It is no coincidence that the greatest number of people who support Israel reside in the United States and Canada. After all, the governments of those two nations are Israel’s most ardent backers and the mainstream media in North America has consistently distorted the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In stark contrast, most of the rest of the world’s population openly sympathizes with the plight of the Palestinians. While the history of Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complex, this article seeks to use numbers to present the historical reality in an accessible manner and to highlight the distortions and inaccuracies prevalent in the rhetoric from Washington and Ottawa as well as the propaganda promulgated by the mainstream media. Continue reading
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Colombia’s Eternal Conflict: Will There Be Peace in Our Time?
Timoleon ‘Timochenko’ Jiménez, new leader of the FARC: call for peace.Timoleon ‘Timochenko’ Jiménez, the supreme commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), opened the New Year by issuing a public statement announcing that the Marxist guerrilla group is willing to engage in peace talks with the Colombian government as long as those negotiations addressed ‘the privatisations, the deregulation, the absolute freedom of trade and investment, the environmental degradation, market democracy, the military doctrine’. In essence, the guerrillas are demanding, as they have done for decades, that any peace agreement would require a public debate about the implementation of the neoliberal, or ‘free-market’, economic model that they so vehemently oppose.
The Hunt for FARC Commander Alfonso Cano
The Colombian military has had numerous successes targeting high-ranking leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in recent years. Its two greatest successes were the killing of secretariat members Raúl Reyes in 2008 and Jorge Briceño, alias “Mono Jojoy,” last year. But the guerrilla leader that the military most wants to capture or kill is the FARC’s supreme commander Alfonso Cano. In an effort to achieve its objective, the Colombian army has deployed 5,000 troops with the sole mission of locating Cano. But the task of tracking down and targeting the FARC leader is proving to be far more challenging than the killing of Reyes and Mono Jojoy due to the high altitude and rugged mountain terrain prevalent in the department of Tolima in central Colombia, where the FARC was founded in 1964.
Distorted Perceptions of Colombia’s Conflict
In a civil conflict such as the one in Colombia, propaganda is an important weapon. It is difficult for journalists and analysts to independently investigate the reality on the ground and so statistics and information are obtained from a variety of sources in order to draw conclusions. However, the mainstream media in the United States is often over-reliant on two sources: Colombian and US government officials. Not surprisingly then, it is the perspectives of the Colombian and US governments that inevitably dominate most news reports. By comparing conflict trends and human rights statistics with media coverage of Colombia’s violence, it is possible to understand why and how the public’s perception of the conflict has been distorted.
The Indigenous Struggle in the Chocó
and Terry Gibbs
Our indigenous guide maneuvered the dugout canoe cautiously through the shallow waters of the Río Opogodó deep in the rainforest of Colombia’s Chocó region. We had traveled almost 12 hours from the departmental capital Quibdó down the Río Atrato and up the Opogodó when we approached a collection of canoes moored on a pebbled embankment. After seeing few signs of human existence during the previous three hours, the sight of a small Embera indigenous village consisting of some 20 open thatched huts on wooden stilts was a magical vision. Walking up a green and muddy hill into the mist-enshrouded village was like traveling back a thousand years in time. But the sense of peacefulness that greeted us as we entered Egorokera proved to be mostly an illusion. The modern day reality for the Embera is far from peaceful as communities from this indigenous tribe struggle to cope with malnutrition, disease, governmental neglect, and constant confrontations with Colombia’s armed groups.
Garry Leech 