up against the regime.

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