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off to feed the people-smooches
ps. oh, really carrol!
Gleaned from www.commondreams.com......
War Study Censures Military in Guatemala Panel Blames Army For Most Atrocities By Douglas Farah Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, February 26, 1999; Page A19
An independent commission formed to investigate widespread human rights abuses during Guatemala's 34-year civil war accused the U.S.-backed military yesterday of responsibility for the vast majority of the crimes, including murder, torture, rape, destruction of Indian villages and widespread state terrorism.
The final report of the Historical Clarification Commission, which grew out of the U.N.-sponsored peace process that brought an end to the war in 1996, also accused Marxist-led guerrilla forces of carrying out summary executions and kidnappings.
"The main purpose of the report is to place on record Guatemala's recent bloody past," said the report, authored by German jurist Christian Tomuschat and Guatemalans Edgar Balsells and Otilia Lux Coti. "Although many are aware that Guatemala's armed confrontation caused death and destruction, the gravity of the abuses suffered repeatedly by its people has yet to become part of the institutional consciousness. . . . The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages . . . are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala's history."
In contrast to the Cold War-era Marxist insurgencies in neighboring El Salvador and Nicaragua, the Guatemalan guerrillas never threatened to overthrow the government, although the war there went on longer and claimed more lives than the other two. Like the Truth Commission report in El Salvador, the report did not name individuals responsible for the atrocities.
At the request of the commission, the Clinton administration declassified and released about 1,000 sensitive documents to help the commission in its investigations. Unlike the government of El Salvador (and the contra rebels in Nicaragua), the Guatemalan army did not receive large-scale aid from Washington; still, the commission found that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some state operations."
The report, titled "Guatemala, Memory of Silence," found that about 200,000 people -- the overwhelming majority of them civilians -- were killed or "disappeared" during the war, a far higher number than a previous estimate of 150,000. Of the 42,000 civilian killings investigated by the panel, it found the army responsible for 93 percent, while 3 percent were blamed on the rebels and 4 percent were unsolved.
"When we as commissioners formed this commission, each of us knew generally what had occurred in Guatemala during the armed confrontation," Tomuschat said in Guatemala City, according to news agency reports. "But none of us could have imagined the dimensions of the tragedy."
The report documented 626 massacres committed by the army in the 1980s, during the height of its scorched-earth policy against Indian peasant communities believed to be sympathetic to the rebels. Documenting the atrocities, the report found the army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their dwellings, livestock and crops" and said that in the northern part of the country, where the Mayan population is largest, the army carried out a systematic campaign of "genocide."
The report also criticized the judicial system for allowing the crimes to go unpunished, saying that by tolerating such behavior "the judiciary became functionally inoperative . . . and lost all credibility as guarantor of an effective legal system."
The report placed special emphasis on its findings that not only were Mayan communities targeted by the army and its paramilitary allies, but that "the rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice."
"The majority of human rights violations occurred with the knowledge or by order of the highest authorities of the state," the report concluded. "The responsibility for a large part of these violations, with respect to the chain of military command as well as the political and administrative responsibility, reaches the highest levels of the army and successive governments."
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
Published Thursday, February 25, 1999
Commentary: Secretary Rubin's double standard Matthew Miller / Los Angeles Times Syndicate
Robert Rubin wasn't aware of the irony, but you can be sure that jobless workers in Brazil, Thailand, Indonesia and Korea would have choked on the U.S. Treasury secretary's words had they heard them.
It happened at a press conference the other day before Rubin left for the G-7 finance ministers' meeting in Bonn. A reporter asked Rubin what he thought of a French proposal to manage currency movements among Europe, the United States and Japan to boost international stability.
Rubin frowned on the idea. Why? Because, he explained, "if our currency is weak at a time when our economy is weak -- and the two might naturally go together -- we would then be required . . . to raise interest rates [to defend the currency] at the very time that our economy is weak. That seems to us counterproductive."
Oops! Michael Kinsley said famously that a "gaffe" comes when public officials accidentally utter the truth. Rubin's flub here was to admit that the policy Treasury and the International Monetary Fund have imposed on struggling economies since the global crisis began is something we would never stand for ourselves.
And for obvious reasons. You don't need a Nobel Prize in economics to know that forcing a country to raise interest rates during a downturn is "counterproductive." Third World officials can be forgiven for screaming: Now he tells us!
The ironies become more painful now that we know Treasury shares blame for the buildup to the meltdown. As a major series in the New York Times reported last week, Treasury was the cheerleader for Wall Street interests that wanted access to emerging countries' capital markets -- despite warnings that semicorrupt banking systems and primitive regulatory regimes couldn't handle a huge influx of First World cash.
In other words, to pad Wall Street's bottom line, the U.S. government helped spur the excessive lending that turned into capital flight at the first sign of trouble, plunging developing economies into chaos. As one administration official told me recently, when it came to the mantra of "orderly financial market liberalization": "There could have been more emphasis on the 'orderly' and less on the 'liberalization.' "
What's to be done now? Economists Paul Krugman of MIT and Barry Eichengreen of Berkeley argue in the debut issue of the Milken Institute Review that conventional wisdom on the sanctity of free capital mobility needs rethinking.
"Fear of speculators," Krugman writes, "has forced Brazil (and many other small economies) not only to live with the risk of recession but to follow policies that will deepen the prospective slump."
Worse, Krugman has explained, the dilemma is usually circular. Brazil's budget, for example, is actually in "primary surplus," meaning that if you don't count interest on the national debt, revenues exceed spending. Yet the high interest rates required to bribe investors not to dump Brazil's currency sends the deficit soaring (since much of the nation's debt is short-term). Then investors turn around and cite Brazil's ballooning deficit -- caused by the high interest rates and depressed economy they imposed -- as the reason they lack confidence in Brazil and must flee!
Krugman and Eichengreen say that to avoid such no-win situations, developing countries should limit short-term capital inflows in the first place.
"Developing countries are simply not ready for prime time," Eichengreen writes. "Their regulators lack administrative ability. Their financial markets are shallow. They cannot borrow abroad in domestic currency . . . . (S)o long as these problems are defining features of emerging markets, there will be solid arguments for capital controls to limit risk and to make room for fiscal and monetary stimulus in a slump."
While the G-7 resists such heresy for now, the need for emerging markets to limit short-term borrowing may be the one sure lesson to come from today's mess.
The other is that without being open to ways that help reeling nations avoid the speculators' stranglehold, Rubin's double standard could provoke a backlash against America's continued world economic leadership.
© Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All rights reserved.