En Camino

An En Camino Media Alert

Dan Freeman-Maloy

January 1, 2004

In mid-October of this year, Canadian resident and citizen Jamal Akkal traveled to the Gaza Strip, Palestine, where he had grown up. Akkal, 23 years old and until recently a student at the University of Windsor, was going to meet up with his fiancée in the community of Nusseirat, where he himself had been born. The trip was only supposed to last a couple of weeks.

Akkal entered the Gaza Strip from Egypt by the border crossing at Rafah, a refugee camp that houses thousands of Palestinians. Just days before his arrival, the Israeli military had made one of its periodic incursions into Rafah - described promptly by Amnesty International as "a war crime" - destroying 170 houses that had sheltered a total of more than 2000 people, leaving 53 Palestinians wounded, and killing 8, including 3 children. Traveling northward, Akkal soon reached his fiancée's home in Nusseirat. Early into his visit there, an Israeli assassination attempt missed its targets in that community, wounding 49 bystanders (including 11 children) and killing 8 (including a child and an on-duty doctor). So life progressed in occupied Gaza. And as the month of October came to a close, Akkal began his planned trip back to Windsor.

[Note: This letter was published in December of 2003 and received some publicity in the Colombian media. Several of the indigenous communities that signed this letter were then besieged by the military and paramilitaries in what can only be interpreted as collective punishment for their insistence on autonomy.]

Popayán, December 15, 2003

Mr. Alvaro Uribe Vélez

President of Colombia

Mr. President

In 1985 our traditional authorities in Tierradentro issued the Resolution of Vitoncó, a document which showed the public, for the first time in Colombia, a social position demanding from the armed actors respect for our legitimate ancestral authorities and our territorial autonomy. Equally important has been our organization's contribution through peace initiatives in the 1980s that led to the Constitution of 1991, the first national accord which recognized the ethnic diversity of the Colombian nation, setting up clear guidelines for the conduct of the state with respect to our communities.

An En Camino Media Alert

Konstantin Kilibarda

November 1, 2003

In a recent edition of Spain's Rebelión magazine, Latin American novelist Eduardo Galeano recalls a popular Bolivian story about how, in the year 1870, the country's dictator Mariano Melgarejo insulted a British diplomat. Upon learning of the slight, Queen Victoria is said to have pointed at the small Andean nation on a map and proclaimed that, "Bolivia doesn't exist!" It would seem that over a century later, Her Majesty's proclamation still resonates with the editor's of the Globe and Mail when it comes to covering events in the small country.

An En Camino Media Alert

September 25, 2003

On August 14th, nineteen men were arrested in police raids under the claim that they posed a threat to national security and "might, in fact, perhaps be a sleeper cell for al-Qaeda according to a Canadian immigration official". This number increased to twenty-one following the arrest of two more men just a few days later. Twenty of the men were from Punjab Province in Pakistan, while one was from India. The men were arrested under the post 9-11 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which allows foreigners to be arrested and detained without evidence or charges, if there is a reasonable suspicion that they might be a threat to national security. This evidence has yet to be produced by immigration officials in the case of the detained men.

An En Camino Media Alert

Dan Freeman-Maloy

September 6, 2003

Having killed more than three thousand civilians, by conservative estimates, the U.S.-led aerial assault on Afghanistan is receding into history; the war is not. Thousands of foreign troops are occupying the devastated country, working to prop up a weak government whose authority scarcely extends beyond the country’s capital, Kabul. Since the central government of Hamid Karzai owes what power and legitimacy it has to its support from foreign, invading forces, it is hard to perceive it as anything other than the native element in a regime of colonial administration. Given the frequency of attacks against both the government and the foreign troops backing it, it doesn’t seem to be a popular one.

September 6 , 2003

We present some notes collected on critical events during the summer in Central America.

Costa Rica [From the San Jose (Costa Rica) Daily, Nacion]

On July 14, some 15 Costa Rican police agents tried to arrest a group of about 80 campesinos on the Bambuzal estate, owned by Standard Fruit, the US banana company, in Rio Frio, Sarapiqui, Heredia. Just four days earlier, on July 10, authorities had evicted 166 families who had been occupying the Bambuzal estate since December 2001. The July 14 incident happened after water authorities cut off water to a nearby store where the campesinos had set up camp following the eviction. Violence erupted after the police arrived and chased the campesinos back onto the Bambuzal estate…

CONAIE

August 6 , 2003

In the face of the most recent declarations and actions of President Lucio Gutiérrez, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador, CONAIE) proclaims the following:

The government has betrayed the mandate given to it by the Ecuadorian people in the last elections. This mandate envisioned the defense of national sovereignty, of natural resources, the reactivation of the economy with an eye towards equity, and a commitment to peace. Instead, during these last six months, the government of Lucio Gutiérrez has maintained a position contrary to the national interest by signing a Letter of Intent with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in which he pledged:

Stephen James-Kerr

August 01, 2003

For as long as I can remember, Rosie DiManno has single-handedly defended an Israeli settlement on page A2 of the Toronto Star. (www.thestar.com ) Each Monday, Wednesday and Friday Rosie issues drive-by reports in which she fires her literary M16 at all the usual suspects; anyone who questions the received opinion of the rich, or physically resists their domination. Now that the Bush Cartel is waging global war, DiManno is locked and loaded.

“Make righteous war, not la-la peace”, she demands on June 4th, calling for “snarly, vigorous intervention” in Congo with troops who are allowed to “Kill the enemy. No bargaining, no discussion, no turning heel and fleeing. Because what is the point of peacekeepers when there is no peace to keep?” One wonders which expendable group of Congolese teenagers Rosie considers ‘the enemy,’ but questions spoil all the self-righteous fun in la-la land.

Marie Campbell

Mideast Media Analysis Group of the Victoria Peace Coalition

August 01, 2003

Summarized here is an analysis of how the Times Colonist, Victoria, British Columbia's daily newspaper covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how this coverage helps readers interpret what is happening. The Times Colonist is one of many Canadian papers owned by CanWest Global Communications Corp. The paper's Editor-in-Chief is Andrew Phillips, whose comments about his own editorial practices, including answers to my own questions in a public seminar, helped me develop the paper's analytic framework. He acknowledged the paper's policy of being pro-Israel. He also declared the Times Colonist to be a middle-of-the-road paper, and that given his concerns about declining circulation, his goal is to publish a paper that matches the preferences of the largest number of potential Victoria readers. My analytic purpose was to determine, through careful textual analysis, if and how these informally stated policies play out in the paper's news coverage. The data analysed include all the stories related to the mid-east conflict published in the Times Colonist between January 29 (just after the re-election of Ariel Sharon) and March 28, 2003 (by which time the US/UK invasion of Iraq had obliterated attention to the Israeli-Palestinian situation). Mr. Phillips subscribes to the view that readers can and do "make anything they like" of the paper's news stories and pictures. That has not been my impression and, indeed, the argument that I make here contradicts it. But, not satisfied to base a judgement of "bias" on the fact of the paper's Jewish ownership, I treated the paper's accounts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the fixed side of a "text-reader conversation" that I and other readers would enter. We would, of course, bring our own views and knowledge to the reading. But, as a text produced in a specific institution, the paper influences in ways that I wanted to discover and describe.

An En Camino Media Alert

August 01, 2003

In the month of July, the Canadian media discovered Africa, as did much of the rest of the Western world's mainstream media. There were 28 articles on Africa over the first 18 days of July. Some of these articles tackled long-standing issues: AIDS in southern Africa, the civil war in the Congo, the civil war in Liberia, political conflict in Zimbabwe. Other aspects were not dealt with: privatizations and evictions in South Africa, IMF/World Bank restructuring throughout Africa over a period of decades that has devastated the public health infrastructure and aggravated every public health crisis, including AIDS, to a devastating degree.