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/.

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Editor: Tom Barry (IRC)

Table of Contents

I. Updates and Out-Takes

SLOVENIA SUMMIT: BUSH-PUTIN MEETING
By Robert Cutler

USER FEES ON HEALTH CARE: TANZANIA
By Robert Naiman, Center for Economic and Policy Research

NAZIS MAKE GOOD CIA OPERATIVES
By Martin Lee

II. Outside the U.S.

HAS ISRAELI OCCUPATION BECOME LEGAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY?
By Sam Bahour

III. Letters and Comments

FOCUS ON PLAN COLOMBIA

I. Updates and Out-Takes

SLOVENIA SUMMIT: BUSH-PUTIN MEETING
By Robert Cutler

The first Bush-Putin meeting will not take place in a vacuum. Their one-day summit in Slovenia will come after Bush concludes a swing through Spain, Belgium, Poland, and Sweden (which currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union). President Vladimir Putin will have already assessed the new U.S. president personally through psychological profiling and consultations with European leaders who have met him. He already has his agenda, which is to use the meeting to influence European elite and public opinion, which is already skeptical about Washington's plans for Nuclear Missile Defense (NMD).

What is the background against which this meeting will take place? By objective performance, the foreign policy and diplomacy of the new administration looks less like a disaster waiting to happen and more like an unfolding disaster movie.

One need only think of Washington's abrogation of a cooperative stance against international money-laundering (because of a mistaken belief that this would harmonize national tax systems), its abandonment of the Kyoto climate change treaty, its ignominious loss of a seat on the UN Human Rights Commission, its failed attempt (undertaken despite justified public advance warning of failure) to get the UN Security Council to adopt new sanctions on Iraq, its ineptitude in the face of China's intransigence over the spy plane affair, its failure to persuade NATO partners to affirm the existence of a common missile threat from "rogue states," and its money-influenced ambassador nominations for Europe (taken directly from a list of large campaign contributors inexperienced in international affairs).

This pattern in Bush's foreign policy is more than the inevitable ironing out the kinks in a new administration. Instead, it looks to many observers like a combined head-in-the-sand and shoot-yourself-in-the-foot syndrome. Secretary of State Powell and Russian Foreign Minister Ivanov have already held two series of meetings in the middle and at the end of May, at which they affirmed a willingness for consultations and negotiations about "strategic stability," meaning what to do about the ABM treaty. But, oblivious to the effects of its bull-in-a-china-shop behavior on even friendly countries, Washington has not altered its declared intention to abrogate unilaterally the ABM treaty.

Anticipating the absence of any real results at the Slovenia meeting, Washington has begun conditioning U.S. domestic public opinion. Starting in mid-May, anonymously provided background to selected journalists sought to emphasize the personal contact that will be established at the two leaders' first meeting. Bush is to "look Putin in the eye" and tell him that "Russia is not an enemy." But Putin hardly considers Washington's opinion important for his management of Russia's domestic and foreign affairs. In a recent poll, Russian public opinion ranked the U.S. in seventh place among the foreign powers whose view of Russia mattered to those questioned. When he talks to Bush, Putin will have an eye toward influencing not only Europe, but also China, India, and other Asian countries.

Also in mid-May, a memorandum describing U.S.-German discussions about Russia at the highest diplomatic level happened to be leaked to the German press. It noted in particular a U.S.-German agreement not to sponsor international financial assistance to Russia until Moscow has put limits on overseas capital flight. The Western press treated the memorandum as authoritative, and no one disclaimed it or claimed it was inauthentic. Putin's subtlety is revealed in his response, commenting that he did not believe the memorandum to be genuine but that nevertheless "secret agreements will come out." That remark was addressed to the Russian elite. Like Putin, the educated Russian public and foreign policy establishment will recall how the Bolsheviks, immediately after the 1917 revolution, published secret treaties concluded by the Tsar with Western powers. Putin was thus assuring his domestic constituencies that Russia will not reach secret agreements with the United States.

What sort of secret agreements might there have been? By coincidence, after Putin's remarks there appeared revelations in the press that the U.S. had proposed purchasing Russian arms systems to be integrated into an NMD system, if only Russia would endorse Washington's idea for it. Cutting through the diplomatic jargon, Putin was saying that such an agreement will not happen. Such a quid pro quo would eventually become public knowledge, and probably sooner rather than later. One might add that Russia's arms export industry is successful enough not to need the U.S. as a client.

The two presidents live mostly in different political worlds. They will meet and then go their separate ways. The Bush spin will claim that the fact of the meeting is itself a success. The Putin spin will politely agree then add statements making clear that nothing was really accomplished. Because the meeting's real significance will be its impact on European opinion, Moscow will emphasize the need for continuing consultations on nuclear matters about which Europeans are deeply concerned. After handshakes and statements of good will, the two sides will return home, each with its own fish to fry elsewhere.

(Robert M. Cutler <rmc@alum.mit.edu> is Research Fellow at Institute of European & Russian Studies, Carleton University. Web: www.robertcutler.org.)

USER FEES ON HEALTH CARE: TANZANIA
By Robert Naiman, Center for Economic and Policy Research

(Editor's Note: In a new FPIF global affairs commentary, excerpted below, Robert Naiman makes a compelling case for why the system of global economic governance needs to be opened up to public review and NGO participation. NGOs have been at the forefront of the attack on one of most pernicious manifestations of structural adjustment: charging the poor for basic health and educational services. The entire commentary is posted at: http://www.fpif.org/commentary/0106userfees.html.)

One of the most controversial "structural adjustment" policies promoted by the World Bank and the IMF is the imposition of user fees on primary healthcare and education. These user fees have been associated with lower school enrollment and reduced access to primary healthcare. For some years, the World Bank, while acknowledging problems with the implementation of user fees, defended them in principle on the grounds that there were, or were supposed to be, exemptions for the poor, even though, as the World Bank was eventually forced to admit, the track record indicates that exemption schemes do not work.

In response to the World Bank's refusal to abandon support for user fees on primary health and education, in October, 2000, the U.S. Congress passed legislation requiring the U.S. representatives at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to oppose any loan or debt relief agreement which included "user fees" on access to primary healthcare and education.

One month later, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) for Tanzania came before the World Bank and IMF boards. The PRSP is purported to be a planning document prepared by developing country governments, in consultation with the IMF and the World Bank, with broad civil society participation, outlining a plan for reducing poverty in the country--in accord with the reformed focus of the institutions on poverty reduction in poor countries announced as part of the "enhanced" debt relief initiative agreed to at the G7 meeting in Cologne.

The "interim" PRSP for Tanzania had included user fees on primary healthcare. Nongovernmental organizations and members of Congress who had supported the legislation requiring the U.S. to oppose user fees on primary healthcare and education wrote to the U.S. Treasury Department, then still under the supervision of the Clinton administration, and reminded Treasury that law required the U.S. to oppose the Tanzania PRSP if it included user fees on primary healthcare. At the time of the Board meeting, the Tanzania PRSP--a document that supposedly resulted from a broad consultation with civil society in Tanzania--was a secret document.

What actually happened at the board meeting is known with certainty only to those who were present, because the board meetings are secret, and no minutes are publicly available. However, there is a summary of the discussion. This is a secret document that is only distributed to World Bank and IMF management and government representatives. The cover page states: "This document has a restricted distribution and may be used by recipients only in the performance of their official duties. Its contents may not otherwise be disclosed without World Bank authorization." [3] In this case, the document was leaked to nongovernmental organizations. The summary is a redaction of the minutes, in the sense that it does not indicate who said what, a critical piece of information for holding governments accountable for what policies they support or oppose at the institutions.

Nonetheless, in this case the summary is telling. The summary contains the following sentence: "Staff noted the concern of many NGOs over the existence of user fees in the health sector but pointed out that the poor were exempt from these charges."

But the nongovernmental organizations that were concerned about the inclusion of user fees on primary healthcare were concerned precisely because exemption schemes have failed. Thus, while "noting" the concern of NGOs, the institutions were in fact completely ignoring them.

It is a remarkable fact, that even when the U.S. Congress, which controls U.S. appropriations to these institutions, went to the trouble of passing a specific law requiring the U.S. representative to oppose a particular policy, the U.S. representative apparently had nothing to say when the subject was discussed in the board meeting.

(Robert Naiman <naiman@cepr.net> is a senior policy analyst with the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. The organization's website can be found at: www.cepr.net. CEPR was established to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people's lives. It works to ensure that the citizenry has the information and analysis that allows it to act effectively in the public interest.)

NAZIS MAKE GOOD CIA OPERATIVES
By Martin Lee

(Editor's Note: Revelations that the CIA has contracted Latin American strongmen such as Panama's Manuel Noriega and Peru's Vladirmiro Montesinos as U.S. intelligence agents have led many U.S. citizens to conclude that the CIA is a rogue operation of the U.S. government that needs to be reeled in. A bevy of recently released documents demonstrate that the CIA has long operated beyond the parameters defined by U.S. public diplomacy. While the U.S. government was trying some Nazi officials as war criminals, it was enlisting less prominent ones as its own agents. Such revelations give strong weight to critics of U.S. foreign policy who contend that the CIA has never been a rogue operation but rather implements the dimensions of a foreign policy that has long been corrupt and criminal at its core. A new FPIF commentary, excerpted below and available in its entirety at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/0105spy.html, by journalist Martin Lee delves into one of the more nefarious manifestations of U.S. postwar foreign policy.)

"Honest and idealist ... enjoys good food and wine ... unprejudiced mind ..."

That's how a 1952 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assessment described Nazi ideologue Emil Augsburg, an officer at the infamous Wannsee Institute, the SS think tank involved in planning the Final Solution. Augsburg's SS unit performed "special duties," a euphemism for exterminating Jews and other "undesirables" during the Second World War.

Although he was wanted in Poland for war crimes, Augsburg managed to ingratiate himself with the U.S. CIA, which employed him in the late 1940s as an expert on Soviet affairs. Recently released CIA records indicate that Augsburg was among a rogue's gallery of Nazi war criminals recruited by U.S. intelligence agencies shortly after Germany surrendered to the Allies.

Pried loose by Congress, which passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act three years ago, a long-hidden trove of once-classified CIA documents confirms one of the worst-kept secrets of the cold war--the CIA's use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a clandestine campaign against the Soviet Union.

The CIA reports show that U.S. officials knew they were subsidizing numerous Third Reich veterans who had committed horrible crimes against humanity, but these atrocities were overlooked as the anti-Communist crusade acquired its own momentum. For Nazis who would otherwise have been charged with war crimes, signing on with American intelligence enabled them to avoid a prison term.

"The real winners of the cold war were Nazi war criminals, many of whom were able to escape justice because the East and West became so rapidly focused after the war on challenging each other," says Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations and America's chief Nazi hunter. Rosenbaum serves on a Clinton-appointed Interagency Working Group (IWG) committee of U.S. scholars, public officials, and former intelligence officers who helped prepare the CIA records for declassification.

Many Nazi criminals "received light punishment, no punishment at all, or received compensation because Western spy agencies considered them useful assets in the cold war," the IWG team stated after releasing 18,000 pages of redacted CIA material. (More installments are pending.)

These are "not just dry historical documents," insists former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the panel examining the CIA files. As far as Holtzman is concerned, the CIA papers raise critical questions about American foreign policy and the origins of the cold war.

The decision to recruit Nazi operatives had a negative impact on U.S.-Soviet relations and set the stage for Washington's tolerance of human rights abuses and other criminal acts in the name of anti-Communism. With that fateful sub-rosa embrace, the die was cast for a litany of antidemocratic CIA interventions around the world.

(Martin A. Lee <martin@sfbg.com> is the author of The Beast Reawakens, a book on neofascism.)

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 at: http://www.fpif.org/outside/index.html. The following commentary is excerpted from a longer FPIF Global Affairs Commentary posted at: http://www.fpif.org/outside/commentary/0106legal.html.)

HAS ISRAELI OCCUPATION BECOME LEGAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY?
By Sam Bahour

This past eight months of bloodletting between Israelis and Palestinians is no more than an additional, exhausting chapter in a decades old conflict that seems today more polarized than ever. When Israel invaded the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem in 1967, the occupation of Palestine was born. With this birth came a second Palestinian Diaspora (the first was in 1948 when Israel was established) and the reality that an entire population--1.2 million Palestinians--would become totally controlled by the Israeli military. Over three decades later, no one expected to see the occupation enduring, or to see Palestinians still able to resist.

From the outset, the world community was aware of the seriousness of the Israeli-caused Palestinian dispossession. Hence, the Arab-Israeli conflict, as it has been termed, was brought to the venue of the United Nations multiple times.

Throughout this conflict, and in addition to all of these absolutely clear international resolves, there have also been numerous UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions confirming the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War upon the Israeli occupation. Israel is a signatory to this Convention but refuses to apply it to the occupied Palestinian lands. The Israeli position that the occupied territories are "disputed" so the 1949 Geneva Convention does not apply, is sophistry.

Israel has arrogantly disregarded all of these attempts to equitably solve the conflict in favor of demanding that the oppressed and the oppressor negotiate a bilateral solution. Sadly, the U.S. has joined in this chorus as well. When the PLO accepted engagement with Israel in an historic concession, they only faced more Israeli demands and the claim that international law is secondary to Israel's security and protection of its citizens and its settlers.

Only a few years ago, on 24 September 1998, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared at the podium of the United Nations that, "It can no longer be claimed that the Palestinians are occupied by Israel." Thirty-four years after the storming of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, occupation is still alive and well. Whereas the will of the international community, stated time and again, was to place occupation in the same category as that of South African Apartheid, Israel has chosen otherwise. As the Oslo peace agreements unravel with the passing of every Palestinian funeral, the Government of Israel has begun a concentrated public relations campaign to legitimize its occupation, its settlements, and Israel's unilateral actions to undermine Palestinian human and political rights.

International law must be defined by the world institutions that were established for that purpose--and not by the existing superpower or the party to the conflict that can hire the better public relations firm. The time has come for the General Assembly to request the International Court of Justice, based in The Hague, to make a definitive Advisory Opinion (2), on all matters of law regarding the rights of the Palestinian people and the Israeli actions in the occupied territories. The Advisory Opinion mechanism is an established Court procedure, open solely to international organizations. This may serve as a way out of the currently failing peace process.

Unlike United Nations Resolutions, which are only quasi-legislative in nature, the opinion of the Court would be binding on the United Nations and affiliated international organizations as to the matters of law that it decides. As a result, the opinion defines the rights and obligations of member states to the United Nations and entities with observer status. Thus, failure to adhere to the Advisory Opinion decision on any matter of law decided can result in appropriate action by the General Assembly, i.e. suspension of the voting rights of a member state and even its expulsion. Since any such action would take place in the General Assembly, there would be no veto power to nullify it.

This Advisory Opinion procedure is actively engaged from countries from around the world, including America, to clarify what is legal and what is not as it relates to international law. Such an opinion would not call into question the right of Israel to exist within fixed borders. Instead, it calls on the Court to decide matters of law pertaining to Israel's violations of fundamental norms of international law binding on all members of the international community.

To renew the already established principle that occupation, in all its forms, is illegal may provide Israel and the United States with a twenty-first century confirmation that toying with the English language to legitimize any form of occupation is a waste of time, effort, and lives--both Palestinian and Israeli.

Armed with an International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion, the General Assembly can once and for all move to make their opinion binding on the parties involved. It would thereby bypass the historically blind Security Council veto that the U.S. invokes every time Israel's violations are brought to the forefront.

The clear and unequivocal end to Israeli occupation, in all of its forms, has the power to bring justice, security, and stability to a region on the verge of self-destruction.

(The writer is a Palestinian-American businessman living in the besieged Palestinian City of Al-Bireh in the West Bank. He is co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994) and can be reached at <sbahour@palnet.com>.)

III. Letters and Comments

FOCUS ON PLAN COLOMBIA

Thanks for your focus on Plan Colombia in recent issues of Progressive Response. The $1.3 billion in military aid to Colombia, and the devastating war in that country, were major issues for activists who gathered in Quebec City in April to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas during the Summit of the Americas.

The INDG, along with others, organized a forum in Quebec City with indigenous people, human rights workers, and trade unionists from Colombia a few days before tens of thousands of people squared off against police to demand an end to corporate-led globalization. Our meeting drew several hundred people--mainly young activists--who came to learn about the connection between globalization and the increased use of police and military against people to defend corporate interests.

Already we are seeing a growing network of activists who are confronting Plan Colombia, and the connections between corporate globalization and militarism.

Thanks for your work.

- Steven Staples,
International Network on Disarmament and Globalization <info@indg.org>

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