Frontlines of Revolutionary Struggle

India Land Grab: Forced Evictions in Orissa

reed — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:31:31 +0000

AmnestyInternational on Jan 27, 2012

Police and security guards forcibly removed people from land earmarked for a Vedanta toxic waste dump.

Research by Amnesty International and other local and international groups documents the serious and continuing pollution caused by the refinery’s operations. Despite the string of decisions against Vedanta, the company has failed to remedy the pollution.

“This decision vindicates the ongoing peaceful protests by the local communities near Lanjigarh to prevent this expansion from going ahead as it would further pollute their lands and water sources,” said Amnesty International’s India researcher Ramesh Gopalakrishnan.

“The Indian authorities have remained silent on the issues of cleaning up the refinery and monitoring the health of local communities. They must act on this now,” he added.

byJason Overdorf, January 31, 2012

India’s great land grab continues, with police forcibly evicting tribal villagers in Orissa from land sold to UK-based Vedanta Resources to use as a toxic waste dump, Amnesty International reports.

The evictions come amid a fraught battle between the mining industry and India’s tribal peoples, as well as environmental activists. Orissa is among India’s poorest and least developed states, but its mineral riches have led to a breakneck race to strip the land of iron, bauxite and other metals needed to fuel the country’s infrastructure and manufacturing sectors.

To gain access to these riches, however, the state government has conspired with industry to run roughshod over the rights of its indigenous peoples, according to their advocates. Local resentment has also helped to make Orissa one of the flashpoints in India’s simmering Maoist insurgency — a crisis that recently resulted in the deployment of some 50,000 police and paramilitary personnel.

Earlier, Amnesty alleged that Vedanta has done nothing to clean up environmental damage at the site of its Lanjigarh aluminum refinery, after the High Court of Orissa once again supported the central government’s decision to reject Vedanta Aluminium’s plans to expand the facility after finding the project violated India’s environmental laws.

“Research by Amnesty International and other local and international groups documents the serious and continuing pollution caused by the refinery’s operations,” Amnesty said in a press release. “Despite the string of decisions against Vedanta, the company has failed to remedy the pollution.”

Vedanta has vowed to challenge the case again in the Supreme Court.

In 2010, similar accusations of rampant violations of laws designed to protect forests and the environment prompted India’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MoEF) to cancel permission for a $1.7 billion bauxite mining project in Orissa’s Niyamgiri Hills — an area held sacred by the local tribe.

The state-run Orissa Mining Corporation (OMC) has challenged the cancellation, and on Monday the Supreme Court fixed April 9 for a hearing on the company’s challenge of cancellation, according to India’s Business Standard newspaper. The court had earlier fixed January 30, as the date for final hearing and disposal of the case.

But Vedanta’s activities — and troubles — are only the tip of the iceberg.

Local villagers are also battling against the allotment of land to Korean steel giant Posco — a deal that represented the largest foreign direct investment ever attracted to India when it was signed six years ago — and the much ballyhooed project exists only on paper. Despite being owned by the government, OMC is under investigation for alleged illegal mining activities. And the Congress Party — in the opposition in the state — has lambasted the government for failing to shut down many illegal operations, despite its claims it has shuttered nearly 500 out of 600-odd mines in the state.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/india/india-land-grab-orissa

Afghanistan: The path from home

reed — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:02:52 +0000

Out of Afghanistan: incredible stories of the boys who walked to Europe

The country is so dangerous it’s no wonder so many leave, travelling alone across the Middle East in search of a new life

by Caroline Brothers, The Observer, Sunday 29 January 2012

Behind the security bars of a spartan, white-tiled room, 25 youths are arranging bedrolls on the floor. The workers on the Salvation Army nightshift, who watch over these lone foreign teenagers in a shelter in a gritty corner of Paris, are distributing sheets and sleeping bags; there are a couple of boys from Mali and a contingent of Bangladeshis; the rest have travelled overland, by every conceivable method, from Afghanistan.

The road to peace: 13-year-old Morteza spent five months travelling from Kabul to Paris. His journey took him through Iran, Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Italy Photograph: Ed Alcock/MYOP

The youngest are 13 years old, pint-sized cousins from Kabul who arrived that morning after a journey of five months. They take off their trainers and place them at the end of their bedrolls. One of them, Morteza, gingerly peels off his socks. The undersides of his toes are completely white.

I ask what happened to his feet. “Water,” he says. Where was he walking in water? Mohammed, the boy on the next bedroll who knows more English, translates. “In the mountains,” he says. Which mountains, I ask, thinking about the range that forms the border between Turkey and Iran. “Croatia, Slovenia, Italy,” Morteza says. Mohammed intervenes. “Not water,” he clarifies. “Snow.”

Suddenly I understand. Morteza’s feet are not waterlogged or blistered. He has limped across Europe with frostbite.

The next day I run into them watching the older Afghans play football in a park. Morteza’s 13-year-old cousin Sohrab, pale and serious beyond his years, recounts, in English learned during two years of school in Afghanistan, what happened. “Slovenia big problem,” he says, explaining how he and Morteza, “my uncle’s boy”, were travelling with eight adults when they were intercepted by the Slovenian police. Two members of their group were caught and the rest made a detour into the mountains. They spent five days in the snow, navigating by handheld GPS, emerging from the Alps in Trento, in the Italian north.

Morteza acquired frostbite on the penultimate part of a 6,000km journey that detoured through the Balkans: through Macedonia, Serbia and Croatia. Their aim is to join their uncle who lives in Europe, the solution their relatives found after Morteza’s father was killed in an explosion. His mother died earlier “in the war”; Sohrab lost his own father when he was 11.

Waiting in hope: boys from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa line up in the hope of being offered a bed for the night Photograph: Ed Alcock/MYOP

Morteza and Sohrab are among the world’s most vulnerable migrants. Like scores of Afghan teenagers in transit across Europe, they are in flight from violence or the aftershocks of violence that affect children in particularly harsh ways. Those who turn up in Paris have spent up to a year on the road, on the same clandestine routes as adults, but at far greater risk.

No one knows how many unaccompanied Afghan children have made it to Europe. Paris took in just over 300 in 2011 – the biggest nationality among the 1,700 lone foreign minors in its care. Sarah Di Giglio, a child-protection expert with Save the Children in Italy, says that last year the number of Afghan boys – there are almost never girls – passing through a day centre in Rome had doubled from the year before, to 635.

Asylum statistics are another measure, though they give only a rough indication since many children never make a claim. Still, at 4,883, Afghans were the biggest group of separated foreign children requesting asylum in 2010, the majority in Europe.

While some are sent out of Afghanistan for their own safety, others make their own decision to leave. Some are running from brutality, or the politics of their fathers, or recruitment by the Taliban. Others have been pushed onwards by the increasing precariousness of life in Pakistan and Iran, countries that host three million Afghan refugees.

Blanche Tax, who is responsible for country guidance at the United Nations refugee agency in Geneva, says security is deteriorating in Afghanistan, which Unicef described two years ago as the world’s most dangerous place to be a child. From January to September, she said, 1,600 children were reported killed or injured, 55% more than the previous year.

A report to the general assembly of the UN security council on 13 December 2011, meanwhile, said “the killing and maiming of children remains of grave concern”. “The most frequent violations continued to be recruitment and use of children, including for suicide bombing missions or for planting explosives,” the report continued. It highlighted a recent rise in “cross-border recruitment by Taliban – as well as attacks on schools”. And it added 31,385 cases of “severe acute malnutrition” among minors to a litany of child-specific damage that already includes landmines, sexual violence and forced labour.

It is from this maelstrom, and its spread to Afghanistan’s south, north and east, that Morteza, Sohrab and others have fled. I first came across adolescents like them three years ago, when I saw them squeezing between the railings of a Paris park to sleep on cardboard among the shrubberies or in the bandstand, along with adult refugees. When the police raided the park and started to patrol it with dogs, they bedded down under the swings of a playground, or on the edges of a canal.

Subsequent raids have moved them on again, but they still play football there or under a railway bridge, in teams that sometimes take on the local boys. They find the undersized Salvation Army shelter by word of mouth, or through a reception office for unaccompanied foreign minors run by a French NGO called France Terre d’Asile (FTDA). It’s the only emergency place of refuge for the children, and is oversubscribed: lately 20 or so have been turned away each evening, to sleep in a corner of a park or metro station, or walk the streets all night in order to keep warm.

In the entrance to the FTDA office for minors I stumble upon Omar, a slender 16-year-old with a ski hat pulled low over his eyes. He is leaning on the counter by himself, too tense to wait on the seats with the other boys. He is doodling with a yellow marker pen on a sheet of paper on which someone before him has pencilled the word “Tunisia”.

“All my family are very worried about my father,” Omar says. “We don’t know where he is.” This is almost the first thing he tells me. He expresses this same anxiety four times in our conversation, and I realise that what initially I took for tension was distress.

From a village in Afghanistan’s Logar province, just south of Kabul, Omar says he is the eldest of five. Enmities from the Soviet era up-ended his life. “I did school in Afghanistan for three years and I wasn’t able to go more,” he said. “My grandfather said don’t go to school, we have enemies who will kill you; stay in the house and don’t go out in the village a lot.” His father and grandfather had “done jihad with the Russians”, he said; those they had sided against came back and “gave a warning”. His grandfather sold their almond orchard and paid $11,000 to a smuggler to get him and his father out.

Travelling with Omar’s uncle, the three made it as far as Turkey before being stopped by the police. Everyone scattered. Separated in the confusion, Omar was deported to Afghanistan. He said his uncle had contacted his grandfather to let them know he was all right; from his father they have had no word.

Omar set off again, spending the next five months on the road. He moved in and out of the hands of smugglers, was held with dozens of others in “passenger houses”, then abandoned in a deserted place on the Turkish side of the border with Greece. There, he and his companions waited, night after night without shelter, for a guide. Finally they gave up and struggled back to Istanbul.

On his second attempt Omar swam a wide canal and walked for five hours in wet clothes, heading on his smuggler’s instructions towards the lights of a Greek town. There he was picked up by the police and held for three days in a room with 15 men. The next four nights he spent in a train station in the northern Greek town of Alexandroupolis, until a railway employee paid his fare to Athens. He waited 25 days in another passenger room before being crammed, with 32 others, into the back of a truck. Told to bring two packets of biscuits and no water, they spent 30 hours inside. “There was no air and it smelt very bad,” he said. The driver abandoned them in Italy.

He caught trains to Milan, and then Cannes, with three other boys. “We slept on the earth next to the sea and we were so cold,” he says. Arriving in Paris, he spent six nights on the street before asking at this office for help. “I want to live here,” he says. “People don’t hurt me in France.” And yet, they already had. A few days earlier three men had mugged him in a Paris park. They stole his bag that contained his last €30 and the slip of paper that bore his grandfather’s phone number, severing his last link to his family.

In the state of anxiety he was in, it was hard for him to think about the future. “I want to have peace,” he said. And if he were able to stay in France? “I’d like to go to school,” he said, “if they give us the opportunity to go.” For many of the kids going to school seems like an enormous privilege, but first they have to be accepted as minors. That means going before a judge, who can order bone x-ray exams – which have a two-year margin of error – if he disbelieves their age; they may have to wait months to get formal protection.

By the time they turn 18, these teenagers will have to prove they speak French and have embarked on a profession in order to have a chance of regularising their status. For Afghan boys with almost no prior schooling, the pressure is enormous. “They have no time to have their adolescent crises,” says Pauline Ferrais, head of the education service at the Maison du Jeune Réfugié (MJR), a day centre. As Pierre Henry, managing director of FTDA, puts it: “Some have spent one or two years on the roads of Asia and Europe in extreme conditions playing with the laws of survival, and we ask them to respect very strict rules in an education system that makes no allowances for them.” Yet teachers remark that those who do go to school have a dynamic effect on the class. It’s something that’s been noted by Romain Levy, the deputy mayor for Paris with special responsibility for minors. “Because of their motivation they act as an engine and pull the other kids up,” he says.

But Paris’s budget for providing for minors is stretched. And elsewhere in Europe the likelihood that these boys will get a second chance at a childhood is waning. Sweden, alarmed by the 1,693 Afghan teenagers who requested asylum there in 2011, has teamed up with Britain, Norway and the Netherlands to create the European Return Platform for Unaccompanied Minors, or Erpum, an EU-funded project that aims to send them back.

Susanne Bäckstedt, its Stockholm-based co-ordinator, denied reports that Erpum wanted to establish care centres in Kabul. She said the programme would be voluntary, and only involve minors who had exhausted asylum appeals and wanted to rejoin their families. “We are not discussing care centres,” says Bäckstedt. “We will only send them back if their family can be traced.” That, she says, meant “a welcoming family” who would come to the airport to meet them.

Erpum hopes to start repatriations of 16- and 17-year-olds this year, provided the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation agrees; Bäckstedt confirmed Erpum has a target of deporting 100 Afghan minors by the end of 2014. The prospect has alarmed child-protection bodies, who fear such initiatives will push those in Europe underground. They want reassurances over how the minor’s best interest would be established, stress the danger to the tracers of inaccurate information, and warn that families who have spent thousands of dollars to send a son to safety will have incurred debts in which collateral can include the betrothal of a younger sister to an older man. “Family tracing is not as innocent as it sounds,” says one children’s rights researcher. The European Council on Refugees and Exiles also opposes returning minors to Afghanistan.

Governments concerned about deterring minors from embarking on hazardous journeys risk missing the point about why children flee in the first place, says Judith Dennis, policy adviser at the UK Refugee Council. “We share concerns that children’s journeys to safety are often dangerous,” she comments, “but it is inappropriate to suggest that the international response should be to discourage them from escaping the threats in their country.”

Every Afghan minor who has survived the endurance test that reaching Europe entails has a story of equal parts courage and grief. Some of them are too frightened, or too traumatised, or simply too young to be able to explain the forces that have borne them here.

I meet Jalil, a round-faced 16-year-old from Kunduz, in Afghanistan’s north, between classes at the MJR, where he is taught French. “This is my first school,” he says with pride. His only education hitherto had been from a neighbour in Afghanistan who came to his house at night to teach him English, “one word at a time”, from a book.

Jalil took his future into his own hands after being orphaned. He had lost his mother to “a heart sickness” when he was nine or 10 and was living with his father, who was killed “three years and four months ago”. “Someone said he helped the Taliban,” Jalil tells me. He didn’t witness the attack. “But my brother saw that and now he is mad,” Jalil says. “He can’t talk. It is like he is finished. He is 22 years old.”

He and his younger siblings moved to his uncle’s house, where he was often beaten. “He was cruel, cruel, cruel,” Jalil says of his uncle. His brother-in-law helped him get away, paying $4,000 to a smuggler to get him to Turkey. Barely 15, he went first to Pakistan, then Iran, and on to Turkey and Greece. He had no money so he stayed there “a long time”, living by washing windows, then crossed into Italy from the Greek port of Patras by clinging to the chassis of a truck. After a nine-month journey he reached Paris in August, and slept for a month in the street. Now he is learning the language and goes every day after class to “the library with headphones” at the Pompidou Centre. “I go there and listen to French,” he says. “The plan is I study more to be a doctor, but if I cannot do a big job I will do a little job. If I can’t be a doctor I will be an electrician.”

Pierre Henry of FTDA believes that Europe should be investing in these teenagers. “You don’t win war, democracy, hearts with occupying armies,” he says, pointing out that educating these minors would help create the diaspora that will one day rebuild their country. “It puts paid to all our values if we can’t take care of those among the world’s disinherited children who come to us.”

A week later I pass by the meeting point where the new arrivals gather to be chosen for the 25 places in the Salvation Army shelter. Forty-five boys are waiting in a ragtaggle line against a supermarket wall, and every one of them is new. Sohrab and Morteza, the boy with frostbitten feet, have left; they are back on the road. There is no sign of Omar. Jalil, who lined up here four months ago, now has a place in a hotel, though sometimes he stops by a nearby soup kitchen, where many Afghans gather, to speak his language again. The others have disappeared on their search across Europe for some place that will allow them to stay. They leave only their stories behind.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/29/out-afghanistan-boys-stories-europe

Emirates ‘has security links with Israel’

reed — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:50:58 +0000

[This is an interesting story from UPI about the economic and military ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates--a rare subject for news reports in the US press. But don't congratulate UPI for their investigative prowess--a critical read of the article will also find this disingenuous statement, offered by UPI as a reason for these Israeli-Arab Sheik relations: "They have also found a common adversary in Iran, whose expansionist policies and contentious nuclear program are viewed as a major threat by the Arab states in the gulf and by Israel." UPI thereby states, without supporting data, that Iran has expansionist policies (and does not mention the truly expansionist Israeli appropriation of Palestinian lands, and the growing Israeli "settlements"). UPI does not report that the Emirates have turned a blind eye to Israeli expansionism. And that is not all. The UPI writer cites the "contentious nuclear program" of Iran (focused on nuclear power as energy, not weaponry) as a mutual concern of the Jewish state and the Sheiks, but, once again, they do not mention the hundreds of "secret" Israeli nuclear weapons already in existence, which is apparently not a subject of concern to the Sheiks--nor to UPI. -- Frontlines ed.]

United Press International, Jan. 27, 2012

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates, Jan. 27 (UPI) — The United Arab Emirates, an economic giant and rising military power in the Persian Gulf, is reported to have discreet ties with private security companies in Israel to protect its oil fields and borders.

The Intelligence Online Web site reports that the country’s Critical National Infrastructure Authority has had business dealings with several Israeli firms since it was established in 2007, even though the emirates has no diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

“Trade between the two countries, principally in the area of security, amounted to nearly $300 million last year,” Intelligence Online reported Jan. 12.

CNIA is based in Abu Dhabi, the main oil-rich emirate in the federation. It’s the capital of the United Arab Emirates and handles the federation’s military and security affairs.

“The Israeli businessman most active in Abu Dhabi is Mati Kochavi, owner of the Swiss-registered company AGT, which sold the emirates surveillance cameras, electronic fences and sensors to monitor strategic infrastructure and oil fields.”

That contract was reportedly worth $800 million.

But these ties may be threatened because of a dispute between Abu Dhabi and Israel’s Aeronautics Defense Systems, founded in 1997 and which has been involved in several international arms scandals in recent years.

This centers on a 2011 deal between CNIA and ADS under which the Israeli outfit would sell the infrastructure authority combat-capable unmanned aerial vehicles like those used against Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip.

But the deal turned sour when it was found that ADS had failed to secure approval from the Israeli Defense Ministry’s military sales division, known as SIBAT, to export the UAVs to an Arab state. The dispute has “infuriated the emirate, which had paid a $70 million advance on the contract,” Intelligence Online reported.

“Fearing irreparable consequences for its relations with Abu Dhabi, the Israeli Defense Ministry is trying to come up with a solution.”

Intelligence Online said Israel’s ImageSat satellite operator has had a Satellite Operating Partner contract since 2006 with the emirates’ Space Reconnaissance Center to provide it with program access to the Israeli firm’s Eros B commercial satellite launched in April 2006.

The emirates is developing its own satellite program, with an eye to acquiring surveillance craft capable of spying on gulf rival Iran.

ADS is headed by Avi Leumi, a former officer in Israel’s Military Intelligence who has secured contracts with Russia and Azerbaijan, a Muslim state and former Soviet republic on Iran’s northern border where Israel has established deep intelligence and military ties over the last decade.

Intelligence Online reported several defense and security concerns such as France’s CS Systems, which supplied the emirates’ military command and control system, and the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. “are hoping to benefit from the Israeli group’s woes.”

EADS, with headquarters in Leiden, the Netherlands, comprises Aerospatiale-Matra of France, DaimlerChrysler Aerospace of Germany and Construcciones Aeronauticas of Spain.

The emirates’ judicious ties to Israel’s security industry, which operates in close proximity to the country’s secretive security establishment, have emerged despite decades of Arab-Israeli hostility.

Kovachi’s AGT, like many of Israel’s private security companies, employs retired military generals and other senior officers who have access to the Defense Ministry. Among Kovachi’s consultants is Maj. Gen. Amos Malka, who headed Israel’s Military Intelligence from 1998-2001.

Since the 1993-94 Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel has established discreet diplomatic and trade ties with several gulf monarchies.

They have also found a common adversary in Iran, whose expansionist policies and contentious nuclear program are viewed as a major threat by the Arab states in the gulf and by Israel.

The Jewish state’s circumspect ties to the emirates were badly jolted when Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior leader of the Hamas Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip, was assassinated in Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates, Jan. 19, 2010. Dubai police blamed Israel for the killing.

Bahrain, Oman and Qatar have all been reported in recent years to have conducted secret talks with Israel. Indeed, their intelligence chiefs have reportedly met several times to discuss the Iranian threat.

Last May, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reportedly met secretly with Qatar’s premier, Sheik Hamas bin Jassim bin Jabor al-Thani, in London and discussed the possibility of buying Qatari natural gas.

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2012/01/27/Emirates-has-security-links-with-Israel/UPI-73471327687767/

Rich Greeks balk at financial aid for homeland

reed — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:26:52 +0000

["National unity" and "patriotic sacrifice" are urged upon the masses everywhere, as the crisis continues to deepen. But these words are rejected by the rich, as they and their bank deposits are taken to Swiss banks and other shelters. Here, that attitude of the Greek bourgeois toward "saving Greece" is described: "Why should I give my money to people I consider useless?" -- Frontlines ed.]

————————————————————————

Jan 30, 2012

by Gabriele Ochsenbein, swissinfo.ch

Wealthy Greeks living abroad, including in Switzerland, are extremely wary about investing in their cash-strapped homeland to help create jobs and boost the economy.

Switzerland is home to several ultra-rich Greeks, like the granddaughter of the legendary shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, billionaire Spiros Latsis, who made his money through oil, housing and banking, and the heirs to shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos.

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation funds a number of social programmes in Greece, including food aid schemes, to help people hit by the financial crisis. But few rich Greeks living abroad are rushing to invest in their homeland.

George Koukis, a successful software entrepreneur who lives on the shores of Lake Geneva, told German television he was proud to be Greek but he was not considering investing in his country.

“Why should I give my money to people I consider useless? Others here think like me, although they might not say so,” he said.

No place to invest

“It’s an honest answer,” Greek lawyer Ilias Bissias, an expert in cross-border legal cases between Switzerland and Greece, told swissinfo.ch. He is also the legal advisor to the Swiss embassy in Athens, and works in Zurich.

“Maybe rich Greeks living in Switzerland should feel morally obliged to help their country. But at the moment there is a great deal of suspicion and caution over every investment project,” he said.

Harris Dellas, who has worked for 13 years at the Economics Institute at Bern University, said nobody was keen to invest in the current hostile environment.

“You never know when there might be a strike; the unions are very powerful, the government is slapdash and constantly changes the rules; there is huge bureaucracy and lots of corruption. The infrastructure is also a disaster,” he said.

In such circumstances it is not surprising that limited investments are being made both nationally and from abroad. And it is equally predictable that more people are transferring their savings overseas.

Swiss accounts

Bissias said over the past two years the number of clients wanting to open a bank account in Switzerland had risen sharply. But precise figures on how much money has flown to Switzerland are hard to come by.

Dellas said the SFr400 billion mentioned in the international press is exaggerated, however. Bissias, like the Swiss ambassador in Athens, Lorenzo Amberg, said the amount of Greek funds stashed in Swiss banks was more like SFr30-40 billion.

The problem is that Greece can do little against capital flight.

“The legal framework does not prevent the flight of foreign currency. You can’t stop money from flowing out,” said Bissias. “A ban on foreign transactions would be absurd. The next day you would have a revolution. Such a measure would also break EU law.”

The Greek lawyer acknowledged he could not exclude that some of his clients were trying to hide some of their assets from the tax man.

“A lawyer is neither a detective nor a tax inspector. We advise clients on Swiss and Greek legal issues and make them well aware of the legal consequences if they violate the laws. We never really know 100 per cent whether we get an honest answer when we ask whether the assets have been declared,” he said.

The Greek state also lacks the appropriate infrastructure to know where declared and undeclared money is hidden, he added.

“There are loopholes,” said Bissias. “Over the past two years tax legislation has been tightened up and tax crimes receive tougher sentences than previously. But I think it’s too late.”

The economics professor believes most Greek money in Switzerland is not “black money”.

“People are afraid of a return of the drachma and then, depending on the exchange rate, losing up to half of their savings,” he noted.

So it is understandable they want to put their money in Switzerland, he said, “it’s their right and not illegal”.

Double-taxation agreement

Since the start of the year a new double-taxation agreement between Switzerland and Greece has entered into force, which provides a legal basis for the exchange of information in possible tax evasion cases. The first exploratory talks about a withholding tax have also been held.

“We get numerous questions about this from people who have a Swiss account,” said Bissias.

“Many are toying with the idea of closing their accounts if, once the tax accord enters into force, the average retroactive tax rate in Switzerland amounts to 25 per cent of their balance held at the bank.”

Dellas expects Greeks who have lots of money in Switzerland to possibly transfer their money to Singapore or the United Arab Emirates.

“Many tax evaders have probably already done so. The Greek government is likely to be disappointed,” he noted.

Gabriele Ochsenbein, swissinfo.ch
(Translated from German by Simon Bradley)

Going Underground in Hard Times

reed — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:00:12 +0000

[As countries across the world sink deeper into capitalist crisis, and relief, though promised, only leads to more "austerity" measures--cuts in basic services, growing unemployment, higher taxes--growing numbers have moved to the "informal", "underground", "grey market" economy, outside of official and governmental review, regulation, and control. In many countries this amounts to one-third to one-half of the economy. This article about the underground economy in Portugal traces such growth in response to official crisis and bankruptcy. -- Frontlines ed.]

—————————————————–

By Mario Queiroz

LISBON, Jan 28, 2012 (IPS) – The underground economy in Portugal is booming thanks to the steep increases in taxation and prices demanded by a “troika” of international creditors to address the country’s economic crisis.

In May 2011, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Union (EU) and the European Central Bank (ECB) loaned Portugal the equivalent of 103 billion dollars as a financial rescue package.

In return, the troika imposed draconian conditions on middle- and lower-income sectors of the population, and headed by the IMF took on a supervisory role over this southern European country’s economy.

Sheer survival instinct among those most affected by the austerity measures is driving them further into the parallel economy, which according to recent official figures amounted to 24.8 percent of GDP in 2010.

And it is continuing to grow, owing to the severe economic crisis from which there seems to be no way out, a study from the Faculty of Economics of the University of Porto concludes.

There are still no statistics for 2011, but economists who have analysed the situation and made their findings public concur that the informal economy grew last year, and is expected to grow again in 2012.

The rise of the informal economy mirrors the ongoing decline of the formal economy, amid rumours of a probable new tax hike that has still not been confirmed or denied by the rightwing government of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho.

Rising prices, taxes, social security contributions and unemployment, along with cuts in social benefits and health care, are the main drivers behind the flight to the underground economy.

Activities in the parallel economy are not registered in the statistics tracking the country’s wealth. One-quarter of economic production is left out of Portugal’s GDP, which is nominally 223.7 billion dollars a year, says the University of Porto study, released this month.

The underground economy generates more than 52.6 billion dollars a year – half the amount of the international troika’s bailout plan.

The study indicates that the size of the unreported economy in Portugal is larger than average for the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) countries, where it varies between 16 and 18 percent of GDP.

Portugal has the third largest underground economy relative to GDP in the EU, after Italy and Greece.

What all three countries have in common, and helps to explain the state of their economies, is high indirect taxation, high direct taxes on consumption and high unemployment, the study says.

Therefore, market competition between businesses is distorted and there is greater uncertainty about the stabilisation of the economy, it says.

In 1970, when the first studies were done on the black economy, its activities had a value of 9.3 percent of GDP. By 2010 it had grown to 24.8 percent of GDP – a gain of 15.5 percentage points in four decades.

Detailed analysis of the data leads to the conclusion that if taxes were paid in the parallel economy, Portugal’s fiscal deficit, which was 9.1 percent of GDP in 2010, would have been reduced to 2.9 percent of GDP.

Portugal’s deficit was the fourth largest within the eurozone, after Ireland, Greece and Spain.

Leaving tax revenue aside, simply adding the underground economy to the country’s declared GDP would have resulted in a deficit of 6.9 percent of GDP, 2.2 percentage points less than the 9.1 percent reported.

The distortion of economic statistics arising from the black economy has a negative impact, including downgrading by financial rating agencies like Moody’s, Fitch Ratings and Standard and Poor’s, which grade the viability of government bonds issued on the international market, based on official economic information.

All three agencies have consigned Portugal to the lowest grade, explaining that their recommendations are based on the oversized sovereign debt, which is 83 percent of GDP.

This, they say, is too high and they forecast that Portugal will not be able to pay it. Their verdict hampers new debt title issues from Lisbon, and when it does issue bonds, the interest rates are exorbitant.

Unmoved by these considerations, however, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) continue to dodge taxes, especially value added tax (VAT) which was raised from 18 to 23 percent over the past three years.

What business can earn a profit margin of 23 percent? is the question SMEs raise.

Few or none, they reply for themselves, so they pin their chances of survival on evading VAT completely, or only declaring half the value of their real business transactions. The same thing happens among independent workers and in the construction trade or repair services.

For their part, independent health professionals ask, when it is time for payment, “With or without an invoice?” and most often their fee is paid in cash, leaving no trace.

A very well-known dentist from Estoril, a city close to Lisbon, told IPS, “The only people who ask me for legal receipts are those who are already paying high premiums for private health insurance.”

Two or three years ago one had to make an appointment to see this dentist at least a month in advance. “Now, the waiting time is only two or three days, because people only go to the dentist when they can’t stand the pain any more,” he said.

Car mechanic Reginaldo Godoy held a similar view, as he complained to IPS that “business is very bad.”

“Previously, customers would try to keep their cars in good condition, having the brakes or the steering checked regularly. Now they only come when they have no alternative, like when they have been in a crash, or the engine isn’t working at all,” he said.

The crisis has also caused the government to redouble efforts to raise revenue, resorting to innovative solutions like huge vehicle inspection operations by the police.

A short trip to the supermarket frequently pits the car owner against a massive deployment of police at roundabouts, where they check drivers’ licenses, car registration, and the contents of trunks, in the hope of catching them in breach of some law.

Meanwhile, in neighbourhoods a long way from the big cities and in rural villages, citizens are complaining to the media that there is a dire shortage of law enforcement agents to deal with the surge in burglaries and muggings.

The Interior Ministry reported this month, with considerable satisfaction, that in 2011 police collected 105 million dollars in fines from car drivers.

(END)

Ice News–News from the Nordics: “Class safari shocks Stockholm snobs”

reed — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:34:45 +0000

30 January 2012

Residents of a wealthy Stockholm suburb have complained to the police about a tour agency’s plan to run ‘high-society safaris’ in their neighbourhood.

The bus trip, organised by Allt åt Alla (Everything for Everyone), aims to debunk the myth that Sweden is a classless nation by driving through the capital’s most densely populated area, Fisksätra, before taking their passengers to Saltsjöbaden to see how the other half live.

Not all of Saltsjöbaden’s well-to-do residents are happy about being a tourist attraction, however, and one has apparently filed an official complaint with the local police.

Not feeling much sympathy for the well-to-do, Ulla Krogh of Nacka Police told the local newspaper, Näcka-Värmdö Posten, that “Anyone is free to organise something like this”.

Highlights of the tour include a visit to the Grand Hotel, an ogle at the sea views from “Oscar’s” house, which featured in the comedy series Solsidan, and an audience with Rolf, the owner of Sweden’s most expensive home.

On its website, Allt åt Alla describes itself as a “revolutionary organisation” with an aim of developing a hate of the class system in sightseers. The Saltsjöbaden tours are proving popular and selling out quickly, according to the group.

Indian State’s war on the people, Stage Two: Army deployed for combat against Indian People

reed — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 05:14:10 +0000

Announcement of Public Meeting in Delhi by Forum Against War on People–

“Let’s Intensify our Opposition to the Indian State’s War on the People”

Speakers:

JAN MYRDAL the internationally acclaimed author will talk on the War on People in India

SUJATO BHADRA will speak on atrocities by Joint Forces in Jangalmahal in West Bengal

The Indian government’s war on people in central and eastern regions has entered its second phase with the deployment of the Indian army. The surreptitiously declared war on the people of this country codenamed Operation Green Hunt (OGH) which was launched in September 2009 by the Indian government is continuing unabated till today. In fact in the recent months, the ruling coalition at the Centre in connivance with political parties of all hues in power in the Central and Eastern states have intensified their brutal war on the poorest, most maginalized and oppressed people of the subcontinent. Contrary to the rhetoric of not deploying the Indian Army in direct combat, the Government of India has increased the number of troops in the region with the intent of crushing the growing people’s resistance against its policies. It is well known that the first batch of 2000 Army personnel were sent by the government to the forests of Narayanpur District in the Bastar on 3 June 2011 with a plan to occupy an area of 600 square kilometres, albeit in the name of Jungle Warfare Training. Just six months later, another 2500 personnel descended on the forests of Bastar on 4 November 2011. Though the Central and Chhattisgarh governments maintain that they have set up this so-called Jungle Warfare Training Centre in Bastar merely to put pressure on the Maoists and to dominate the region militarily, the real purpose is to hand over the vast swathes of mineral-rich forested lands to the Multinational Companies and to evict the people who have stood up to defend their jal-jangal-zameen, their very existence.

The involvement of the army in this war is more than what meet the eyes. Senior army officials were appointed long before OGH was initiated two-and-half years ago to guide and coordinate the ‘counter-insurgency’ operations involving more than two hundred thousand police-paramilitary joint forces. The launch of OGH further +institutionalised the Indian Army’s role under the Unified Command Structure of joint operations of the four different armed forces – the civil police of various states, Special Armed forces raised by different states (like the C-60 of Maharashtra, SPOs of Chhattisgarh, SOG of Odisha and Greyhounds of AP), paramilitary forces under the Union Government and the Indian Army along with the Air-force and the Navy. The Union Government’s public posture that the Army will not be engaged in combat with the Naxalites is only to hoodwink the democratic sections of the public in the country and to safeguard its image in the international domain as the much-advertised “largest democracy” in the world. Such claims fly on the face of the license to kill, handed out by the Indian government to the Air-force and the Army: while the former reserves the ‘right’ to commit aerial bombardments in the name of ‘self-defense’, the latter does not even require such fig-leaf of an excuse as it has been made clear that the army will not wait to be first shot by the Naxalites, but will be the first to fire upon anyone it suspects to be a Naxalite. Indian Army’s operations are being expanded in the war zones where the adivasis and other communities are resisting the sell-out of natural resources to international and domestic monopolies, displacing and decimating the local people. In order to deceive the democrats in the country and outside, the rulers – who are fighting against the most deprived sections of the people – have tried to justify their war as an act of curbing ‘left-wing extremists’ or Naxalites / Maoists. No doubt Naxalites / Maoists are part of the larger resistant movement today in all these regions, but this does not justify the ruling elite’s war on the citizens of this country.

Due to the stiff resistance faced by the Indian state’s Armed forces from the wretched of the earth in these regions, the ‘democratic’ Indian state has followed the policy of raising private armed vigilante gangs. That the corporate sector in India also has time and again asked the Government to further institutionalise such gangs through concrete material and other supports so as to enable the easy loot and plunder of the resources in these regions is an open secret that few have noticed. The list of such private armed groups formed and led by the joint armed forces of the government in central and eastern India is a long one: Salwa Judum and Koya Commandos (now legalised) in Chhattisgarh, Sendra, Nagarik Suraksha Samiti, PLFI, Jharkhand Prastuti Committee, Tritiya Prastuti Committee in Jharkhand, Shanti Sangams in South Odisha, and Harmad Bahini or what is now called Bhairab Bahini in West Bengal, and so on. And these are only a few of the vast number of private armed gangs being propped up by the government to kill and brutalise our fellow citizens by spending the tax-payer’s money. All these forces are under the directions of the Unified Command of the Indian government and the Home Ministry. These publicly-funded private gangs are killing thousands of people branding them as Naxalites/Maoists. If we add the private armed gangs maintained by the local warlords, the mining mafia and other corporate houses supported and patronised by the Indian state, the number of common people who are resisting their oppression and are killed by the government forces in the War on People shoots up exponentially.

The War on People is not restricted to the rural and mineral-rich forested regions of India alone, but has also reached its urban enclaves. It has spread to encompass all the urban and semi-urban regions from where support and solidarity is extended to the rural regions – the mainstay of the resistance movements. Democratic voices are stifled and choked everywhere. Thousands of democratic individuals and hundreds of peoples’ organisations that boldly raise their voice of protest against this War on People are jailed, tortured, threatened or killed in fake encounters. It is important to note here the detailed statement of the Minister of State for Home Affairs Jitendra Singh in the two houses of Parliament showing organisations such as Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF), Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners (CRPP), People’s Democratic Front of India (PDFI), Democratic Students Union (DSU), CPI (ML) (Naxalbari) and other parties and people’s organisations as “being watched” closely by the eyes and ears of the government. That “being watched closely by the eyes and ears” of the government is to provoke a sense of siege mentality in the psyche of the general public vis-à-vis such organisations so as to segregate them from the vast democratic mass movements that they are part of. Further the minister has gone ahead to brand RDF, CRPP, PDFI and DSU as the frontal organisations of the CPI (Maoist). It is evident that all these organisations have been successful in rallying the voices against the murderous campaign of the Indian state to facilitate this largest land grab ever since the time of Columbus let alone the attendant loot and plunder of resources of the people. So it becomes inevitable for the Indian State to see to it that such voices are criminalised by profiling them as ‘anti-development’ and hence against the ‘national’ interest. This fascistic tendency to supress the democratic voices is a needed strategy for the belligerent ruling forces that are entangled in crisis with the deepening economic crisis world-wide.

The Indian rulers facilitate the unbridled plunder of people’s resources and labour to help the imperialist countries come out of their economic crisis, while the people fall prey to starvation, diseases and planned genocides of the state. This situation is certainly no better than the old colonial policy since Columbus and his brand of land-grab that decimated numerous indigenous tribal communities. The only answer is to intensify our opposition to Indian State’s War on People in the name of Operation Green Hunt.

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About JAN MYRDAL, speaker at the Forum: The Swedish author and columnist, Jan Myrdal, son of Nobel laureates Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, and a central figure in the protest movement against the Vietnam War, has penned more than 80 books, among which are Confessions of a Disloyal European (1968), Report from a Chinese Village, The Silk Road and India Waits (1986). He has written fiction, plays and books on literature, art, politics.

He is a prominent supporter of the civil liberties movements in various countries, a trenchant critic of US imperialism and Israeli colonial settlements in the Middle East. He has also made a number of feature films and TV documentaries.

Two years ago, at the age of 83, Jan Myrdal travelled in the tribal heartland of Bastar and personally interacted with the tribal people and the leadership of CPI (Maoist). His book Red Star Over India is an account of his trip which deftly combines India’s present with its past. The English version the book is released in the Kolkata Book Fair on 28 February 2012.

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Forum Against War on People: Contact: forumagainstwaronpeople@gmail.com, mobile: 8800100490, 9810081228, 9268708291

Source: http://www.icawpi.org/en/peoples-resistance/statements/824-lets-intensify-our-opposition-to-the-indian-states-war-on-the-people

Syria: Internal violence and the West’s external players

reed — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:27:40 +0000

[Amid heavily distorted and censored news accounts of events in Syria--overwhelmingly crafted to support one of the opposing sides--this report explores the maneuverings between the Arab League and NATO, which have not found their way into US/EU media, for the most part. This tells an important part of the story. Another part is the ongoing and shifting relations between Syria's Assad regime and the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Lebanon's Hezbollah--their closest allies--and that story is similarly untold. Finally, the views of Syrian rebels who are largely unorganized and have no affiliation with or allegience to external forces, are not heard in the media which serves Assad, nor in the media which serves the GCC and NATO. -- Frontlines ed.]

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NA31Ak04.html
January 31, 2012

What is the GCC up to in Syria?
By Pepe Escobar

So the Arab League has a new draft United Nations Security Council resolution to “solve” the Syrian saga. [ 1]

World public opinion may be fooled into believing this is an altruistic Arab solution to an Arab problem. Not really.

First of all this is a draft resolution of NATOGCC – that symbiosis between selected North Atlantic Treaty Organization members and selected petromonarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council. By now, after their “success” in blasting regime change into Libya, NATOGCC should be well known as the axis between the European poodles of the Pentagon and the six monarchies that compose the GCC, also known as Gulf Counter-revolution Club.

This draft UN resolution goes one step beyond a so-called Arab League transition plan laid out over a week ago. Now the spin is of a “political roadmap” that essentially means President Bashar al-Assad voluntarily stepping out, his vice president installed in power for a transition, the formation of a national unity government, and free and fair elections with international supervision.

According to the Foreign Minister of Qatar, Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, “The president will delegate his first vice president the full power to work with the national unity government to enable it to perform its task in the transitional period.”

Sounds very civilized – except that it masquerades the real agenda of UN-imposed regime change. A quick look at the draft resolution also reveals a two-week deadline for Assad to get out of Dodge; if not, expect hell, “in consultation” with the Arab League.

“Arab” League is now a fiction; what’s really in charge is the Arab Gulf league, or GCC league; in practice, the House of Saud. Even aspiring regional superpower Qatar plays second fiddle. And everyone else, they are just extras.

So here we have the House of Saud and its Gulf minions detailing a road map for regime change followed by full Western parliamentary democracy, and places like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait defending human rights in Arab lands. It’s as if this whole thing was a joint plan concocted by dadaist Tristan Tzara and surrealist Andre Breton with a Monty Python twist.

Stuff your Somalia remix

Not surprisingly, the Syrian government rejected the draft resolution as a “blatant intervention in its internal affairs”, according to the SANA news agency. The Syrian ambassador to the UN, Bashar Ja’afari, was even more graphic; “Syria will not be Libya; Syria will not be Iraq; Syria will not be Somalia; Syria will not be a failing state.”

BRICS member Russia – which alongside China had already vetoed a previous Western-redacted resolution – has already buried this one. For starters, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov couldn’t understand why the Arab League suspended its monitoring mission in Syria this past Saturday. Instead, Lavrov would “support an increased number of observers”.

Russia – which in no time learned the lessons of the open-ended UN resolution on Libya – has its own draft resolution which, according to Russian UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin, privileges a “Syrian-led political process”, not “an Arab League-imposed outcome of a political process that has not yet taken place”, or, worse yet, “regime change” a la Libya.

Russia – unlike the West – ascribes the now non-stop violence in Syria to both the Assad regime and the “rebels”. Even the GCC League has somewhat admitted that there are shabbihah (armed goons) on both sides, those on the “rebel” side affiliated with the already discredited Free Syrian Army.

That tray of sweets is all mine
Even though there are no objective conditions whatsoever for a NATO bombing of Syria, the NATOGCC + Israel geopolitical axis will pursue its objectives relentlessly.

The objectives are vast; exercising total control over any Arab Spring-related transition (as in the case of Yemen); preventing any changes to the status quo (as in pre-emption in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco); outright repression (as in the case of Bahrain); and preferably getting their cake and eating it too (as in the case of Libya).

But Syria is infinitely more complex; because of the Iranian connection; because BRICS members Russia and China will block any regime change scheme; because there have been no significant cracks among the Syrian military; and because the Assad regime is expert in navigating the divisions between a Sunni majority and the Alawite minority.

So the GCC League was successful in Yemen – controlling the “transition” and even having the dictator Ali Abdulla Saleh sent to the United States. It has been relatively successful in Egypt; even though the head of the snake (Hosni Mubarak) was kicked out, the snake is very much alive and kicking (the military establishment), and to top it off, the new parliament boasts a huge Islamist majority (our heart goes out to the youngsters who actually started everything in Tahrir Square and are left with nothing).

Even the venerable stones in the Umayyad mosque in Damascus know that the Syrian National Council (conveniently exiled in NATO members Turkey and France) is being financed by the House of Saud and Qatar. So expect more GCC-financed weapons to continue raising hell in Syria – now even in some Damascus suburbs. No wonder the GCC League had to pull out its “monitors”; they would have to roundly denounce the very people they are arming.

Even the Playstation King of Jordan – who was the first Arab potentate on the record to want to topple Assad (no wonder Jordan was invited to be a GCC member) – has been forced to admit, “I don’t see Syria going through many changes.” King Abdullah at least had the good sense to observe, “It’s a very complicated puzzle and there is no simple solution. If you can imagine Iraq being a simple solution … and it’s different in Libya, so it has everybody stumped and I don’t think anybody has a clear answer on what to do about Syria.”

By the way, there are pro-democracy protests in GCC-addicted Jordan virtually every day; but not a peep will be heard about it in Western corporate media. “Liberated” Libya totally disappeared from the Western triumphalist narrative – even as Amnesty International now has evidence of systematic torture in makeshift mini-gulags, and Medicines sans Frontiers (MSF) decided to leave Misrata for good after being asked by those formerly known as “rebels” to treat victims of torture, so they could be tortured again.

Which leads us to the ghastly equivalence between the “transitional councils” in both Libya and Syria. Their undisguised masters were – and are – NATOGCC. Russia may have its own agenda in Syria, but at least the Russians know hardcore violence is being served as much by the Assad regime as by the Syrian National Council and the Free Syria Army.

King Playstation at least got one thing right; no one has a clue on what to do about Syria. So it’s Assad on one side against NATOGCC on the other, with average Syrians – covering a wide spectrum of opinion – squeezed in the middle. Rumors swirl about a possible plan C; a bazaar-style deal, over endless cups of green tea, between Assad and the House of Saud. That’s unlikely; the GCC League wants the whole tray of sweets – and to eat them too.

Note 1. See here.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

Greek puppet/”minister of economics” signed onto IMF “austerity” plan without reading it

reed — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 07:06:15 +0000

Minister Manolis Chrysochoidis. Photo by Flickr user Piazza del Popolo (CC BY 2.0).

Shock and awe awaited Greek citizens on Monday January 23, 2012, when Louka Katseli, former minister of labour and social security (2010) and minister of economy, competitiveness and shipping (2009), revealed that she had had only three hours to read the IMF memorandum tackling the country’s debt crisis.

Michalis Chrysochoidis, current minister for development, competitiveness and shipping and former minister of citizen protection, admitted on a morning television show interview [el] that he signed the IMF memorandum without having read it at all, arguing that “simply, he had other obligations during that time, as he was fighting against crime”:

Minister Manolis Chrysochoidis. Photo by Flickr user Piazza del Popolo (CC BY 2.0).

News spread quickly on the web reacting to the remarks, including extremely negative comments and derogatory insults from netizens, expressing their disdain for the political system, and mocking the minister’s excuse.

Within one to two hours, the case became a world trending topic via the Twitter hashtag #de_diavasa_to_mnimonio_giati (I didn’t read the memorandum because…):

Uruguay: Landless Peasants with 80 Families Occupy and Take Over Farm in Northern Uruguay

reed — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 06:02:54 +0000

Written by MercoPress

Wednesday, 18 January 2012

The landless peasants’ movement has reached Uruguay: the self called “shaggy” ones, with eighty families, have taken over a 400 hectares farm in the extreme north of the country Artigas, and have been occupying the land since.

“We have been through seven years of Broad Front government and very few peasants or paid farm hands have had access to a plot of land”, said Jorge Rodas president of the Union of Sugar Workers from Artigas, (UTAA).

The union was originally founded in the sixties by the Uruguayan urban guerrilla leader Raul Sendic and whose organization now as a political party belongs to the ruling catch-all Broad Front coalition which extends from the conservative Christian Democrats to Communists, Socialists, anarchists, Trotskyites and obviously the former guerrilla, whose current leader was elected in 2009 president of the country, Jose Mujica.

The idea of the ‘shaggies”, very similar to the MST, landless movement in Brazil and who have introduced the 80 families, is to remain for some time to send “a strong message to the government and the people of Uruguay”.

Rodas said that the organization keeps growing in number and is targeting farms minimally exploited or belonging to absentee landlords. “This is to tell government that if we have the strength to occupy private land, we will continue growing in the number of people who support us and are joining our movement”

“When we occupy a private farm is to tell government the problem faced by farm hands, by landless workers. We want government or whoever, to find a solution to the issue”, said Rodas who claims UTAA has 2.000 members.

Three leaders of UTAA have been summoned to court and in a brief release argue that the occupied farm belongs to a “money lender who gobbled the plots of small farmers”.

Artigas to the north of Uruguay and bordering Argentina and Brazil has an economy based on farming and non industrial mining, amethysts. However it also has sugar cane plantations and a sugar mill that has been exposed to political turmoil for over six decades.

The UTAA effectively was created in the sixties by Raul Sendic the founder of the urban Tupamaros guerrilla movement, and sugar cane planting since has been a sensitive issue in Uruguay. However the main fact is that growing sugar cane in the north of Uruguay is simply not profitable compared to the huge efficient crops of Brazil and Argentina.

However since winning the election in 2004 and repeating in 2009, the ruling Broad Front coalition has made it a political question to ensure sugar cane plantations, this time mainly for a bio-fuel project and has promised to distribute land to the “shaggies”, which so far has not happened.

So even when the occupation of farms in the north of Uruguay, in the sugar cane area of Bella Union can be interpreted as a repeat of the well organized Landless Movement in Brazil, it is in reality yet another infighting dispute among the different groups of the ruling coalition.

Some groups insist land must be distributed, as promised, while other underline that private property and the rules of the game must be respected if Uruguay is to keep receiving investments. To this must be added a local ingredient: the Governor of Artigas, Patricia Ayala who belongs to the ruling coalition has seen her standing in the public opinion polls plunge.

Meanwhile, the Uruguayan Treasury is having to pay the bill of the dispute: most of the so-called ‘shaggies” and belonging to the government bio-fuel project to boost sugar cane plantation in small farms or cooperatives have been incorporated as government employees.