Geography Archives: Africa

  The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, attended the conference to condemn the Israeli government’s brutal and repressive policy against the Palestinians.  The European delegates walked out when he called the government of Israel “racist,” but the Latin Americans stayed.  The United States and eight other countries boycotted the event. The Israeli government’s stance against […]

  Conor Foley, The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, Verso, 2008. All is not well within the world of humanitarian aid organisations.  In his new book, The Thin Blue Line, Conor Foley, an experienced aid worker, discusses many of the problems associated with the burgeoning relationship between contemporary aid organisations and recent […]

BEIRUT, 16 April 2009 (IRIN) — Eighty Ethiopian women have been in Tripoli Women’s Prison in north Lebanon for over a year, accused of not having a passport which was either taken from them when they started as domestic workers, or which they never had in the first place. Most were arrested on the street […]

Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror is the most ambitious book yet on the Darfur crisis.  Unlike the vast majority of other writing on the crisis, which is political science, human rights, or ethnographic narrative, specific to the Darfurian or the Sudanese situation, Mamdani places Darfur in deep and […]

Dear CCR Supporter, On May 26, 2009, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), co-counsel EarthRights International (ERI), and other human rights attorneys will bring oil giant Shell to federal court in New York for the start of a landmark trial for corporate accountability.  CCR is pleased to make two exciting announcements as we draw nearer […]

Most of Darfur’s internally-displaced camps are urban settlements in all but name.  In geographical terms the most striking impact of the last seven years has been to change Darfur from being overwhelmingly scattered rural villages and hamlets to huge extended cities.  In the wake of the abrupt expulsion of the international NGOs which provided a […]

Chilling testimony by Israeli soldiers substantiates charges that Israel’s Gaza Strip assault entailed grave violations of international law.  The emergence of a predominantly right-wing, nationalist government in Israel suggests that there may be more violations to come.  Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians also constituted war crimes, but do not excuse Israel’s transgressions.  While […]

Washington, DC (April 2) — The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and allied organizations participating in a national boycott campaign against Motorola welcomed news that Motorola Israel Ltd. has sold its Government Electronics Department, which made several products that enable Israel’s military occupation of and human rights abuses against Palestinians. The reported sale […]

  The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has issued the following statement: Investigate the Israeli Missile Contract The Rs. 10,000 crore missile production deal with an Israeli company, the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), has now been exposed as a deal involving massive kickbacks besides being an unnecessary contract.  The Left parties […]

Background Raymond Deane, “A Public Stoning in Germany,” Electronic Intifada, 6 March 2009; and Yossi Bartal, “The German Left and Israel,” Alternative Information Center, 18 March 2009. We are peace activists of Jewish background.  Some of us typically identify in this way; others of us do not.  But we all object to those who claim […]

In light of the rampant extremism and militarism around the world, nothing is more dangerous than the manipulative alteration of truth to reach certain political ends.  In the final analysis, it is this tactic that facilitates the demonization process that blurs ideologies and beliefs in the West and the Islamic world.  And no concept is […]

Murali Balaji, The Professor and the Pupil: The Politics and Friendship of W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, New York:  Nation Books, 2007. W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson have been poorly served by their biographers.  David Levering Lewis and Martin Duberman found these two US communist revolutionaries about as congenial […]

Dear People of Gaza, I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize for doing absolutely nothing in the last few months to stop your suffering. Although I cannot feel your pain, I have seen it on the news.  I’ve read that 1.5 million of you civilians endured weeks of being fired on and bombed with […]

See, also, Hajir Palaschi, “Interview with Shahla Lahiji on Women’s Presence in the Labor Market: No Vocation Must Be Prohibited for Women,” Trans. Yoshie Furuhashi, MRZine, 18 February 2008. The Iranian Revolution and its aftermath have generated many debates, one of which pertains to the effects on women’s labor force participation and employment patterns.  For […]

  As the financial crisis that erupted in 2007 unfolds in an economic cataclysm which, it is now clear, is unprecedented in the history of capitalism, world leaders without exception reveal themselves as politically and ideologically bankrupt in their efforts to bring it under control.  This is most obviously demonstrated by their insistence on the […]

23.02.2009 I hope you will understand that after everything I have been through I am neither physically nor mentally capable of facing the media on the moment of my arrival back to Britain.  Please forgive me if I make a simple statement through my lawyer.  I hope to be able to do better in days […]

  Since February 2003, Iran’s nuclear program has undergone what the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) itself admits to be the most intrusive inspection in its entire history.  After thousands of hours of inspections by some of the most experienced IAEA experts, the Agency has verified time and again that (1) there is no evidence […]

  Joel Kovel holds the Alger Hiss chair in social studies at Bard College and is the author of Overcoming Zionism among other titles.  He has recently been informed by the college that his contract will not be extended beyond July 1.  In the statement below, he argues that the termination is due to his […]

Introduction Over the last two months, cholera has broken out in a number of provinces in South Africa.  Thousands of people have been infected and over fifty people have already died.1  Initially, a number of politicians, including parliamentarians from the right-wing Democratic Alliance (DA), tried to blame Zimbabweans — who were fleeing the economic meltdown, […]

  The Middle East has always been a difficult challenge for Western human rights organizations, particularly those seeking influence or funding in the United States.  The pressure to go soft on US allies is in some respects reminiscent of Washington’s special pleading for Latin American terror regimes in the 1970s and 1980s.  In the case […]