The Progressive Response

The Progressive Response (PR) is a weekly service of Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF)--a "Think Tank Without Walls." A joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies, FPIF is an international network of analysts and activists dedicated to "making the U.S. a more responsible global leader and partner by advancing citizen movements and agendas." We encourage responses to the opinions expressed in the PR and may print them in the "Letters and Comments" section. For more information on FPIF and joining our network, please consider visiting the FPIF website at http://www.fpif.org/.

We Count on Your Support!

Editor: Tom Barry (IRC)

Table of Contents

I. Updates and Out-Takes

LIBERAL SHOOT-DOWN POLICY IN LATIN AMERICA
By JoAnn Kawell

HIV/AIDS IN AFRICA: TIME TO STOP THE KILLING FIELDS
By Chinua Akukwe and Melvin Foote, Constituency for Africa

MITCHELL REPORT ON ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN VIOLENCE FLAWED
By Stephen Zunes, FPIF Middle East Editor

II. Outside the U.S.

SOVEREIGNTY TO THE CHINESE PEOPLE

ISRAEL'S JORDAN IS PALESTINE OPTION
By Sam Bahour

III. Letters and Comments

NOLT RESPONDS: CHINA'S MILITARY NOT EXPANDING

I. Updates and Out-Takes

LIBERAL SHOOT-DOWN POLICY IN LATIN AMERICA
By JoAnn Kawell

(Ed. note: This commentary is posted in full at: http://www.fpif.org/commentary/0105shootdown.html.)

When the Peruvian air force shot down a civilian Cessna last week, killing missionary Veronica Bowers and infant daughter Charity, it was the CIA-contracted crew of a U.S. surveillance plane that had tagged the tiny craft as a suspected drug carrier. This so-called "liberal shoot-down policy" would never be tolerated in this country, but it's been part of U.S. policy in Latin America for years. In fact, military forces there, aided by the U.S., have "forced down" over 120 planes suspected of transporting drugs, according to the 1999 congressional testimony of General Charles Wilhelm.

Whether the CIA crew or the Peruvian military were more at fault is still not known. Whatever the full story turns out to be, the Bowers were collateral damage in a quiet, nasty war that continues to rage in Peru and neighboring nations. Below the radar screen of American public awareness, U.S. military, CIA personnel and private military contractors have long had an important, if low-profile, role in this war. While this role is not secret, it remains unknown to the U.S. public.

Not to the people in the fire line, though. In 1988, when I first visited Tingo Maria, the main town in Peru's Huallaga Valley, most of the other guests at the town's best hotel were U.S. pilots and mechanics, civilian employees of a company widely reported to have ties with the CIA. The Huallaga was then partly under the control of leftist guerrillas, and was as well the world's largest grower of coca used to make coca paste, a raw form of cocaine. The U.S. embassy had contracted the men to fly and maintain U.S.-owned helicopters used in the coca eradication program. Many local residents considered the U.S. crews to be part of an invasion force, an impression reinforced when DEA agents accompanied Peruvian forces on what amounted to full scale occupations of valley towns. In these operations hundreds of residents were indiscriminately arrested, all in the name of drug control.

Despite claims that the U.S. presence has contributed to significant "victories," the main result has been a spread of war throughout the region. While the cocaine trade has brought violence and disruption to many remote locales like the one where the Bowers died, U.S.-funded drug control efforts have often harmed rather than helped the people who live there. Thousands of people have been injured, dispossessed or even killed as the result of the drug war. It is only when the victims are U.S. citizens that it makes the news here.

Moreover, private military contractors play a critical role in the war. The U.S. government, unwilling for political reasons to use our own troops, has hired so-called PMCs to do the actual flying, and sometimes shooting. The result is a clandestine war, one in which much of the action is farther from accountability or even acknowledgment.

Yet, it is a war and the U.S. is central to it. President Ronald Reagan had opened the way for actual U.S. military involvement in the drug war in 1986, when he signed a secret directive naming international drug trafficking as a national security threat. By the end of that year, U.S. Army Special Forces advisers were training Bolivian drug police.

Joint U.S./Peruvian surveillance flights began in 1994 as part of an attempt to shut down the so-called "air bridge"-the network of drug trafficker small planes used to ferry coca paste from the Huallaga across the border to cocaine processing sites in Colombia. By 1999, U.S. officials were proclaiming that the air interdiction program, combined with aggressive coca eradication, had virtually shut down coca and paste production in the Huallaga. Indeed it had-but Colombian cocaine makers merely turned to domestic producers for their raw materials.

At the same time, the Colombian conflict over drugs and guerrillas threatens to spread further, into Ecuador and Venezuela. In response to further attempts to shut them down, Colombian cocaine producers have further dispersed their production and distribution networks into ever-more remote parts of the Amazon region-this makes "interdiction" more difficult, no matter how sophisticated the surveillance aircraft, and, in largely roadless areas where small planes are a basic mode of transportation, accidents like last week's are ever more likely.

Whoever is to blame in the Bowers incident, there is no escaping U.S. culpability in a policy that leads to death and destruction and is ultimately ineffective.

(JoAnn Kawell, an expert with Foreign Policy In Focus, has reported on the Andean drug war for National Public Radio, The Progressive, and others. She can be reached at <jakawell@jps.net>.)

Also see:

FPIF Drug War and Colombia Page
http://www.fpif.org/colombia/

Closing the Latin American Air-Bridge: A Disturbing History
By JoAnn Kawell
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/0105airbridge.html

HIV/AIDS IN AFRICA: TIME TO STOP THE KILLING FIELDS
By Chinua Akukwe and Melvin Foote, Constituency for Africa

(Excerpted from a new FPIF policy brief, posted at: http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol6/v6n15hivafrica.html.)

According to the UN Agency for HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), 25.3 million Africans live with the virus or are dying of AIDS. Barring a miracle or a major change in international attention to the scourge, these Africans will die within the next decade.

Despite the horrors of the pandemic, the international response has been limited and only recently have most African governments begun to publicly address the problem. African governments are hobbled by poverty, cultural taboos about sex, and misperceptions about the cause and seriousness of AIDS. They also fear disruption of precious tourism and investment dollars from the West and have failed to warn their citizens about the dangers of AIDS. Western nations, including the U.S., have largely ignored the dangers and international repercussions of widespread infection in Africa. The United States in 2000 spent only $300 million for basic AIDS care and prevention programs in Africa-far short of the $3 billion regarded as necessary to slow down the pandemic.

The HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa is of the gravest magnitude. Every day, 6,700 families lose a loved one to the disease; the construction and sale of coffins is one of the fastest growing occupations in southern Africa. Sixteen African countries have one-tenth or more of their population infected with HIV, and Africa is home to 95% of all mother-to-child transmissions of HIV. In these countries, almost 80% of all deaths of young adults aged 25-45 will be directly linked to AIDS.

In six countries of southern Africa, by the year 2005, AIDS will claim the lives of between 8 and 25% of today's active physicians. Women are affected more by this dreaded disease; in Africa, 12 women have HIV/AIDS for every 10 men. African women account for 85% of all global female infections. In southern Africa, one in four women aged 15-49 live with HIV/AIDS. In some countries, between 10 and 20% of teen-age girls are already infected. Infected girls are more likely than boys to drop out of school, reversing decades of slow but steady progress in female education. The much-vaunted African extended family system is faltering, as the number of orphans living without the care of extended families rises. By the year 2010, the projected number of orphans may exceed 40 million in Africa.

Economic underdevelopment and Africa's impoverished conditions have created a wide-open gateway for HIV infection, tuberculosis (TB), and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 30-50% of all TB patients in Africa are also infected with HIV/AIDS. Africa has the highest rates of STDs in the world. STDs facilitate the spread of HIV infection, especially among women.

Political instability and violent conflicts keep many African governments from focusing on the AIDS crisis. Twenty of the continent's 53 countries are involved in intrastate or interstate conflicts, which lead to having the world's largest regional concentration of refugees. Another important factor in the deepening crisis is the high rate of AIDS within Africa's armed forces-15-20% of the members of the military in some countries have AIDS. Mobility of the African male populations-through military operations, migrant labor such as mine workers, and shifts from rural to urban centers-exacerbates the spread of HIV/AIDS. As the HIV/AIDS pandemic continues, political and social instability will likely intensify as AIDS gobbles up scarce human and economic resources.

(Melvin Foote is President/CEO of the Constituency for Africa (CFA), a Washington, DC advocacy organization. CFA is promoting an AIDS Marshall Plan for Africa. Chinua Akukwe <cakukwe@att.net> is a board member of Constituency for Africa, and Adjunct Professor at George Washington University School of Public.)

Also see:

Citizen Agenda: Essential Medicines
http://www.fpif.org/cgaa/pharma.html

Robert Weissman, Free Trade and Medicines in Americas
http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol6/v6n13meds.html

Robert Weissman, AIDS and Developing Countries: Facilitating Access to Essential Medicines
http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol6/v6n06aids.html

MITCHELL REPORT ON ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN VIOLENCE FLAWED
By Stephen Zunes, FPIF Middle East Editor

The report on the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the commission led by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell is a failed effort--not for what it includes, but for what it does not include. Another problem was the naming of two former U.S. senators, George Mitchell (who headed the panel) and Warren Rudman, both of whom were strong supporters of Israel's occupation policies while in the Senate, where they supported billions of dollars worth of economic and military aid to Israeli occupation forces.

(For the entire commentary, visit http://www.fpif.org/commentary/0105mitchell.html.)

II. Outside the U.S.

(FPIF has a new component called "Outside the U.S.," which aims to bring non-U.S. voices into the U.S. policy debate and to foster dialog between Northern and Southern actors in global affairs issues. Please visit our Outside the U.S. page for other non-U.S. perspectives on global affairs and for information about submissions: http://www.fpif.org/outside/index.html.)

SOVEREIGNTY TO THE CHINESE PEOPLE

(Editor's Note: The following is an edited version of an open letter to Chinese President Jiang Zemin from 18 Hong Kong-based labor and religious groups that appeared in the South China Morning Post on May 8, 2001.)

With your arrival in Hong Kong to attend the Fortune Global Forum, you glorify globalization as the model to enhance the wealth of the countries in Asia, but what we see is that the free-market system you embrace does not bring wealth to the common people. Rather, what we see is transnational corporations stealing the resources of the world and making workers more vulnerable, their working conditions more intolerable, and the gulf between the rich and poor more entrenched. Currently, as China awaits entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the gap between the rich and poor is widening with a gini-coefficient that measures income distribution of 0.456--a high figure, especially for a nation that calls itself socialist. This gap is reflected in the unemployed population of China that now stands at 140 million workers and the decreasing income of peasants. These hardships will become even more of a burden when China enters the WTO.

Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, the government extols Hong Kong's success because of its free-trade economic system, but Hong Kong's economy, in reality, is facing a great crisis. Hong Kong's gini-coefficient is 0.52, which indicates that the gap between the rich and the poor is the greatest among the developed countries. The difference between the income of the 20% of the highest income families and the 20% of the lowest income families is 23 times. The population of the poor in Hong Kong is now more than one million people. Their employment is never secure, and working conditions are getting worse. Moreover, occupational health and safety in the workplace is more precarious as more industrial accidents are occurring. We believe that after China enters the WTO, the lives of workers will become even worse. Thus, you come to Hong Kong to sell to us and the world this global free-trade system. You tell us everyone will benefit from free trade, but the people who really benefit from this system are a small number of business tycoons, while the majority of the poor will become even more marginalized.

We believe that, as the leader of the country, your responsibility is to ensure that the nation's wealth is shared by all. Now, since Hong Kong and China are facing difficult times, only a more equal distribution of wealth will lead to a real economic alternative for the poor and will eventually bring social stability, but what a pity it is that our Hong Kong Government does not guarantee or provide comprehensive social security for the people. Instead, it promotes the privatization of public services and the subcontracting of government projects, which breaks the workers' "rice bowls."

The imbalance of economic power among the people in Hong Kong is because of the imbalance in political power. Currently, directly elected legislators comprise only 40% of the Legislative Council seats, whereas the voting bloc system and the limitations on tabling private members' bills inhibit the ability of Legco to monitor the government. Recently, the government proposed that senior civil servants must be more accountable; but without a directly elected legislative system, this will only expand the Chief Executive's power. Meanwhile, senior civil servants will not dare criticize or disagree with the views of the Chief Executive.

We believe that the people are the masters of the country. To actualize the real sovereignty of the nation, we must protect people's rights. Sovereignty and human rights are not mutually exclusive; sovereignty should not override human rights. However, respect for human rights in China and Hong Kong is still deteriorating. For example, the voices of dissidents in China are still being silenced, and dissidents on the mainland continue to be arrested. The religious freedom of Falun Gong practitioners is also being denied, and the Public Order Ordinance in Hong Kong further violates people's civil rights.

Globalization not only destroys the environment but also, in the name of development, breaks the natural interdependence between people and the environment.

ISRAEL'S JORDAN IS PALESTINE OPTION
By Sam Bahour

(Excerpted from an "Outside the U.S." Global Affairs Commentary, posted at: http://www.fpif.org/outside/commentary/0105israel.html.)

In today's complicated Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the political assumption that a Palestinian State is part and parcel of any future peace agreement is now a common realization that the U.S. and Israel have finally come to terms with. The U.S. Administration, the Israeli press, and even the hawkish Israeli government, now openly make public statements to this regard. I do not question the fact that a Palestinian State is on the horizon, but I have serious doubt that the geographic location of this State is the same between the world's conviction and that of the Israeli government led by Prime Minster Ariel Sharon.

To understand my suspicion, I refer to the Sharon of the past and relate it to the, new and improved, or so we are to believe, Sharon of today.

In 1981, and on several previous occasions, today's Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon, expressed his opinion about a Palestinian State as follows: "I believe that the starting point for a solution is to establish a Palestinian state in that part of Palestine that was separated from what was to become Israel in 1922 and which is now Jordan. [...] The only strangers are the members of the Hashemite Kingdom ruled by King Hussein. [...] I don't mind who takes over Jordan." (Time magazine, October 5, 1981)

And as for illegal Israeli settlers settling on confiscated Palestinian lands, he continued in the same interview: "I believe that 30 years from now, there should be about 1 million Jews living in a ten-mile radius around Jerusalem. I believe that in the rest of Judea and Samaria [West Bank] there will be about 300,000 Jews. If there is a steady influx of 15,000 Jews into Israel and other factors remain the same, there will be about 4.7 million Jews in Israel by the year 2000. [...] If you are looking at the needs of this population for security, then the population should be spread out." (Time magazine, October 5, 1981)

In 1982, in an interview with Oriana Fallaci, Sharon, while answering a question regarding the denial of Palestinians of their rights, was quoted as saying: "But they get a homeland. It is the Palestine that is called Jordan, yet Transjordan. Listen, this Palestinian thing has puzzled me for 12 years, and the more I think of it the more I decide that Jordan...is the only solution. What counts for me is that a Palestine already exists, so there is no need to create another one. And I tell you: we shall never permit another Palestinian state. [...] It will never happen. Judea and Samaria shall not be touched. Nor Gaza. Forget it..." (Washington Post, August 29, 1982)

Disturbingly enough, most recently in April 2001, more than 20 years later, the "Millennium Model" Ariel Sharon was quoted in an exclusive interview to an Israeli newspaper as stating: "I have not changed my world view. The one thing that has changed is my view of Jordan as Palestine--and that only because there is a reality [on the ground] here. I never believed there should be two Palestinian states. That is the sole change that has taken place in my positions." (Ha'aretz, 11/4/2001)

In 2001, in the midst of a Middle East powder keg, the Israeli "Jordan is Palestine" strategy was raised by Sharon without anyone asking him. This is clearly an Israeli option that not only remains in their political lexicon, but also most likely is in the Israeli government's political bag of tricks.

(The writer is a Palestinian-American businessman, born and raised in Youngstown, Ohio, who relocated to his family's home in Al-Bireh, West Bank immediately following the signing of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. He can be reached at <sbahour@palnet.com>.)

III. Letters and Comments

NOLT RESPONDS: CHINA'S MILITARY NOT EXPANDING

(Jim Nolt responds to a letter in last week's Progressive Response http://www.fpif.org/progresp/volume5/v5n14.html about his "Assessing New Arm Sales to Taiwan" commentary http://www.fpif.org/commentary/0104taiwanarms.html.)

My commentary was based on detailed study and 30 years of developing expertise in military affairs and strategy. My basis for saying that China's arms procurement is "very restrained" is that at the current rate of procurement, China's armed forces will continue to decline both relative to key neighbors (and potential adversaries) and absolutely.

Yes, there has been a recent increase in defense spending, but if you look into the details, you will see that most of that is because of pay increases needed to prevent officers and skilled personnel from leaving for more lucrative jobs in the booming private sector.

Although China's official defense budget numbers are too low, some other estimates are way too high, because they include things like spending on the People's Armed Police, which is a paramilitary force for internal security. Another trick used to inflate China's military budget is to try to calculate how much the Chinese armed forces would cost (including personnel) if paid for at world market prices--instead of the low cost China actually pays for its personnel and for many services. China's actual spending is about 1.5 to 2 times the official spending. Actually, even many forces included in that figure are local forces with limited means of transportation that are also for internal security and unlikely to be used against any neighbor. The total personnel in China's Class A main force army units (those actually ready for war without mobilizing reserves--though poorly equipped by neighbors' standards) is only 700,000, i.e., about the same size as the Iraqi armed forces at the start of the Gulf War, but they are distributed throughout China along its many potentially hostile borders.

What is more important than spending is what they are spending the money on. Personnel costs eat up a large part of the budget, which is why there have been drastic and continuing cuts in the personnel strength of the PLA in recent years. Compared to other major militaries, China spends relatively little money on the things that make for military effectiveness: R&D, training, and weapons procurement. Training standards in all branches of the PLA are poor compared to China's neighbors' standards. Major exercises are rare and small-scale.

Most telling is that China is manufacturing very few weapons, mostly of poor technology AND poor reliability. Its major weapons systems are all imports from Russia, including the Su-27 and Su-30, Kilo subs, Sovremenny destroyers, SAMs, etc. The only major exceptions are tanks (China makes a poor-quality model) and ballistic missiles (including their nuclear warheads). If you compare numbers and quality of weapons procured in the past decade, you will see that China is behind both Taiwan and India. So far China has imported less than 100 Russian fighters, while Taiwan imported and built 430 modern fighters in the same period. China does not make any modern fighters of its own yet. You can make similar comparisons in other areas: warships, guided missiles, etc. If you actually look in detail at the few weapons China is actually procuring with its defense spending, it is really quite remarkable.

Because China's rate of weapons procurement is so low both relative to its neighbors and to the size of its own forces, it is falling behind them in terms of relative modernization. It is trivial to say that China is modernizing its forces. No country ever replaces modern weapons with obsolete ones, so every country is modernizing. What you need to consider is the relative rate of modernization. China is buying so few weapons in relation the current size of its armed forces that there is no possibility for it to even make a dent in replacing the huge stock of obsolete weapons it has been maintaining on inventory. Therefore, the average age (esp. technological age) of its weapons is increasing in virtually every category. While Taiwan replaced nearly its entire air force with new aircraft in the 1990s, China acquired so few modern aircraft that the bulk of its air force still operates ancient MiG-19s! Not only are they early 1950s Russian technology (never significantly upgraded--without radar or modern ECM), but most were manufactured during the Cultural Revolution virtually by hand. U.S. contractors who inspected a number of Chinese MiG-19s in the 1980s (when U.S. companies has contracts to upgrade them, cancelled in 1989) found that upgrades are difficult because so many parts are hand-made and therefore not interchangeable! Some Chinese and Chinese-made North Korean MiG-19s that have defected have been found to be so poorly made that they could not withstand the high-G maneuvers they were designed for! On top of that, because they are so old and worn out, and because China's budget for training is limited, these old planes are not even much use for training. The average MiG-19 pilot flies 80 hours per year--about 1/3 of the USAF standard and half Taiwan's or India's.

China would have to hugely increase its rate of weapons procurement just to maintain the current size of its armed forces, replacing old and obsolete weapons with newer ones. Since China is not doing this, the absolute size of their forces will continue to decline significantly. In recent years the country has disbanded about 40% of its army divisions and over 1/3 of its fighter regiments, but even deeper cuts are inevitable without a huge increase in procurement. They are DEmilitarizing, NOT expanding their military, unlike neighbors such as India, which in the past 40 years has more than doubled the size of its armed forces, while China's have been cut in the same period by more than half. If there is a rising power in Asia, it is India, not China--but Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are also significant military powers in relation to China and all have been growing stronger relative to China since 1971.

I don't scoff at the Sovremenny's or the Su-30s. It is just that China has so few of them. India, for example, procures Su-27s, Su-30s, and other modern Russian fighters at a much higher rate than does China. They also import more and better Soviet ships & subs. If Taiwan does procure 8 modern subs and 4 Kidds as promised under this latest arms package, its naval capabilities will be superior to China's. India's and Japan's are already far superior. Even ASEAN navies, if united, could match the Chinese.

- Jim Nolt <NoltJ43@aol.com>

Please consider supporting Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF). FPIF is a new kind of think tank--one serving citizen movements and advancing a fresh, internationalist understanding of global affairs. Although we make our FPIF products freely available on the Internet, we need financial support to cover our staff time and expenses. Increasingly, FPIF depends on you and other individual donors to sustain our bare-bones budget. Click on https://secure.iexposure.com/fpif.org/donate.cfm to support FPIF online, or for information about making contributions over the phone or through the mail.

We Count on Your Support. Thank you.

Subscribe to The Progressive Response!

To subscribe to The Progressive Response, send a blank email to:

To unsubscribe from The Progressive Response, send a blank email to:
lists-unsubscribe@irc-online.org

Simply click the appropriate hyperlink above, or send a blank email to the appropriate email address above.

The Progressive Response aims to provide timely analysis and opinion about U.S. foreign policy issues. The content does not necessarily reflect the institutional positions of either the Interhemispheric Resource Center or the Institute for Policy Studies.

Please consider taking our online users' survey by going to: http://www.fpif.org/form_survey.html.

We're working to make the Progressive Response informative and useful, so let us know how we're doing, via email to irc@irc-online.org. Please put "Progressive Response" in the subject line. Please feel free to cross-post the Progressive Response elsewhere. We apologize for any duplicate copies you may receive.

IRC
Tom Barry
Editor, Progressive Response
Codirector, Foreign Policy In Focus
Email: tom@irc-online.org

IPS
Martha Honey
Codirector, Foreign Policy In Focus
Email: ipsps@igc.apc.org

This page was last modified on Wednesday, November 14, 2001 1:00 PM
Contact the IRC's webmaster with inquiries regarding the functionality of this website.
Copyright © 2001 IRC and IPS. All rights reserved.