[T]he number of children attempting to cross the Mexican border into the United States has risen dramatically in the last five years: In fiscal year 2009 (October 1, 2009 – September 30, 2010) about 6,000 unaccompanied minors were detained near the border. The US Department of Homeland Security estimates for the fiscal year 2014 the detention of as many as 74,000 unaccompanied minors. Approximately 28% of the children detained this year are from Honduras, 24% from Guatemala, and 21% from El Salvador.

The particularly severe increases in Honduran migration are a direct result of the June 28, 2009 military coup that overthrew the democratically-elected president, Manuel Zelaya, after he did things like raising the minimum wage, giving subsidies to small farmers, and instituting free education. The coup – like so many others in Latin America – was led by a graduate of Washington’s infamous School of the Americas.

As per the standard Western Hemisphere script, the Honduran coup was followed by the abusive policies of the new regime, loyally supported by the United States. The State Department was virtually alone in the Western Hemisphere in not unequivocally condemning the Honduran coup. Indeed, the Obama administration has refused to call it a coup, which, under American law, would tie Washington’s hands as to the amount of support it could give the coup government. This denial of reality still persists even though a US embassy cable released by Wikileaks in 2010 declared: “There is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 [2009] in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch”. Washington’s support of the far-right Honduran government has been unwavering ever since.

[T]he questions concerning immigration into the United States from south of the border go on year after year, with the same issues argued back and forth: What’s the best way to block the flow into the country? How shall we punish those caught here illegally? Should we separate families, which happens when parents are deported but their American-born children remain? Should the police and various other institutions have the right to ask for proof of legal residence from anyone they suspect of being here illegally? Should we punish employers who hire illegal immigrants? Should we grant amnesty to at least some of the immigrants already here for years? … on and on, round and round it goes, decade after decade. Those in the US generally opposed to immigration make it a point to declare that the United States does not have any moral obligation to take in these Latino immigrants.

But the counter-argument to this last point is almost never mentioned: Yes, the United States does indeed have a moral obligation because so many of the immigrants are escaping a situation in their homeland made hopeless by American intervention and policy. In addition to Honduras, Washington overthrew progressive governments which were sincerely committed to fighting poverty in Guatemala and Nicaragua; while in El Salvador the US played a major role in suppressing a movement striving to install such a government. And in Mexico, though Washington has not intervened militarily since 1919, over the years the US has been providing training, arms, and surveillance technology to Mexico’s police and armed forces to better their ability to suppress their own people’s aspirations, as in Chiapas, and this has added to the influx of the oppressed to the United States, irony notwithstanding.

Moreover, Washington’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has brought a flood of cheap, subsidized US agricultural products into Mexico, ravaging campesino communities and driving many Mexican farmers off the land when they couldn’t compete with the giant from the north. The subsequent Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) has brought the same joys to the people of that area.

These “free trade” agreements – as they do all over the world – also result in government enterprises being privatized, the regulation of corporations being reduced, and cuts to the social budget. Add to this the displacement of communities by foreign mining projects and the drastic US-led militarization of the War on Drugs with accompanying violence and you have the perfect storm of suffering followed by the attempt to escape from suffering.

It’s not that all these people prefer to live in the United States. They’d much rather remain with their families and friends, be able to speak their native language at all times, and avoid the hardships imposed on them by American police and other right-wingers.

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World’s Only Super Power . His latest book is: America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy. He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com

[T]he Border Patrol apprehended twice as many unaccompanied minors trying to enter the United States this year as they did last year. In response to this surge in the apprehension of unaccompanied minors, President Obama is requesting $4 billion from Congress. These funds will be used on new Border Patrol agents, immigration judges, aerial surveillance, and new detention facilities – all designed to speed up deportations of people caught at the border.

Spending $4 billion more on enforcement will not alleviate the situation.

Pouring money into border enforcement has never been successful at deterring the flow of migrants. Professor Wayne Cornelius – who has studied this issue for decades – contends that “tightened border enforcement since 1993 has not stopped nor even discouraged unauthorized migrants from entering the United States.”

Speeding up deportations does nothing to address the root causes of this surge in the arrival of unaccompanied minors from Central America. These youth are fleeing violence and instability in their home countries. If we don’t address these issues, these youth will continue to come.

The United States government is already spending unprecedented amounts of money on immigration law enforcement: the total budget authority for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is $60 billion– one fifth of which goes to Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). Another $4 billion will not make CBP more effective unless there is a fundamental shift in policy.

More funding means more agents and more technology. DHS funds have been used to place increasing numbers of CBP agents along the border. There were over 18,000 CBP agents along the US-Mexico border in 2013, as compared to 2,500 in 1993. The number of agents has increased fairly consistently since 1993, even during those years when fewer migrants were attempting to enter the United States. This constant uptick in the number of CBP agents has made the agency more powerful, but has done little to stem the flow of migrants.

There is little correlation between the number of CBP agents along the border and the number of migrants apprehended. Instead, apprehensions are related to the number of people trying to enter. When a lot of migrants attempt to enter, CBP apprehends a lot of people. When fewer migrants attempt to enter, they capture fewer. These apprehensions also track well with economic changes – when unemployment is low, more people try to enter the United States. When there are no jobs, fewer migrants attempt to enter.

The economic recession in the United States and the accompanying high unemployment rates have meant that fewer people are trying to get into this country. This is evidenced by the fact that there were four times as many apprehensions in 2000 as there were last year. In fact, the 400,000 CBP apprehensions in the Southwest sector last year were the lowest they have been since 1974. With border apprehensions the lowest they have been in 40 years, why would anyone advocate for more CBP agents?

It is true that there are more unaccompanied Central American childrencrossing the border since 2011 than there have been in years past, yet overall border apprehensions are at a historic low. And, border enforcement spending must be understood in this larger context.

Central Americans have been migrating the United States in large numbers since the United States began meddling intensely in the affairs of their countries in the latter decades of the twentieth century.

Increases in the number of agents along the border does not deter migration. Instead, it makes the passage more difficult and dangerous for those migrants that are determined to enter. If we want to protect children, enhancing the number of CBP agents is a terrible idea.

Processing these 40,000 children requires special resources – both because they are children and because many of them are not from Mexico – where they can be more easily sent back. However, the solution is to develop new and better policies – not to throw more money at border enforcement. It seems hard to believe that an agency that apprehended 1.6 million people in 2000 with half the agents it has today needs additional funding in order to do its job.

There were 1.6 million CBP apprehensions along the US-Mexico border in 2000, when there were 8,5000 agents stationed along that border. Last year, we had 18,000 CBP agents along the border and there were 400,000 apprehensions – of which 40,000 were Central American children. In 2013, the average CBP agent apprehended 22 unauthorized migrants. This is compared to over 300 apprehensions per CBP agent in 1996. With these data, it is hard to make a case for more agents. Instead, it seems it is time to cut back.

A much more viable – and affordable – solution is to place the children in alternative-to-detention programs and provide them with a safe haven while the United States and Central American countries work together to develop solutions to the root causes of this rise in the emigration of children. President Obama could also grant refugee status to these children – a viable option under current laws.

The arrival of 40,000 unaccompanied children in the United States is not the crisis. The crisis is the decision to place these children behind bars, which is a clear violation of international human rights laws. The crisis is also the conditions that drove these children to leave their countries. These are the crises that demand our attention.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tanya Golash-Boza is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of: Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach, Yo Soy Negro Blackness in Peru, Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions and Deportations in Post-9/11 America, and Due Process Denied: Detentions and Deportations in the United States. She blogs at: http://stopdeportationsnow.blogspot.com

[S]oon after the too-little too-late decision by Hamas and Palestinian Authority  (what a misnomer) to mend the fences between the rival dogmatically regressive Hamas and the ineptly corrupt Israeli/US lackey  Abbas and Co. was announced, Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu  and a bevvy of  his equally rabid, like-minded  fascists went on the offensive. As he’s done in the past, to punish the truant Palestinians,  King Bibi ordered the construction of new settlements on expropriated Palestinian lands. And, as the US has historically done, it tucked in its tail, cowered to the sidelines, and remained silent.

Silence is synonymous to acquiescence and complicity. And silence is the “price tag” exacted by AIPAC and their Christian Zionist consorts and the vise that keeps 535 U.S. congressmen and presidents at bay.

This protracted morbid trepidation by successive U.S. administrations  and the immoral acquiescence and support (financial, military, political, and otherwise) of Israel’s brutal, illegal, and inhumane occupation and treatment of Palestinians and the ingrained Israeli xenophobic thinking and policies are the underlying  reasons for the most recent tit for tat killings and mauling of Israeli and Palestinian children. In the aftermath, Hamas’  ill-advised and preposterously stupid rocketing of Israel and Israel’s retaliatory air strikes and impending land campaign are merely another act in an ongoing mortifying tragedy .

During a speech he delivered to his subordinates in the Congress of the United States of America in December of 2011, the subservient servants elevated Bibi to the status of an Olympian God and gave him 29 standing ovations, ovations that canonized him as Israel’s can-do–no-wrong American Saint.  This pandering affirmed to Bibi that, when it comes to foreign policy, he is more powerful  than the President of the United States. The power Bibi  wields  and the hegemonic  political clout he can exert on American foreign policy is more powerful than all the combined weapons in America’s military and diplomatic arsenals.  Thus, fully confident of his power to subdue the world’s super power, yet one more time,  Bibi neutered  Obama and Kerry and thumbed his nose at the latters’ repeated attempts to broker peace. Why not?  The ploy had worked for successive Israeli prime ministers of the labor and Likud proclivities. Soon after the recently announced so-called reconciliation between the warring Palestinian factions,  Bibi Netanyahu, a leader so enamored by his own sycophantic, self-aggrandizing and megalomaniacal  rhetoric, went into overdrive.

With Bibi’s 2009 re-election a fanatically fervent and politically regressive philosophy leached into and has permeated the Israeli political landscape as it has never done before. This fanatic mentality emanated itself in a fixated political, ideological, and religious parliamentary and public discourse whose tenor has reached a heretofore unprecedented openly hateful and blatantly xenophobic rhetoric akin to the rhetoric spewed by the Nazi propaganda machine of the 1930”s. This rhetoric has been matched by official Israeli actions such as political assassinations, mass arrests and torture,and especially the arrest/torture of children as young as five, human rights violations of the worst kind,  and the wanton destruction of the thread-bare fabric that holds Palestinian institutions and infrastructure in a tenuously  fragile paper-thin  band aid. The ethnic cleansing of some 80 thousand Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev Desert so as to build a new Jews-only city and the almost daily demolishing and razing of Palestinian homes and farms is a well-planned expansionist, facts-on-the-ground policy to ethnically cleanse what’s left of historic Palestine. This madness has gone unabated and unhindered by the US, the UN, the EU, and the oil-rich corrupt theocracies of the Near East.

Since its creation in 1948, Israeli politicians have refused to accept the existence of Palestinians by demonizing them in a variety of ways. As an example, in 1996 Golda Meir stated the following: “It was not as if there was [sic.] a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”  Later the same year she stated: “How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.”   And, in a typically Israeli official pronouncement (one that blames the victim), Golda was quoted as having sanctimoniously stated that: “Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs learn to love their children more than they hate us. We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for FORCING US TO KILL THEIR CHILDREN [emphasis mine].”   Forcing us to kill their children?  How sick is that? And did not Hitler utter similar words?  By the time Golda reached her seventies she talked about her nightmarish dreams of sending young Israeli soldiers into the battle fields, including her most horrifying egregiously xenophobic catatonic fear: “She would lay awake at night terrified at the number of Palestinian children that would be conceived that night.”  Even Shimon Peres, Israel’s Mr. Nice Guy,  has repeatedly expressed concerns about the “Demographic Palestinian Time Bomb,” a recurring bigoted theme in Israeli discourse, planning, and policy.

Over the years an assortment of denigrating epithets have been used  to describe Palestinians: General Moshe Dayan called the Palestinians “Jackals”;  former PM Yitzhak Shamir: “grasshoppers;”  former PM Menahem Begin: “ two-legged vermin;”  General Eitan espoused the notion that “We [Israelis] need to keep Palestinians like drugged roaches in a bottle.”   (For more  information on such hate speech read Philip Weiss, Norman Finkelstein, John  Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt.)  At the height of the second 1988 Intifada Yitzhak Katzir,  PM Yitzhak Shamir’s Deputy Prime minister, told a group of 15 fact-finding members of the American Coalition for Middle East Dialogue (idealistic American citizens of Jewish, Palestinian and other backgrounds)  the following: “We have the brains, they have the backs. We kill keep them on their knees and we will follow them  all over the world and kill them.”  To which I replied: “This is scary ! [meaning the ideas he espoused]”  To which he replied in a loud, angry, and sadistic voice: “Good!”  The smirk on his face was one of aberrant satisfaction. At the Allenby Bridge, Huda, a twenty-something American citizen born to Palestinian-America parents in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I were pulled out for the traditional Israeli welcome exclusively reserved for Americans of Palestinian origin. We were strip searched;  she had to put up with male soldiers gawking over her nubile and shapely body. The border police stole ( theft is always explained as a security concern) two large suitcases-full of granola and candy bars Huda had taken to feed starving Palestinian children in Ramallah.   They also made several attempts to steal my wife’s hair dryer and curling iron. Officers at the American Embassy in Tel Aviv informed my wife that “there is nothing we can do.”

Even as child, I learned that  Palestinians were not to be heard and, if seen, they were to behave in the most servile manner, and the epithet Aravi Melulah (Parasitic Arab) was used so frequently by the mishtara  (police) and in public discourse it became an accepted nomenclature to which  I readily adapted.  On occasion in the years 1951-1955 my uncle’s store on the Jerusalem Bethlehem highway in Upper Bakaa was vandalized, and many a time a newly-arrived  Israeli Khakhami (Orthodox) immigrant would stand in the doorway, spit his phlegm  as far as he could, and walk out.  Moroccan Jews were the most notorious; they would enter the store, fill their mouths with sunflower seeds, pretend they were looking at merchandise, deliberately spit the shells on the floor, with an occasional brazen character who’d spit his hatred on some of the linen materials lining the walls. I watched in pain as my uncle suffered the constant humiliation he experienced at the hands of these Oleem Hadasheem (new immigrants). Had they not suffered similar treatment in Europe and other places? And why, in the name of God, would my uncle not stand up for these sick thugs?  When I accompanied mother to the open market on Yehuda Street, I witnessed similar despicable practices. When mother paid  for the produce and fruit,  vendors occasionally motioned to her to place the money on one of the flat pans of the old style  scales, whereupon the money would be chucked into  cigar-like boxes. The change would be placed into the other pan,  held out for her inspection, and then deposited at the base of the scales. Instead of handing her the just-purchased items, as is the customary universal human conduct, the items were deposited on the stall stand. On occasion a vendor would take a rag, wipe the surfaces of the flat scale pans, and place them back on the scales. Was our money, too, meluhlah?   Was it not kosher enough?

In the aftermath of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish fanatic (to the cheerleading of Likudnic- types) and the ascendance of Netanyahu and his like-minded  cohorts, Israel has gone through a drastic transformation, a transformation that has openly promoted Jewish superiority and a recalcitrant mind-set whose aim is to pretend  to work towards peace while at the same time pursuing an illegal land-grab policy. The celebratory  rejoicing by Likudnic-types after Rabin’s death exposed the deeply rooted racism that had been deeply embedded in the fault line of Israeli society. And since that time the Israeli left and the peace movements have been sidelined by  a new breed of religious fanatics and a Settler mentality that perceives the Palestinians as a road block to a greater Israel, a demographic time bomb to an Israel that aspires to stretch from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.

Even before the recent abduction of Naftali Frenkel, Gil’ad Shaer and Eyal Yifrach,  Netanyahu stepped up his arrests of numerous West Bank Palestinians and Hamas types. He instituted numerous punitive actions that have had a detrimental effect on an already exhausted  and frightened Palestinian population in the deep abyss and pathos of a  47-year occupation; he also exponentially increased the settlement program. In like manner, he condoned the stepped up “price tag [revenge] attacks” by a Settler population gone wild (frequently supported by the Army). These have resulted in the destruction and vandalizing of churches, mosques, schools, homes, and vehicles, including the burning of farms and the uprooting of hundreds of trees.  Especially pugnacious are the graffiti and public discourse about population transfers;  “Death to the Arabs” and “Jesus is a monkey” in the form of graffiti and Facebook postings are carried out by mob cheerleading Settlers. Didn’t Hitler’s Youth behave in a similar manner? An attempted lynching of a Palestinian youth in a West Jerusalem shopping center has been glossed over, as have the personal attacks, maiming, and killing of Palestinians all over the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli Settler attacks had become such an accepted, common-day routine occurrences, they ceased to be newsworthy. And, instead of protecting  Palestinian civilians (the duty of an occupying force), the Israeli army has been serving as a shield and a cover for the Settlers. Hardly a week has gone by when Palestinians of all ages have been wounded, maimed, run over by cars, or killed.

In the aftermath of the dastardly abduction and killing of Naftali, Gil’ad, and Eyal, Bibi Netanyhu vowed “Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created. Neither has vengeance for the blood of 3 pure youths. .. Hamas is responsible.”   Over 500 West Bank Palestinians were immediately arrested,  protestors were shot at, several killed, and countless others  arrested, and beaten. Houses were demolished and a previously-planned clamp-down went into effect.  And yes, egged on by Netanyahu’s  rhetoric, vengeful retribution was swift and as equally merciless as it was for the three Israeli lads. Seventeen-year old Muhammad Abu Khdier was abducted, tortured, and burned — alive. How could people who’ve experienced mass annihilation in gas chambers do the same to an innocent  child?  Bibi Netanyahu  waxed eloquently about his and Israel’s moral superiority:  “A broad moral gulf separates us from our enemies. They sanctify death; we sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty, and we mercy and compassion. This is our strength.”  Really?

The merciless and brutal burning /murder of Khdier  and the equally brutal  beating of Palestinian-American sixteen-year old  Khdier’s cousin, Tariq Khdier,  fly in the face of Bibi’s ”we sanctify life  …  and … [have] mercy.”  He fans the fire by uttering nothing but caustic, hollow and angry rhetoric.  While the brutalities inflicted on Palestinians have been going on unchecked for years now, this time Israel was caught with irrefutable  video evidence that exposed the psychotic and deranged clubbing and kicking, all of which was caught on tape.  After the repeated  beating and stomping  of an already unconscious limp body of a 16-year old youth, the Israeli soldiers carried him as one would  carry the carcass of a just-killed deer.  Each kick and each punch is ymbolic of the collective deep-seated xenophobic fear and hatred that has been  bred into an Israeli  society that has not learned  that what was done to them in Europe they are likewise doing to others in a land they are desperately trying to cleanse.

The world has finally come to recognize Bibi and his Settler supporters for what they are, a mentally deranged lot.

Depending on how the carnage in Gaza unfolds, the tragic drama of five innocent youth, three Israelis, and two Palestinians, may be the jolting wake-up call to the entire world. The Israel Palestine conflict is the cancer from which most of the regional problems have emanated,  rabidly cancerous spores  that have metastasized into  a regional virulent madness  that  is fed by fanatics, madmen, and megalomaniacs of the worst kind.

Unfortunately, I do not hold out any hope. The vicious cycle of violence will go on.

Raouf J. Halaby, a naturalized U.S. citizen, is about to launch his 42nd year as a Professor of English and Art at a private university in Arkansas. He is peace activist, a sculptor, a writer, a photographer, and an avid gardener. halabyr@obu.edu.

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[I]ndonesians have voted and what votes they have cast! Either they have chosen an outright Nazi, or a populist supported by a bunch of Nazis!

The results are actually too close; it appears that almost half of the active Indonesian voters have endorsed either the Mayor of Jakarta – a former furniture salesman and populist known as ‘Jokowi’ – or a former general of the National Special Forces – Prabowo Subianto.

Incompetent according to some, populist, if you listen to others, or fierce ‘reformer’ for quite a substantial group of his supporters, not long ago Mr. Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo appeared to be running almost unopposed. But then the state, intelligence and corporate apparatuses went into gear and the gap ‘miraculously’ closed.

The ‘military camp’ deployed nationalist speeches, insults, and flag waving…

And now it is almost even…

Both candidates have declared victory.

Propaganda and ‘manipulations’ cannot be blamed for everything. There could hardly be any excuse for the great part of the nation being poisoned by racism, a nation submissive to anybody who wears a uniform, who has some power; a nation submissive to market fundamentalism.

Without any doubt, Prabowo Subianto is all that the Indonesian public that desires the continuation of fascist rule can dream of. He is a perfect 21^st century Nazi.

He served in the Indonesian National Army Special Force Kopassus (ascommander of Group 1 Komando Pasukan Sandhi Yudha (Kopassandha)) during the brutal 1976 occupation, and the genocide that Indonesia committed in East Timor. In that ruthless sadistic orgy of killing and rape, a third of the local population of the tiny nation vanished.

As a reward from his handlers, Mr. Prabowo was later trained (in the 80’s) at Fort Benning, in the United States, the country that he is really serving.

And to show his zeal, he was then involved in yet another (and ongoing) genocide, that in Papua.

But even that did not wear him out. In 1998, according to Adam Schwartz, (A Nation in Waiting) in a private conversation with Sofyan Wanandi, Prabowo said he was willing “to drive all the Chinese out of the country even if that sets the economy back twenty or thirty years.” That’s the spirit of a good Indonesian racist!

In the same year – 1998 – troops under his command were busy kidnapping and torturing opposition figures. Countless Chinese women were publicly gang raped.

Prabowo never went to jail.

Those that yearn for fascist continuity in this confused nation can now truly rejoice, by studying their candidate’s biography. Prabowo’s clan is all about that ‘continuity’.

His grandfather was a founder of Bank Negara Indonesia, his father was a cabinet minister in Suharto’s government, and as an exemplary son of a… dictatorship, Prabowo himself managed to wed one of Suharto’s daughters.

Not that his history is all that different from the biography of the present President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), who was also a general under the Suharto regime, got his ‘education’ in Fort Benning, USA, in 1976 became a platoon commander in ravaged East Timor, and married the eldest daughter of retired General Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, the very same Indonesian ‘hero’ who was unable to stop bragging that his military managed to butcher 3 million people during the massacres (or call it again, a genocide) of 1965/66.

Mr. Prabowo and the present Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, also studied at the same military academy, in the city of Magelang, as have many other Indonesian leaders. They, most likely, studied the same things, at home and abroad.

***

Many Indonesians are fond of acts of murder and mass murder in general (the homicide rate in Indonesia is twice that of the United States, per capita) and those committed in the 1965/66 in particular, as was clearly shown in the recent documentary film “Act of killing”, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer.

After these 2014 elections, Anwar Congo, jagal (“Butcher”), one of the main protagonists of the Act of Killing, is most likely rejoicing.

In the film, he admitted, looking straight at the television cameras in one of the major Indonesian television studios, that he murdered 1,000 people with his own hands.

As a reward, he received loud applause from the audience, and an admiring grin from the lady moderator.

For sure, Kopassus murdered many more people and managed to gain even greater respect…

War criminals and mass murderers are, of course, all over the place, in all national and local Indonesian elections.

To make it ‘diverse’ (‘Unity in Diversity’, is a national motto, after all), for instance, General Wiranto is one of the strongest backers of ‘Jokowi’; and Wiranto is the same general who on February 24, 2003 was indicted for Crimes against Humanity by a joint UN-East Timorese court.

According to John M. Miller from the “East Timor and Indonesia Action Network”:

“Others in the ‘Jokowi’ campaign team are also accused of serious violations of human rights. General AM Hendropriyono has been implicated in the 1989 massacre of civilians of Central Lampung, in the assassination of human rights lawyer Munir while head of Indonesia’s intelligence agency (BIN), and in the forced deportation of over 250,000 people from East to West Timor in 1999. Former BIN deputy chief retired Major General Muchdi Purwoprandjono also stands accused of the murder of Munir. A U.S. Department of State cable described Muchdi, a career Kopassus officer, as “one of Indonesia’s most vindictive public figures to justice” and placed him “at the heart of one of the nation’s human rights tragedies–the 1998-99 abductions of student and pro-democracy activists.

Former Jakarta Military Commander Lieutenant General Sutiyoso is accused of torture in Timor-Leste. In 2007, an attempt by Australian investigators to question him about the October 1975 murder of five Australia-based journalists in Balibo, Timor-Leste, caused a diplomatic incident. Sutiyoso was Jakarta’s military commander when thugs backed by troops and police attacked the headquarters of the Indonesian Democratic Party in 1996. Retired General Ryamizard Ryacudu is a hardliner known for his xenophobic remarks and criticism of rights activists. As Army Chief of Staff, he oversaw the implementation of Martial Law in Aceh beginning in May 2003.”

***

And at this point, I have to ask one simple if maybe a rhetorical question:

Would many of my readers consider going on vacation, or for work, to Germany, in 1961, just 16 years after ‘Adolf Hitler was made to step down’? Would they go there if half of the German folks would have cheerfully cast their ballots in favor of a Nazi candidate, who had been, on top of it, married to a daughter of Hitler (if Hitler had one)? And if that candidate had been a general, or a Sturmbannführer of the SS or SA forces, responsible for murdering, torturing and raping civilians somewhere in Ukraine or the former Yugoslavia, or “disappearing” the opposition in his own city, Berlin?

Would that be even thinkable?

Would they close their eyes and ears to the fact that anyone who did not look German and dared to just walk down the street, would be called names (at least in the capital city’s suburbs and in all major cities even in the center), had fingers pointed at them… blacks, Chinese, Papuans, even whites?

In Indonesia, everything is being tolerated, because Indonesia is just a myth – a grotesque product of the Western media, while the local media is trained to repeat exactly the same lies, only on a much more primitive level.

‘A democracy, a tolerant nation.’

In mythological Indonesian ‘democracy’, the mainly uneducated population (the Indonesian education system is a disaster) votes for parties that do not represent the majority and belong to the same corporate, feudal and military clique.

Its economic growth is a myth, too. What has grown is the plunder of raw materials, while the country produces close to nothing. Now it even imports rice from abroad. And its official poverty rate is one grand myth – if international norms were to apply, well over 80% of population would be defined as poor.

In this fictional country, in 1965/66, the top Indonesian military brass is true hero! In reality, it committed treason and triggered the killing of 2-3 million of its own people, mainly Left-wing intellectuals, the Chinese minority and atheists, on the explicit orders of the West. Suharto and the others around him were always just the lackeys.

Of course, the religious cadres, Muslim, Hindu and even Christian, had settled their scores with the moderate and constitutional Communists (PKI), simply because they were advocating for social justice and land reforms (religious cadres in Indonesia double as latifundistas, historically).

How do I know? I was told by my friend; the former Indonesian President, Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur), who also happened to be a progressive Muslim cleric, and the head of the biggest Muslim organization in the country (NU). Gus Dur was not a ‘fictional figure’ for a change; he was real! He was also a closet socialist and the only person with great vision, although he was almost blind. Therefore, the elites and the military got rid of him, in a well orchestrated coup.

***

I have covered Indonesia for 15 years. I have written books about this country including “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”). A book about this nation, with sub-Sahara African social indicators, but with the inflated pride of a well fed and protected lion. I have made films. I have written countless reports, essays and studies. I also co-authored the last book written by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the greatest Southeast Asian novelist of all times, “The Exile”; the book in which Ananta Toer openly calls Indonesia a fascist state, a collapsed and immoral nation, and a shame.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer was the only Indonesian who ever came close to receiving the Nobel Prize… for anything. Year after year, this former “prisoner of conscience” in the Buru concentration camp was nominated, but the academy would never give the prize to this ‘Indonesian Solzhenitsyn’, who rotted for years in a horrid pro-Western gulag. When he died, his family gave him a Muslim funeral, although he was an atheist. His comrades sang, like beggars, the International, at the curb. Make-believe place!

***

For 15 years I have listened to farmers in dozens of god-forsaken villages, and even to a bunch of Indonesian businessmen.

One tycoon told me, in Sumatra:

“We need Adolf Hitler! In order to fully restore law and order.” He loved Adolf… Many in Indonesia do.

For all those years I could not stop writing and researching! Despite all those trolls deployed by the Indonesian regime and the West, to discredit me and anybody who dares to shout that the ‘emperor has no clothes.’

To write about Indonesia is a totally ungrateful job. They spit at you there and abroad, if you dare to write the truth. That is why almost nobody does.

But I kept writing, as a warning to the world (an example of what happens to a country fully abandoned to a perverse bunch of looters, and to Western neo-colonialism; a concept of extreme brutality) because what I have seen, witnessed and heard, was bordering on the ‘impossible’. I kept thinking: “a country like this cannot really exist on this planet. And if it does, it cannot really get away with it, can it?”

But it really exists and it gets away with everything. Especially the elites do! Local elites – that perfect Nazi, racist (now all ethnicities belonging to that gang have become hopelessly racist), brainwashed gang, consisting of angry serfs, full of arrogance but also of inferiority complexes. More insecure, more brutal and murderous…

This gang kills people, poisons rivers, conducts full deforestation, poisons the air, robs cities of parks and sidewalks, as well as of any cultural institutions… It privatizes all public assets and throws the nation to an absolute dark nihilism, insecurity, ignorance and indefinable fear.

And it rules the country. And it gets elected!

And for the poor, the great majority of Indonesians, what is left? It is the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) slammed onto the extreme of Southeast Asia. Similar, but with luxury hotels and malls, and with corrupt leaders, with the local and foreign media (and the Australian National University next door, with its ‘Indonesian lobby’ and shameful lies that Indonesia is a ‘normal country’, like Brazil…) covering the entire insanity of it all, presenting it as a ‘normal country’ to its own people and to the world.

My Ugandan colleague who proofreads my essays, always comments: “It is like Uganda; damn, exactly, exactly like home!”

Uganda is, of course, yet another horrid and Fascist client state of the West, which is devouring its own people, and alongside Rwanda, murdering millions in the neighboring DRC.

It is all so similar. It is exactly the same. Indonesia devoured between 1 and 3 million of its own citizens in the 1965/66 cleansing period, and then committed two monstrous genocides in the neighboring countries that it shamelessly occupied – East Timor and Papua. Papua is an on-going genocide, committed in full view of the world, and totally under-reported, for obvious reasons…

Any sanctions against Indonesia, for the genocide? …For the third genocide in just half of century? No?

As I was writing this, my friend, a leading Australian historian and Professor Emeritus at Nagasaki University, told me over a coffee:

“The question is; what is the United States doing right now, in Jakarta? What is it doing, inside those 300 rooms they have inside the embassy – the CIA, the Pentagon, the economists? There are huge interests at stake there, right now! What protagonist would fit the best to their interests? Is Washington favoring old military elites dating to Suharto, or an unknown populist? All we know is that Washington and Canberra revoked visa restrictions on Prabowo. They prepared for his Presidency, in case it happens… We all know how closely he is linked to the US, through Kopassus…”

Identically, like the Rwandan leadership and the ongoing genocide in DRC it is committing, the Indonesian military is covered, given immunity by the West, because it is killing and plundering (Papuans and others, now and in the past) on behalf of Washington, London and Canberra.

You cannot touch the Indonesian elites, and you cannot touch the Rwandan ones. You cannot touch them; and you cannot cover them or expose them, fully, in the mainstream.

Therefore, mass murderers are ruling with no fear in Jakarta, Kigali and Kampala.

So back to the original question: would my readers consider going on vacation to a country where half of the people had just expressed their support for the Nazis?

Special Correspondent Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. The result is his latest book: “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. ‘Pluto’ published his discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. His feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” is about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.