While votes were still being tallied on Nov. 7, The American Civil Liberties Union suggested President Obama halt drone attacks. President Obama has ordered nearly 300 drone strikes during his tenure, six times more than his predecessor, according to NBC News.

Americans may one day regret using drones while other countries — like China, Iran or Pakistan — are in the process of obtaining the technology. The international community needs to regulate drone warfare before their proliferation can get out of hand.

While the current code of international law allows nations to declare war on terrorist groups, members of these groups can be killed only if they act violently against a state. Obama has stretched the law by repeatedly targeting individuals all over the Muslim world, who may only be small time members of terrorist groups, if at all.

International law needs to be updated for the use of remote controlled weapon systems like drones. Remote attacks via unmanned aircraft are currently not considered warfare because boots are technically never placed on soil. International law will most likely be disregarded as drones proliferate worldwide.

Drone strikes cause too many civilian casualties. According to a Stanford and New York University report on drone use, the percentage of “high level terrorists” killed by drones is at an estimated two percent.

This data clearly shows that drones are ineffective, yet because their use is unchecked by the international community, world heads of state can order strikes without fear of repercussion.

President Obama’s record of extrajudicial killings has set dangerous precedent for our next commander in chief. Drones have been used to kill American citizens, some of them harmless, like noted terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year old son.

While drones provide a clear technological advantage for America’s military, the rest of the world is not far behind. In the summer, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was seen parading on Iranian television with a completely intact drone, while first world countries, like France and the United Kingdom already have drones stocked in their arsenals.

The international community must send a message that this use of technology is off limits for warfare. Like chemical weapons or landmines before it, an outright ban or strong restrictions will prove beneficial for human rights.

The technology also has practical uses. Drones have been used to gather data to optimize grape growing for winemakers, and also have surfaced as flying toys for children. But the fact is, military use is more widespread than consumer use.

American consumer technology may make people’s lives better nationally, but for those living in the Muslim world, this American technology has proven to be destructive. Let’s develop consumer use for drones with restrictions rather than allowing this trend to continue.

Carl Wilkens speaks to students about his time spent in Rwanda during the genocide. The event was put on by the UCSC chapter of the anti-genocide organization STAND in the Merrill Cultural Center. Photo by Sal Ingram.

Carl Wilkens was the last American to stay in Rwanda during the mid-1990s genocide. Now he dedicates his time to spreading awareness about genocide to students and supporters as a full-time speaker. Earlier this week, Wilkens spoke at UC Santa Cruz’s Merrill Cultural Center about his experiences.

Wilkens was invited to UCSC by STAND, a national anti-genocide coalition with over 850 chapters. The group spreads awareness about Darfur and other genocide-afflicted regions of the world, including Southern Sudan, Burma and the Congo. STAND, which also has an international division that extends to more than 25 countries, has a chapter at UCSC.

Passionate about bringing awareness to places like Santa Cruz, Wilkens shared his experiences in Rwanda with the hopes of not just educating students, but getting them involved in a more direct way.

“If I can just encourage five, six, a dozen [students] to go [to Rwanda], maybe that’s my role right now,” Wilkens said.

In 1990, Wilkens moved to Rwanda and did not return to the United States until 1996. It was eight years before he got involved in anti-genocide work and became an adventist pastor. He was interviewed by PBS’ Frontline for a documentary called “Ghosts of Rwanda” in 2003, and since then has spoken at many events. In January of 2008, Wilkens decided to become a full-time speaker.

Wilkens’ speech included stories about near-death experiences and relationships he built with Rwandans during the genocide. He spoke about how the Rwandan genocide gained attention for a short time and then gradually faded out of people’s minds.

He disagrees with the idea that war or genocide can be viewed as simply a fact of life.

“People think it was inevitable, Wilkens said. “I don’t want to live like that. I would rather live with false optimism. We settle for less, we get less.”

Chiara Cabiglio is the co-president of the STAND chapter at UCSC. Two years ago, Cabiglio saw Wilkens speak at Pledge to Protect, STAND’s national convention, and earlier this year asked him to speak at UCSC.

Carl Wilkens speaks to students about his time spent in Rwanda during the genocide. The event was put on by the UCSC chapter of the anti-genocide organization STAND in the Merrill Cultural Center. Photo by Sal Ingram.

“He sounded really enthusiastic to come,” Cabiglio said. “It was perfect.”

Cabiglio and her co-president Mollie Murphy coordinated Wilkens’ stay in Santa Cruz to include speeches at Pacific Collegiate School — a local charter school — and a UCSC psychology class called Children and War, along with his presentation at Merrill.

Wilkens’ presentations were funded by a donation from the national STAND organization, of which financial advisor Nicole Pokojny was in charge.

“We put on events so that people will become more aware and maybe get involved themselves,” Pokojny said. “It’s an outlet for people who are interested in anti-genocide movements.”

The local chapter of STAND holds weekly meetings consisting of a group of eight to 10 regular students. Last year the chapter was inactive, but this fall, co-presidents Murphy and Cabiglio started it up again.

To conduct outreach for this event, STAND at the UCSC campus made flyers and banners, created a Facebook event page and talked to local newspapers.

Sangetha Komar, a second-year student at UCSC, attended the event and has been trying to become more engaged with STAND’s organization.

“A lot of the members are graduating seniors, and I hope to get involved,” Komar said. “Coming out and spreading awareness is key.”

Third-year Yaneli Torres also attended the event. Both Komar and Torres planned to “like” Wilkens’ Facebook page for his organization, World Outside My Shoes.

“I wanted to learn more,” Torres said. “I learned a lot and I’m really happy I came.”

Illustration by Kristian Talley.

Thirty years after she was adopted as an infant from Korea and brought by her parents to the United States, a mother of three in Arizona is facing deportation to Korea, a country she barely knows. Meanwhile, on an Internet message board, a 49-year-old adopted woman is seeking help determining why, after more than 30 years of voting, working and paying taxes in the United States, her request for educational financial aid has been denied and she is being told she is not a citizen.

These two women are among the many who, as the State Department website puts it, “are considered to be foreign-born, non-citizens and do not even know it.”

If the problem of adopted U.S. residents being unaware of their lack of citizenship is significant enough for the federal government to freely admit that many have difficulty finding jobs or even face deportation, it is fair to wonder why more is not being done to remedy this problem.

While it is true that the information is only a Google search away, it is unfair to expect otherwise unaware residents to take these steps to fix a problem they don’t know they have. A simple publicity campaign, a press release or a few commercials alerting the public to this issue might have prevented what the Immigration and Customs Enforcement calls a “large number” of deportations of adoptees who were unaware of their non-citizen status.

Legal residents can be returned to their native countries if convicted of drug possession, prostitution or other similar crimes or if sentenced to serve more than a year of jail time. This looming threat of deportation at even the slightest indiscretion has sparked serious debate over the past few years, especially as the Obama administration has increased the detention and deportation of “criminal aliens,” a term that encompasses many legal residents with low-level drug convictions.

Those unaware of their immigrant status make the decision to smoke marijuana or shoplift with the expectation that, like their peers with legal citizenship, the consequences would at most be brief jail time. Instead, they face deportation.

The case of the Arizona woman facing deportation to Korea, after being convicted of theft, has received significant media coverage. While much attention is paid to the fact that she has children who will go to foster care, and that her criminal acts only barely met the parameters for deportation, disturbingly little concern is given to the side note at the end of the article: Her situation is not unprecedented.

She was not the first, and will certainly not be the last, foreign-born adopted U.S. resident to live much of her adult life under the impression that she was a citizen, because she had been given no reason to assume otherwise.

The movement for equality and democracy in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca has come close to a standstill in the last few months.

At an event entitled “The People’s Resistance in Oaxaca: Short Films and Reportback” held in the Santa Cruz Veteran’s Hall on Friday, March 2, a large crowd gathered to hear the latest news from Santa Cruz travelers and reporters Vladimir Flores and Shannon Young.

The event began with a number of short films showcasing some of the most dramatic points of the movement, including the 700,000 strong mega-march through the zocalo, or plaza, last June, and the day the people of Oaxaca stopped the Federal Protective Police (PFP) from entering the University of Oaxaca on Nov.12.

In Oaxaca, the last year has been an extremely tumultuous one.  A teacher’s strike calling for higher wages and breakfast and shoes for children brought to light some of the major failings of the Oaxacan government, including the suspicious election policies of governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz.  The strike avalanched into a statewide movement demanding an end to Ruiz Ortiz’s government. The struggle was organized principally by the Popular Association of the People of Oaxaca (APPO by its Spanish initials) – a group that grew out of Section 22 of the Mexican National Teacher’s Union (SNTE).

Shannon Young, one of the speakers at the Santa Cruz forum, spoke about her coverage of a three-week-long march from Oaxaca to Mexico City. The march, which was held in support of a resolution to allow investigations into Oaxacan election policies, ended with demonstrations in front of the Mexican Senate.

“These were just ordinary townspeople who marched for three weeks straight and slept using sidewalk curbs as pillows,” Shannon said. “They were a lot older than me and I had trouble keeping up.  After the resolution failed, they went on a hunger strike for a week.”

This level of dedication was characteristic of the various actions organized by the APPO. The night of Nov. 25, however, saw a shift in the movement, according to a recent interview that The Organizer held with an original leader of the Oaxacan SNTE who was also an elected leader of the APPO.

The teacher-unionist, who requested that his name remain anonymous, said that the Ortiz government’s level of repression took a major upswing on Nov. 25, when the PFP and the army marched into Oaxaca city to quell demonstrations. Since then, over 400 activists have been arrested in the city, and 140 were sent to a detention center 1,000 miles away in Tepic, Nayarit, where reports of abuse have been rampant.

“They were accused of sedition and criminal activity for their role in organizing the peaceful demonstrations that called for the ousting of the corrupt and universally despised governor of the state, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz,” the source said during a phone interview.

Bradley Smith, who works with El Enemigo Comun in Santa Cruz, explained at the event that divisions within APPO emerged during the movement, creating conflict within the organization.  Members of the newly created Section 59 of the teacher’s union in Oaxaca accepted a wage increase in return for re-opening Oaxacan schools after a nine-month strike. The original striking group, Section 22, has officially refused to return, holding out for their original demands. This has led to a divisive dynamic, with dissident teachers being locked out of their classrooms, and students protesting for their original teachers.

“This has led to true divisions in the movement,” Smith said. “Neighbor is pitted against neighbor on the question of where the struggle goes from here.”

With the government actively working to break up the democratic Section 22, the union is divided over future actions to pursue. However, there have been continued uprisings in the outskirts of the city.

In the words of the still-dedicated Oaxacan teacher-unionist, “The repressive arm of the state has dealt a harsh blow to the popular movement in Oaxaca, this cannot be understated. But they have not succeeded in putting down the uprising in Oaxaca. If anything, people are angrier than ever, and they are defiant.”

Vladimir Flores, an organizer from Oaxaca who attended the Santa Cruz speaker forum said that, “the struggle of the teachers in Oaxaca is the same as the struggle for justice in Mexico.”

Joanna Macy, PhD is an activist, author, eco-philosopher, and scholar of Buddhism, systems theory, and deep ecology. She has written numerous books, including a recent memoir entitled Widening Circles, and travels the world to give lectures, workshops, and trainings in deep ecology, preparation for The Great Turning, and “the work that reconnects.”

City on a Hill Press: What is the Great Turning?

Joanna Macy: It’s just a name, of course, for the revolution that is taking place in this era. [The Great Turning] has the same scope and magnitude as the Agricultural Revolution back in the Neolithic era, which took centuries to unfold. [It is] as big in its impact as the Industrial Revolution that changed everything in terms of regulating our lives and pursuits by the machine, and addicting us to cheap energy and launching this explosion of technology and subservience to the market.

This gave us the “industrial growth society.” I like that term because it says it all—particularly that term “growth”— because it is a political economy that sets its goals and measures its achievements and success by how fast it can grow.

In any system you can’t maximize one variable—in this case corporate profits—without throwing [the system] off balance. And this system is out of control. It’s getting evermore unstable as we can see in the markets and its needs for ever widening our [use of] resources, so it has to be accompanied by militarism, et cetera.

So what’s worth noting for us all, and especially for young people, is that this is a system that is doomed. It is already being replaced, but you can’t see it very clearly because it is not being reported in any real way by the corporate controlled media. So it is very important that we perceive this as a revolution, and The Great Turning is just a name for it. Maybe other generations will call it something else.

CHP: What indications have there been that this is a great revolution?

JM: I think the first time I heard it referred to as the third revolution of this magnitude was from William Ruckelshaus, who was the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency (1970-73). Then, from Lester Brown of the World Watch Institute, and Dana Meadows, author of The Limits to Growth.

They all see it, as I do, as something that is underway, and they all see it as something that will not inevitably succeed, because you can’t tell. Maybe we won’t be able to tell right up to the last minute whether it’s new ways of doing and thinking will lock in before living systems on this planet unravel beyond the point of no return. So it’s a mighty adventure, and I consider it for me a source of gratitude, I feel it is a privilege to be alive at this time, where we can take part in it, because really it is a great adventure of our time.

CHP: How can people prepare for and understand the process better?

JM: I see it as like putting on a pair of spectacles. You learn to see as it is, so you have to look beyond, or see through, or look away from the deluge of misinformation and corporate infotainment that we are deluged with, and look at what sometimes can seem a little marginal. So we [often] look at the resistance.

There are these three dimensions that I talk about, [which] on one hand are all very different in character, and many of us are involved in one or all three. We need to see them, how important they are, and the distinctive functions that they play.

First are the forms of resistance, or saving what is left. These are the rescue operations, I sometimes call them “holding actions,” where we work to slow down the destruction of the industrial growth society. This is what many people think of as activism. It’s the political, legal, and legislative work. It’s also the direct actions. It’s the boycotts and blockades, the tree-sitting and civil disobedience, so forth, to slow down the destruction, and these are very important because they buy time for the other two dimensions.

But it’s not enough for The Great Turning.

You need to build the forms and structures, or build the embryonic forms of them that will ripen into a life-sustaining society, because that is what is birthing now, what’s emerging in its rudimentary forms, but they are appearing in abundance.

CHP: What is the third stage in The Great Turning?

JM: These new forms will just shrivel and die unless they are deeply rooted in our perceptions of reality, and what we hold to be real and true, and what we understand about who we are and how we are related to each other and to the living earth. That is the third dimension, which you can call a shift in consciousness. It’s a perceptual, scientific, and spiritual revolution. A core discipline of mine, along with Buddhist thought, is systems theory, which some would say is the greatest cognitive revolution of the last 3,000-5,000 years, because it’s a shift to seeing reality in terms of flows of energy and information instead of terms in things and separate entities and substances.

It’s really a tremendous visual shift, like a figure ground reversal, and that brings, that heralds a proliferating way of perceiving reality, reflected both in theory, but also in art and poetry and then the resurgence of attention being paid to indigenous earth wisdom traditions, so you got voices being heard now that haven’t been heard for many centuries, that we are paying attention to. Indigenous voices, shamanic traditions, women’s spirituality goddess traditions, as well as the growing importance of eastern traditions especially.

CHP: Is the idea of The Great Turning within some of these spiritual beliefs and indigenous traditions?

JM: [One is the Tibetan Shambala Warrior Prophecy], as well as Hopi and Mayan prophecies. These are kind of useful to us, because as we don’t need to believe them literally, they are like windows that can help us see reality in fresh configurations, and take down to blinders of the reductionism of classic science, where there were such dichotomies erected between mind and matter, mind and nature, self and other, reason and emotion.

CHP: As the Great Turning turns, how can people stay positive as they continue working for change?

JM: I find that there are a number of things that are really helpful in not going crazy with all the destruction and brutality that is happening now as the late capitalist society goes out of control. People get very mean, and there is frantic competition for the remaining resources. What helps me not go crazy with that and to keep my eyes on the big change is, for one thing, gratitude. To come from gratitude that I am alive now in this time, that I have a chance to weigh in. And that there are others that care, who are grateful for that, like…so many students at UC Santa Cruz, and so many people out there. It’s just amazing how many there are who keep on going and who cherish life and want to conserve it.

You just look at things like the World Social Forum, how it’s just catapulted in numbers of people who are seeing that the only way to go is to take charge of our lives at the grassroots level and to move from acquisitiveness to sharing.

Coming from gratitude is one, and the other is to not be afraid of the dark. Don’t be afraid of the darkness of your own feelings, don’t be afraid of the sorrow and grief that comes up, because if we try to repress that, we just rob ourselves of energy. We just shut down, if we try to shut down to the pain, we shut down our energy, and we get kind of acquiescent to the power-holders now. To find our energy and find each other we need to be ready to cry and ready to honor our grief and our outrage and to see them as the other face of our love for life, that our sorrow for what the loss is is an essence inseparable from our love for life. [In the] Shambala Prophecy they talk of compassion [and] not being afraid of the world’s suffering. If you are not afraid of being with the world’s suffering, nothing can stop you.

CHP: For the younger generation, where do we fit in, and what are some of the most important and urgent issues?

JM: I’d say, trust, there is a lot of readiness to risk and adventure in young people, and to trust that. To trust the appetite for [renewal], to trust your disgust for the outworn political accommodations of greed and militarism. I’d say to be sure to band together, to link arms, and to never try to go it alone. I’d say not to struggle over which issue is most important, don’t try to compete in urgency or think that you have to work on everything at once. If there is one thing that matters to you, then work on that, because all issues are related, they are all expressions of the same problematique so to speak. They reflect our contempt for life and nature. Know that doing what you care about is part of the whole.

Also, know that this cannot be collected overnight. I’m very inspired by my friends in Sri Lanka in the peace movement. They have a peace plan, because they are in the middle of the civil war, and the peace plan that they have developed is [a] 500-year peace plan. They say this war is the ripening of seeds, wounds, and difficulties from over the last 500 years, and it’s going to take at least that long to [reach peace]. So be ready to do your part and hang in there for the long haul, plant seeds for the people that are coming along, and don’t berate yourself or disparage yourself because you can’t make total change overnight.

Be gracious.

_For more information about Joanna Macy, go to her website www.joannamacy.net_

Peace is quite literally in every step of the land-sharing community of San José de Apertadó in northwestern Colombia.

After a 1997 massacre of seven community leaders by the state army, the whole community dedicated themselves to non-violence and cooperative farming. Since the community’s founding, it has suffered 160 cases of murder from outside forces.

At a Feb. 22 event hosted by the Colombia Program of the international peace and justice organization Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), members of the Peace Community of San José came to Santa Cruz to show the documentary Hasta La Última Piedra (Until the Last Stone).

“Peace was our only option,” said speaker Juan Giron, an original member of the community since it was founded 10 years ago. “If we had retaliated against the government, there would have only been more deaths.”

Maintaining a peaceful community has been no easy task in Colombia, a country on the brink of civil war. Groups in rebellion against the government are fighting for control of land rich in oil and other resources.

According to John Lindsay-Poland, another FOR speaker who has spent the last five years in different parts of Colombia, the government troops are no less controversial than those of the rebellion movements.

“Since 2000, the United States has spent more than $4 billion on ‘Plan Colombia’ as part of the war on drugs—80 percent of it [going to] military aid, which has greatly escalated the war in Colombia,” Lindsay-Poland said.

According to Giron and Lindsay-Poland, it was government troops who were responsible for killing the community leaders in 1997, as well as a similar atrocity in 2005. Community members who witnessed the event said that government army soldiers killed eight people on Feb. 21, 2005, including one founding member of the community, Rigoberto Guznan.

The movie showing coincided with a major victory for the San José peace movement, when the Felicitia, the Colombian equivalent of the Attorney General, announced that it was charging 69 soldiers with their involvement in killings during the last few years, including a dismemberment of one community member and the murder of a child with a machete.

“This announcement is hopefully a step in the right direction,” Lindsay-Poland said. “But [President Alvaro Uribe] is still trying to move backward. [Uribe reacted by going] on television and declared that San José was infiltrated by guerrillas working against the government.”

The event also stressed the United States’ involvement in Colombia.

“The focus of public officials and much of the media in the United States has been on drugs and violence. The motives for the U.S. commitment—such as access to oil in Colombia—have remained hidden,” said Lindsay-Poland, who urged the listeners to get involved in changing Colombian policy by writing letters to representatives. Harry Edwards, a representative of the U.S. International Aid Office, disagreed with these statements.

“The Colombian government is using U.S. funding to create peace as much as is possible, but it is not an easy task,” Edwards said in a phone interview.

Lindsay-Poland, however, held true to his statements and considers American involvement in Colombia similar to the situation in Iraq.

“The United States has gotten in deep in Colombia, in tangled in a web of ignorance and deceit, and has no exit strategy.”

Immigration continues to be a hotly controversial topic in the United States, and the debate hosted by Colleges 9 and 10 on Feb. 21 only served to reinforce the fact.

“You Americans are hurting!” yelled Colonel Albert Rodriguez, when asked who was ultimately losing out from increased undocumented immigration into the country.

Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the You Don’t Speak for Me project of the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR) was one of four panelists at the debate hosted at the College 9 /10 Multipurpose Room.

Joining Rodriguez at the debate was Ira Mehlman, media coordinator for FAIR. The two debated together as the voice opposing undocumented immigration. The panel also included Mariana Bustamante, public education coordinator of the national Immigrants’ Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Luis Alejo, a Watsonville attorney who has been active in local, state, and national immigrant rights efforts, who together argued in favor of immigrants’ rights.

As Mehlman pointed out to City on a Hill Press (CHP) after the debate, “We focused on [immigrants from Latin America] because a majority of people who are here illegally come from Mexico and Central America.”

Mehlman and Bustamante, speaking on behalf of FAIR and the ACLU, respectively, refrained from personal stances as they both discussed—with opposing viewpoints­—the need for America to address the realism of immigration.

Meanwhile, Alejo used his less restricted role on the panel to portray immigrants as real people.

“A lot of this debate was only talking about statistics, figures, these immigrants, and those immigrants,” Alejo said. “I wanted to contextualize it for the audience to see that some of these people, who remain nameless and faceless, even work at or are students at UC Santa Cruz.”

The panelists each had noticeably distinct vocabularies, using carefully chosen words such as “illegal” versus “undocumented” and “assimilation” versus “integration.”

Alejo pointed out that word usage has become crucial to both sides of the argument, as the connotation of a word carries a significant meaning.

“It’s only recently where words like ‘illegal’ have been seen as pejorative words—they’re degrading,” Alejo said. “When you’re constantly calling or hearing someone being called ‘illegal,’ a specific perception is created in your mind.”

Regardless of different approaches and views, both sides listed the many “winners” and “losers” of high immigration rates in the United States.

Rodriguez believes that immigration harms Americans.

“American people as a whole… are the ones paying for having [immigrants] here in the United States,” Rodriguez said during the debate.

However, Alejo emphasized the importance of accepting immigrants, and noted that the first United States soldier to die in the occupation in Iraq was a Guatemalan immigrant. The vast numbers of soldiers overseas, he said, are fighting for a country that is not willing to fight for them.

Mehlman countered that immigrants are the winners, as they put a strain on the public school system and the job market.

“The losers are those of us who have to compete for schools or jobs,” Mehlman said, as he cited that $7.7 billion annually goes to pay for undocumented immigrant children to be educated in California.

“The people who are going to be paying the price are not the people in the executive suites,” Mehlman said. “It’s the average worker in this country who is going to wind up paying.”

Bustamante of the ACLU, however, argued that state governments and their economies benefit from the labor immigrants provide. She agreed that the population is somewhat negatively affected by heavy flows of immigration, but specified that high school dropouts and low-skilled workers are the ones competing with undocumented workers in the labor force.

Colonel Rodriguez, who occasionally spurred “boos” and shouts from disagreeing audience members, concluded that “illegal immigration does not belong here. It needs to stop.”

Helen Shapiro, provost of College Nine and College Ten and the facilitator of the debate, thanked the audience at the end for welcoming viewpoints that contradicted the generally left-leaning views of the campus.

“UC Santa Cruz has been slammed for rejecting different points of view,” Shapiro said. “[The debate] demonstrated that we’re willing to be more open-minded.”

The last few weeks have not been easy for Bolivian President Evo Morales.

Morales has had to contend with violent protests urging him to follow up on promises of land reform and nationalization of resources, paired with calls from states threatening to secede if he does.

Morales was swept into office in January 2006 as the first indigenous leader of Bolivia since colonization, but this year he faces opposition to attempts at drafting a new constitution that would give more power to the indigenous people of Bolivia.

Oil-rich eastern states, including the regions of Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, attempted to pass referendums declaring themselves autonomous of the national government. This action has prompted recent protests across Cochabamba, which has a significant indigenous population.

Monica Q., who asked that her last name not be released, is a 19-year-old student in Bolivia and a principal organizer of the protests with the organization La Chispa (The Spark).

“The Bolivian people do not want autonomies. They want bread, land, and jobs,” Monica told City on a Hill Press (CHP) in a phone interview. “We are organizing to show our support for the Morales government against the right.”

She helped organize the Jan. 8 protest where she estimates tens of thousands of Bolivians occupied the capitol of the department of Cochabamba. The protests continued for three days until they ended in violence.

Eric Fromme, a UC Santa Cruz alumnus who recently returned from Bolivia, described the violence.

“The protests were generally peaceful until a youth group opposed to the protestors broke through a police line and began attacking the crowd with baseball bats and lead pipes,” Fromme said. “The… fighting left two protestors dead and hundreds wounded.”

The attacking group, Youth For Democracy, supports proposed moves to autonomy.

In response to this violence, the governor of the Department of Cochabamba, Manfred Villa Reyes, fled to Santa Cruz – a region known for its conservative politics and huge oil reserves.

With protests beginning across the country, Vice President Alvaro Garcia decided that it was time for the government to intervene.

“The government respects the legally existing authorities. We will give the governor military protection to return to Cochabamba,” Garcia said to reporters.

Monica Q. viewed the attempts to calm protestors with harsh criticsm.

“The government is not comprehending the situation very well. The people of Cochabamba are opposed to the policies of Villa Reyes, and as such he has no authority here,” Monica said.

Monica sees this action as one of a number of Morales’ failures to support a true peoples’ democracy.

Jake Salcone, a UCSC student who recently returned from Bolivia where he studied sustainable development, saw things differently.

“I think the Morales government has done a great job balancing the country,” Salcone said.

“It’s not an easy job at all. The rich, land-owning families in the east are backed by huge companies like Monsanto; the wealthiest 10 percent of the population owns 90 percent of the land, while many in the other 90 percent [of the people] are looking for violent revolution.”

Daniella M., another protest organizer with the organization La Chispa, is optimistic that Morales will be the saving link from the horrors of poverty that currently confront the majority of Bolivians, a hope shared by many in the Bolivian community.

“Life is still very hard, but we have made great strides toward the future with the election of President Morales,” she said. “He will lead us as we continue on our journey.”

In war-torn Afghanistan, education is not a top priority.

The southern California-based Afghan Women’s Association (AWA), however, is focusing on boosting education of the women and children in Afghanistan in order to ensure the country a successful future.

The non-profit organization’s president, Kawky Anwar, and the other seven female core members that include a UCLA graduate, Afghanistan’s first beauty queen, and a gynecologist working for Kaiser Permanente, were born in Afghanistan and eventually found themselves situated in southern California.

“We all noticed that the minority communities around us were getting together and starting associations,” said Anwar, a former teacher and administrator at Malalai High School in Afghanistan. “We wanted to do that for our community because our people needed help too.”

Before forming AWA, the women were entranced by stories of Afghani women and children living under the rule of the Taliban.

“Women couldn’t leave the house,” Anwar said. “Women couldn’t go to school. A woman couldn’t go anywhere without men. We knew that we had to fight to defend both women’s rights and human rights.”

Jamila Niazi, another founding member of AWA, emphasized the importance of these programs in working for a stable future.

“The core of the problems are rooted in being uneducated,” Niazi said. “We would like to see Afghanistan stand on its own feet—economically, socially, and politically. Health and education are both necessary in order to get us someplace someday.”

Due to a budget reliant on fundraising, AWA can only work on small-scale projects. The group has donated $10,000 toward drinking water purification programs in addition to funding toward women’s hospitals, schools for children and for the deaf and mute, as well as coordinating seminars for local Afghan communities.

AWA’s most recent project was the improvement of Qalai Zaman Khan, a school for first through ninth graders on the outskirts of Kabul.

The AWA members visited the school in 2002, when the school’s 4,000 students had no books or school supplies and were atteding classes in tents.

“The kids were all begging for us to build classrooms because of the trouble during the cold winters and harsh summers,” Anwar said.

After organizing local concerts and community events, AWA raised enough money to build 10 classrooms and purchase school supplies.

“When we returned in May 2006, there were 9,000 students who had to go to school in three shifts because it was so crowded,” Anwar said. “In each classroom, there was a range of 56 to about 70 students.”

AWA also encouraged the members of the Afghani Ministry of Education to step out of their offices and see the reality of the situation in Afghanistan. According to Anwar, they pledged to work on improvements in the future.

Realizing the political priorities of the country, many organizations are working to help countries such as Afghanistan rebuild schools and get their lives back together. However, many find it is difficult to keep politics out of the picture.

“It is the political circumstances in these nations that are fueling the problems and stereotypes we know today,” said Mahmoud Fadli, a representative of the Muslim Student Alliance at UC Santa Cruz. “Islam itself is a very progressive and practical faith; it stresses the importance of equality, education, faith, unity, peace, and tolerance.”

Niazi also stressed the importance of fighting stereotypes associated with Islamic cultures.

“We get grouped with all of these negative aspects that are shown of the television, so many people who are not familiar with our community get the wrong idea,” Niazi said.

A bright future still seems dim, however, especially when radical groups—some who have burned down newly built schools—are attempting to instill fear into aid organizers.

Following in the footsteps of several other countries, France has implemented a ban on smoking cigarettes in public places. Often seen as an icon of French culture in accordance with the fine arts, intellectualism, and glamorous lifestyles, the shattered stereotype has been lighting up discussion at UC Santa Cruz.

The ban gave Jane Bogart, coordinator of UCSC’s Student Health Outreach and Promotion (SHOP), reason to list a few of the negative effects of the addictive habit—which she said was a detriment to health, social image, brain activity, and sex life (the decreased blood flow causes impotence in men).

Bogart, who worked with the “Quit and Win” program at NYU, was told by many art students that cigarette smoking made them feel creative.

Because smoking is often glorified among some of the world’s artistic greats, she challenged them to find creative people who don’t smoke cigarettes.

Dick Terdiman, professor of French literature at UCSC, recognized that many French and American artists and entertainment figures glamorize smoking.

“Surely the images of famous French cultural figures with a cigarette dangling from their mouth—Sartre, Malraux, Camus—dominated a certain period of the 1950s and ‘60s,” Terdiman said. “Of course the image of Humphrey Bogart puffing away in many films—and later dying of lung cancer—tells us that the phenomenon was not limited to France.” 

On the other hand, some art students, including one wishing to be identified only as Jared, credit the flow of their creative juices to smoking marijuana rather than cigarettes, noting that the social aspect of smoking cigarettes can only take one so far in their art.

Yet for some, smoking comes when inhibitions are lowered from alcohol or other social pressures to look “cool.”

“It is about having something in your hand, being busy, and looking intellectual and edgy,” said Lindsay Winslow, a fourth-year art student at UCSC.

“When you have a cigarette break, you can go out and talk about art or whatever with whomever you are smoking with,” said Daniel Lu, a third-year art student. “You get to meet new people. You can go up to anyone who is smoking and ask for a cigarette. It’s like an ice breaker.”

But from a professional perspective, Jane Bogart sees the trends turning. 

“Smoking has long been used as a social or bonding activity, and also as an appetite suppressant,” Bogart said. “There is also the ‘cool factor’, but that is changing. Lately, we have been making [smoking] more socially unacceptable, empowering those that don’t like it to speak up and say, ‘don’t do it in my face.”

Some students notice the heavy influence of smoking in the media. Clayton Kober, a fourth-year art student at UCSC who is against smoking, blames the appeal of cigarettes on James Dean. Tamara Dib, a second-year art student, noticed the appeal of smoking in books like On the Road and songs like Simon and Garfunkel’s “America.”

Julian Lloyd, a third-year student who is studying both art and film and digital media, thinks that smoking lends itself to a jaded attitude toward life that is part of a very cliché art culture.

Regardless of the potential influence from the media and social pressures, most students emphasized that their smoking habits are under control.

“I may stop when I make a move to a more professional and ‘together’ place in my life, just for the sake of it,” Lloyd said.

Bogart mentioned, however, that many college students don’t realize that they are addicted to smoking. She often hears students assure her that they only smoke cigarettes after they have been drinking and intend to quit after they graduate.

For some students though, there is a deeper question at hand that asks if a ban on smoking should be such a priority.

Benjamin Raymond, a Sartre-esque 20-year-old student who has been smoking for three years, feels that smoking is a personal choice and should not be denied in our supposedly free society.

 “If we confront social inequity as largely as we have battled smoking, that people wouldn’t be able to lie, cheat, steal, or blasphemize…within twenty yards of most congregations,” Raymond said. “Smoking is masochistic at its worst. We should solve the sadism of our societies before we worry about what we choose to do to ourselves.”

A watershed vote last week by members of Sinn Fein, the Irish political party long associated with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), may change the face of Irish politics.

On Jan. 28, party leaders gathered in Dublin and voted overwhelmingly to cooperate with the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), a move that may mark the end to the IRA’s 27-year campaign to forcefully free Northern Ireland from British sovereignty.

In recent years, Gerry Adams, the figurehead of Sinn Fein who was rumored to have been a long-standing commander of the Irish Republican Army, has been leading the party away from radical politics and more toward a conventional peace accord.

“This shows that the war is over,” Adams was quoted as saying Sunday. “And if the war is over, we have to build the peace.’

Violence between Unionists, who support Great Britain, and Republicans, who work for Irish independence, has been largely responsible for an estimated 1,800 deaths, including thoseof 300 police officers, between 1960 and 1990. But the move by Sinn Fein, which has been recognized as the political arm of the IRA, signals a possible end to the violence that has come to be known as “The Troubles.”

“This is a major shift in the party’s political orientation,” said Bruce Thompson, UC Santa Cruz professor of history. “It may open up whole new frontiers of fragmentation, but it will probably create peace.”  Thompson, who teaches a seminar on the troubles in Ireland, echoed the popular opinion among analysts who believe the vote may represent a turning point in the struggle to reach the terms of the 1998 Good Friday peace accord. Since President Clinton helped draw up that agreement eight years ago, the conflict has continued.

The perceived step toward peace is good news to Tom McCormick, an Irish native and literature major at UCSC.

“This is a turning point in nationalist politics,” he said. “People are realizing we have to participate in the system, or things will go on without us.”

Neil Bramley, a native of Belfast, the capitol of Northern Ireland, and currently a student at the University of Glasgow, gave City on a Hill Press an up-close view of the situation.

“Even here in Scotland, people are talking about the vote, all over, in the streets, in pubs,” Bramley said. “Mostly people think it’s a pretty sound idea, and I’m hopeful for peace.”

However, 800 years of conflict between the Irish and British die hard. The troubles are rooted in religious tensions between Irish Catholics and British Protestants in Northern Ireland—issues that politics often fail to transcend. 

While the vote certainly shows a newfound willingness to cooperate with police on the part of Sinn Fein, some party members warn that all is not forgotten.

‘’We have to boss policing, because we are the bosses,” Martin McGuiness, the deputy leader of Sinn Fein, was quoted as saying. “They’re going to have to earn our trust. And we will let them know that they are going to be the servants of the people, not the other way around.”

Whether the move will result in a permanent peace in Northern Ireland remains to be seen, but in a region that has seen so much suffering, any change is accompanied with newfound hope.

As the health officials who were convicted for allegedly infecting over 400 children with HIV at Al-Fateh Children’s Hospital in Benghazi, Libya, await their sentencing, a Facebook group has been created to raise awareness among the online community in hopes of helping current efforts to free the prisoners by raising awareness.

The group “Help Free the Bulgarian Nurses in Libya,” created by Dimitar Tashev, who is currently living in Washington, D.C., has been gaining a following since its creation in October of last year, attracting nearly 2,500 members and running a long list of websites and news feeds.

“We’re creating a dialogue,” Tashev said in a phone interview. “We recently had a guy from Libya give his perspective on the [message] wall.” The group is attracting many members who want to stay informed, including many Bulgarians living the U.S., such as UCSC student Svetoslav Goranov.

On Dec. 19, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were sentenced to death by firing squad after their first appeal failed. After being detained for over eight years, Libyan courts recently announced that the medics would not face the death penalty.

Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, Libya’s head of state, has vehemently claimed that the infections were part of a conspiracy against his country by the CIA and Mossad, the Israeli secret service, although there is no evidence to validate these claims.

The Libyan Consulate declined to comment on these issues.

Boris Yovchev, recent alumnus of Marian College in Wisconsin and member of the group, credits the recent changes of the trial to support from the European Union and United States.

“Now that the EU and U.S. have stepped up and expressed their position, which is very similar to the one Bulgaria holds on the issue, al-Gaddafi is trying to trade for the nurses,” Yovchev said. “[al-Gaddafi] is presenting a case in front of his nation where he…will keep a straight face in front of his people, the nurses will be brought back home…the EU and the U.S. will be happy…but Bulgaria will have to pay millions of dollars [in reparations] for something that the nurses were still not proven guilty of.”

Apostol Dyankov, an Oberlin college student and member of the Facebook group, expressed his disappointment and disgust at Libya’s recent decision to offer to trade the nurses for a detained criminal in the UK, or release them for large sums of money.

“For us Bulgarians, it is immaterial whether the nurses would be executed or held for a life term in prison, so the decision not to execute them doesn’t do anything to alleviate our anger,” Dyankov said. “The nurses are hostages, not defendants, and we will only accept their unconditional liberation.”

Al-Gaddafi’s claim is just one of many problems surrounding the case, which was originally dismissed in 2002 for lack of evidence.

Two women confessed during their detainment, but later disclosed that they had been tortured and confessed under duress.

During the trial, the court refused to hear witness testimonies from various experts, including some of the researchers who discovered the AIDS virus. The researchers claimed that the HIV infections were a result of poor hygiene, bad medical practices and especially the reuse of syringes.

While the problem of reusing syringes and working in unsanitary conditions is common, Dr. Mary Zavanelli, a lecturer at UCSC who teaches the course “Biology of AIDS,” said it is difficult to trace the HIV virus to its origin, emphasizing the many complex factors involved in the process.

“There are anecdotal reports of hospitals (and blood testing labs) in the U.S. that have reused needles, so to expect it not to happen in a poorer country is not logical,” Zavanelli said via e-mail. “However, this is not proof that it does or did happen in this or any other case.”

To address the problematic details of the case, many efforts have been launched in order to save the nurses and doctor, including a petition started by Tashev that now has over 31,000 signatures, and mass protests like one on Feb. 9 in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Another member of the group, Maya Draganova, works for a newspaper in Bulgaria that started the widely known “ne ste sami”, or “you are not alone”, campaign in solidarity.

“It’s all about money, power, and politics,” Yovchev said. “Us little people probably don’t even know everything that is taking place as far as negotiations.”

SAN FRANCISCO—Politicians, movie stars, students and many more around the nation spoke their minds on Saturday in response to the president’s plan to send an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq.

In San Francisco, between 10,000 and 15,000 people gathered in protest, including a number from Santa Cruz.

The crowd carried signs and

banners, played drums, and flashed the peace sign as they marched from the corner of Market and Powell to Pier 31 to hear speakers address various topics including the troop surge, the war in Iraq, Israel and Palestine, racism against Arabs, Katrina reconstruction, and San Francisco labor struggles.

The march was organized principally by United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), a coalition of more than 50 independent organizations against the war.

“We call on Congress to take the actions within its legal power, to make history and steer this country toward sanity, rationality and stability to end the war now,” said Leslie Cagan, UFPJ national coordinator.

The call to end the war seemed to resonate with the many marchers Saturday, many of whom were UC Santa Cruz students who made the drive up to San Francisco to show their support.

“We’re here to tell the congress that they can’t just ignore the voice of the people, they need to take action to end the war now,” said Fred Mosqueda, a fifth-year molecular biology major at UCSC.

In typical San Francisco fashion, the crowd was more varied than the topics covered in speeches, spanning a wide range of protestors, from 10 year-old children to the elderly and from the radical to the moderate. David Hennick, a Vietnam War Veteran who lives in the Bay Area, had a more distanced view.

“It took the American people a long time to take action on Vietnam, too,” Hennick said. “I think that the situation now looks a lot like the turning point of 40 years ago. I think we may be seeing massive changes in the near future.”

Though the UCSC students at the protest seemed to agree in their opposition to the troop surge, Kelley Hayes, president of the UCSC College Republicans, defended the move.

“If we don’t do everything we can to support the troops there, that would be like knocking over a sand castle and not building it back up,” said Hayes, who did not attend the protest.

Savannah O’Neill, a first-year art major at UCSC, explained that while she doesn’t usually attend protests, she decided to drive to San Francicsco “just to check out a big protest.”

Others, such as Adam Hauthschild, a first-year politics major at UCSC, were more passionate about the event.

“The American people voted against the war in November, and Bush responded by adding more troops,” Hauthschild said. “That’s unacceptable.”

Both newcomers and those with a more militant stance attended the protest.

“The imperial Bush administration has showed itself to be completely against the rule of the people,” said Jack Ryan, a student at Lowell High School in San Francisco. “These marches are the beginning of their downfall.”

The overwhelming anti-war sentiment has carried on to UCSC alumni, including San Francisco resident Eric Fromme. “Why can’t we pull the troops immediately?” he said. “You don’t rebuild countries with guns.”

Melanie Phillips knows controversy.

The British journalist, who was voted 2005′s “Most Islamaphobic Media Personality” by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, came to UCSC on Jan. 23 to speak about her book Londonistan: How Britain Created a Terror State From Within.

Speaking at the Merrill Multicultural Center to a diverse mixture of more than 150 students and community members who sat under a ceiling lined with colorful flags of the world, Phillips ironically told the audience that “Multiculturalism must go.”

The speaker, who has published numerous pieces discounting global warming and evolution and advocates for coalition forces to attack Iran in order to “win in Iraq,” drew polarizing reactions from the crowd, where mostly admirers sat up front while most of the students sat in the back. It was not uncommon for people to stand up and leave.

“I believe that lately we’re very deeply in denial over the threat, the nature, and the extent of the threat that radical Islamism poses to the West and to the free world,” Phillips said, describing the situations as “a holy war, a jihad, which has been waged on the Western world for at least the

last 25 years.”

Phillips focused her remarks on the idea of multiculturalism, claiming that “we [in the West] can’t criticize a minority faith without being accused of being a racist or an Islamaphobe.”

Her disdain for multiculturalism was only the beginning of the remarks that continually created stirs among the mostly-quiet students, who occasionally couldn’t help but to grimace, shake their heads, or even snicker from frustration. Before the event, fliers were passed out with quotes and question that framed Phillips’ agenda.

Alexander Jabbari, a junior-transfer community studies major of Iranian-Jewish decent and founding member of the Iranian Student Network, was among the many students who found the speech offensive.

“The majority of terrorists who happened to be Muslims are indeed disenfranchised, poor, marginalized, and that’s what all the analysts that I’ve ever heard, other than her, put forth,” Jabbari said, addressing Phillips’ claims that the problems arriving from Islamic extremism are rooted in religion rather than such things as the occupation of Iraq, the Israel-Palestine conflict, or general economic inequality.

“[Her argument] struck me as similar to what people like Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter or other far right conservative pundits say, but instead of using their more common [language] she puts it into academic jargon,” Jabbari said.

When a question from the audience asked if she thought “500 years of British colonization, including stealing resources and exploitation of the Islamic world, is also worth mentioning,” Phillips said that it was “a point of view, and this question is absurd,” continuing to convey her side of the common debate that she believed. “The exploitation of the Islamic world has got nothing to do with the fact that the Islamic world wishes to Islamize the free world,” she said.

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East brought Phillips to UCSC, as well as the Jewish studies department and the Santa Cruz Israel Action Committee. John Ellis, UCSC professor emeritus of German literature and a fellow British-Jew, introduced Phillips, telling the audience why she was brought to speak here.

“It is important that major points of view be aired on campus,” Ellis said after the speech. “She probably represents a view that isn’t heard much on this campus…so she can round out the discussion.”

Phillips did attrack a few supportive UCSC students.

“I think Melanie Phillips actually pays attention to her history,” said Aryeh Breakstone, a third-year history and anthropology major.

“Too many people make arguments on either side without really knowing anything,” he said, referring to tense debate between Israel and Palestine. “I think ignorance is one of the biggest problems…nobody really invests the time to figure out what is actually going on.”

But with statements like “Israel …is the litmus test of civilization,” many felt that this wasn’t much of a discussion.

“I don’t think that the speaker had a very open mind to criticism during the question-and-answer period,” said Sefira Fialkoff, a second-year global economics major who helped organize the students to attend the event and challenge Phillips’ viewpoints.

“It seemed a lot of what she tried to convey was fear-driven and reactionary, with a very narrow view on a complex component in our world today,” said Fialkoff, noting that she thought that most of all, “It’s important to realize that there is a great range of opinions [that] deserve open ears and open minds.”

Dahr Jamail, one of few independent, unembedded journalists on the ground in the Middle East, recently spoke at UCSC about his eight months in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria.

He is currently reporting for the Inter Press Service, and has been published in The Asia Times, The Nation, The Sunday Herald, Islam Online, the Guardian, Foreign Policy in Focus, and the Independent. Dahr Jamail’s reporting can be read on his website www.dahrjamailiraq.com.

*City on a Hill Press*: Why did you go to Iraq?

*Dahr Jamail*: The primary reason that I went was to make an effort toward giving people a more accurate picture of what was actually happening on the ground, because the picture we were being provided by the corporate media was so skewed and so dishonest. It was as much of a skewed picture of the occupation as the sell job of the war. I saw those trends continue and get even worse, and once the occupation was underway, I decided I wanted to go do something about it.

*CHP*: Why is much of the coverage inaccurate?

*DJ*: I think there are really two main reasons—one, corporate ownership, and two, state pressure. With corporate ownership, the most common example is the classic case of General Electric owns NBC, General Electric being a huge weapons manufacturer; it doesn’t behoove them to have a national television station broadcasting images of what happens when their products hit human beings.

The other main reason is direct state pressure. The famous example there I would point to is when the Washington Post ran a photograph of the inside of a cargo plane full of coffins covered by US flags, you know, with dead troops, they and all media were given an order not to run any more photos like that.

*CHP*: Currently, media coverage is focused on Iraq’s sectarian conflicts and the idea that Iraq is in civil war. How accurate is this coverage?

*DJ*: It is accurate that there is civil war, although they are reporting it a year after it began, and they are also not reporting who is responsible for starting it.

*CHP*: What do you mean by that?

*DJ*: In the Fall of 2004, when it was clear…that the second siege of Fallujah, rather than stopping the resistance, just spread it all over the country, [the US military] instituted a death squad program to try to target the leadership of the resistance. It was a program that even [former Secretary of State Donald] Rumsfeld referred to in January as the “Salvador option,” as reported in Newsweek. Basically, retired Colonel James Steele, who was counselor for Iraqi security forces and answered directly to [the previous US Ambassador to Iraq] John Negroponte, basically facilitated special forces operations, selecting members from the Shia and Kurdish militias to form death squads and then sent them out targeting leaders of the Sunni resistance, sympathizers, and Sunni religious leaders. Of course it is important to put that in the context that it is the same James Steele and the same Negroponte who set up death squads in Central America in the early and mid 1980′s. They basically just brought them into Baghdad to do the same thing, and they did it very well.

*CHP*: What do you see happening with the “surge” of 21,500 troops?

*DJ*: Well the surge is already happening, it was already happening before Bush already announced it, we had guys deployed to Kuwait…and they started sending them into Baghdad long before Bush even announced it. This so-called surge brings the level of troops up to just about the same level of the amount we had in January 2005 for the so-called elections on January 30, 2005, and what did that level of troops do then to help security? Absolutely nothing. If they really wanted to use military means to try to bring security into that country, they need to start with sending about 300,000 troops and then escalate from there.

*CHP*: As for alternatives to the surge, or proposals for withdrawal, what do the Iraqi people say?

*DJ*: I think we just go with the majority of what the Iraqi people want, and recent polls suggest that 90 percent of the Iraqi people want a withdrawal in less than a year’s time. That is what we should do. There is the argument about ‘fix it if you broke it’ or ‘stay the course,’ but those are all moot points. I think the most important thing is what do the Iraqi people want? They want us out, and that is the opinion that needs to be respected above all else.

*CHP*: And if the troops do withdraw?

*DJ*: Without a doubt the violence, the chaos, and the instability will continue for a bit, but the Iraqi people would then be sovereign and there would be the possibility then of having legitimate elections. Therefore you would have a government that really did have popular support. That is why ending the occupation would really be the first step toward stability in that country.

*CHP*: Do you have any comments about the recent protests across the United States, like the Jan 27 marches in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco?

*DJ*: It’s important to see that more and more people than ever actually are angry and willing to get out there and take some risks and try to do something about it that can change. I think it is going to take a lot more than permitted demonstrations on a weekend, I think that experiment has been run enough times to show that this government won’t listen to huge displays of people wanting to shift policy. I think it is going to take things more like demonstrations, without permits, non-violent of course, but doing things like direct actions and shutting down financial districts of cities and the ability for this government to conduct business as usual until it starts changing its policy. Until that starts happening on a wide scale, like it did during Vietnam, I really don’t think we can expect this government to change its policy, especially when Bush goes out of his way to say that he really isn’t interested in listening to the whims of the people.

*CHP*: Was this really about bringing democracy to Iraq or ending the ‘war on terror?’

*DJ*: Of course not, that is just empty propaganda used by various empires throughout history. It is all about geopolitical positioning of the US military, and it’s all about getting to that oil so that our government will control it and make it available to western countries, before countries, for example, like India, or China, or Russia can try to do the same.

*CHP*: Do you feel that the Iraqi people’s needs and wishes are being met, or even heard?

*DJ*: None whatsoever. In no way are they being heard. The voters were promised that if they voted for these various political coalitions that they would immediately demand a timetable for withdrawal. Of course, [that didn't happen] because they weren’t allowed to do so from the people that pulled their strings, i.e., D.C.

*CHP*: What is life like for Baghdad residents?

*DJ*: Well, they are in a living hell, where they don’t have electricity—they have on average two hours per day—odds are they don’t have safe drinking water, there is basically no health care left because the hospitals are in a state of ruin, 70 percent employment, 70 percent inflation, security speaks for itself—there is none—30 kidnappings a day in Baghdad alone. Most of the people I know who are still in Baghdad are too afraid to leave their houses. Anyone who had the ability and a little bit of money has fled to Syria or Jordan, about a million refuges in each of those countries, almost two million refugees within Iraq itself, and it’s getting worse by the day. It’s untenable. It is not something that is sustainable. Something has to change immediately; it’s an absolute emergency situation.

*CHP*: What about the Iraqi deaths?

*DJ*: I always go with…the most recent one that came out on October 11 that was published in The Lancet by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health. That found 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq, which counts people who have died from a direct result of the US invasion and occupation. Now that survey is over a couple of months out of date, so the real number might even be significantly higher. It is, without a doubt, the most scientifically accurate and most recent figure that we have to go on.

*CHP*: What about Iran and Syria?

*DJ*: It’s looking pretty clear that the US, with two air craft carrier strike groups already in the Gulf, another one on the way, and probably another one, the Reagan, will deploy in mid March. In my opinion it looks like they will be hitting Iran sometime around April. That is coupled with all the propaganda going on in Israel, what the Israeli military is doing and what their government is saying, troop build-ups in eastern European bases. I really think that an aerial attack is going to happen in April sometime.

*CHP*: Will that spur other countries to get involved?

*DJ*: Well, it has serious potential to expand into a region-wide war, and that is very, very worrisome because, of course, China and Russia both have very strong economic links to Iran.

A taste of history, a touch of politics and a twist of controversy were all part of a presentation given by Juan Cole during his Jan. 17 lecture, "Iraq’s Crisis as an American Crisis" at College 9/10.

President Bush’s calls for a troop "surge" and the supposed looming threat of Iran were at the forefront of the PowerPoint presentation given by Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan and one of the nation’s foremost experts on the Middle East. Cole gave the historical background of the current violence, intertwined with the effects of the United States and Iran’s involvement in the Iraq war and the basics of the deep-seeded sectarian conflicts between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

While explaining details of Iraq’s decades-long political and religious clashes, Cole emphasized that the effects of U.S. occupation contribute to the continuing escalation of violent attacks and insurgent activity.

"Bush keeps saying that when Iraq stands up, we’ll stand down," Cole said during the presentation. "You might not want to hold your breath very long."

As heated debates in Congress address President Bush’s plan to send 21,500 troops to Iraq in coming months, Cole is among the critics who insist that the troop surge will not bring more stability but instead will likely create more targets for the insurgency and fuel anger over the U.S. occupation.

"This is a disaster waiting to happen and it isn’t going to settle things," Cole said. "Marines don’t speak Arabic, how do they know who the guerilla is?

"Many of those planning and executing the attacks are the equivalent of Harvard and West Point graduates," Cole said, noting that the insurgents are reverting to their only option to resist the U.S. occupation.

Most of the insurgents, according to Cole, are loyalists to the Ba’ath Party, which was formerly headed by Saddam Hussein. However, most of the violence is a result of continually growing tensions between Sunni and Shiite religious sects.

The clashes, which many are referring to as the beginnings of a civil war, worsened after the December 2005 provincial elections, which the Sunnis boycotted. With little contest, Shiites dominated the election and took seats in predominantly Sunni regions, including the al Anbar province, one of the most violent regions in Iraq. On Feb. 24 of last year, Sunni militias bombed the Askariyah Shrine, the holiest of the Shiite shrines in Iraq, which triggered the bloodiest fighting since the March 2003 occupation began. According to Cole, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to have Iraqi guards stand down because Marines would guard the building.

While Cole recognized that President Bush is facing a complicated quagmire that may not be easily solved by a simple withdrawal of troops, he did offer a few suggestions toward stability.

"I think we should have provincial elections again and that the Sunnis should run," Cole said. "Get Sunni electorship in provinces and negotiate some sort of settlement as [the military] withdraws."

Although Cole did offer critical views about the United States policy in Iraq, some UCSC students attending the event felt that the talk was too focused on the internal conflicts.

"I think that framing all of the violence in terms of Shiite and Sunni sectarianism runs the danger of reducing the situation into a ‘Fox News’-type of simple explanation for Americans," said Foaad Khosmood, a second-year computer science graduate student and anti-war activist.

"Even when they are fighting each other they are [blaming] each other for the U.S. occupation," he said.

Owen Goodwin, a fourth-year history major and a member of Students Against War, was also concerned that the U.S. military presence fueled the internal conflicts.

"For the United States, the big question is bringing the [troops] out because they are not going to bring democracy," Goodwin said after the presentation.

In the meantime, as the fighting in Iraq rages on, Juan Cole knows that "the longer we are there, the more brutal this is going to be."

With upcoming talks between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, UC Santa Cruz students and visiting experts are presenting a range of viewpoints on the Israel-Palestine debate.

The current peace talks are big news for the variety of groups on the UCSC campus that are working for peace and justice in the area. Mahmoud Eriekat, the leader of the Committee for Justice in Palestine (CJP), a student group on campus, spoke with City on a Hill Press about the central issues of the peace process.

"We believe that the creation of a strong Palestinian state is the most important step toward justice in the area," Eriekat said. "The violence cannot stop while Palestinians are fenced in with no voice of their own.

Corinne Strasser, a member of the Santa Cruz Israel Action Committee (SCIAC), agreed with Eriekat’s point of view.

"A Palestinian state would be a good step toward peace," Strasser said.

However, the wall in construction on the West Bank between Israeli and Palestinian land strikes a more contentious note between the two groups. The wall is in various stages of construction in different areas. In population centers, there are often concrete barriers up to eight meters high, though elsewhere the barrier is made of chain link fence topped with barbed wire.

Sandino Gomez, an organizer at the Resource Center for Non-Violence, has been involved with the Israel-Palestine conflict for
several years.

"The wall is the single most obvious measure of Israeli aggression," Gomez told CHP in a phone interview.

"The wall has its pros and cons, but the fact is that Israel needs to be able to protect itself," Strasser said. Though the Bush Administration has given approval of the wall, the topic is likely to be discussed in the upcoming talks.

Eriekat echoed the concerns of many Arab leaders.

"The wall is a serious human rights violation, not to mention an obvious attempt to annex Palestinian land," Eriekat said. "It is only continuing the violence."

The disagreement over the wall highlights one of the crucial matters of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Melanie Phillips, who recently spoke at UCSC about relations between Islam and the West in her speech "Londanistan," questions whether there is really a legitimate claim behind Palestinian statehood at all.

"Many people are not aware that an Arab state never existed before Israel," Phillips said.

Laurie Brand, director of international relations at the University of Southern California and an expert on the history of the Palestinian conflict, recently spoke at UCSC about Palestinian statehood.

"It has impaired access to lands, education, Holy Places, and ruined any spiritual atmosphere the city once held," Brand told CHP regarding the wall in Bethlehem.

However, Brand also provided some hope for the future, as far as the experts can tell, "the wall appears to be a temporary solution," and with the coming peace talks. "The wall may come down soon."