One system,
one result - the Cuban 5, Laurent Gbagbo, Xiomara Castro
Tortilla Con Sal
Enviado
por tortilla en Dom, 12/01/2013 - 13:50
tortilla con sal, December 1st 2013
Each year goes by and still the five Cuban
anti-terrorist heroes remain imprisoned in the US criminal injustice system
(Rene can hardly feel free while his four comrades remain in captivity). The
charges against them are incontrovertibly false. But for sinister reasons of
State, the US government continues their grossly unjust imprisonment. The Five,
Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and
René González are symbols of both undefeated human dignity and the unsurpassed
moral calibre of the Cuban Revolution.
Likewise, in Scheveningen near the Hague, Ivory
Coast's elected but deposed President Laurent Gbagbo is in prison under the
rules of the NATO country dominated International Criminal Court. Even after
investigations lasting over two years, in June 2013 the Court was forced
humiliatingly to order its prosecutor to find more plausible evidence. Even so,
clearly innocent, Laurent Gbagbo remains imprisoned for political reasons. Like
the Cuban Five, he too has become an inspiring symbol of human dignity and also
of African moral superiority to the injustice of the neocolonial ICC and its
political masters.
On November 29th this year, Xiomara Castro the
presidential candidate of the progressive LIBRE party in Honduras announced
that her party rejected the result of the country's national elections held the
previous Sunday. She powerfully condemned the widespread electoral fraud that
clearly occurred before, during and, especially after, polling day. While
Xiomara Castro failed, under the rules of a corrupt electoral system, to poll
enough votes to win the Presidency, the final results still reflect a massive
injustice against her party, both in the Presidential vote and in the elections
for the Honduran legislature.
The injustice so clearly apparent in all these cases
is the deliberate result of oligarchic global corporate capitalism and its
regional political imperatives. Each case demonstrates the categorical falsity
of the alleged commitment to democracy, the rule of law and due process of the
countries of North America, Europe and their allies among the countries of the
Pacific. It is no accident that the Cuban Five, Laurent Gbagbo and Xiomara
Castro, all represent and promote political ideas and processes challenging the
unjust dominance of elite corporate interests over the well being of the global
majority.
In the case of Cuba, its direct democracy contrasts
favourably with the corruption and exclusion characteristic of NATO country
systems of representative democracy. Despite 50 years of economic blockade by
the US, Cuba's socialist economy has lifted the country higher in the UN Human
Development Index than both neoliberal showcase Panamá and Mexico, a member of
the North American Free Trade Area. The Cuban Five have demonstrated to the
world the unquestionable hypocrisy of a US State that protects mass murderers
like, among many others, Luis Posada Carriles, who boasts of bombing a civilian
airliner, killing over 70 people.
In Ivory Coast, France and its allies in the UN
promoted a terrorist war over a decade trying to destabilize the country. In
2010 they intervened in the Presidential elections. Ivory Coast's institutions
successfully resolved massive fraud perpetrated by the UN and French
presidential candidate. In the end, after the due constitutional process in
such cases, the country's Constitutional Court named Laurent Gbagbo as
President. As a result, UN and French troops garrisoned in the country
intervened, collaborating in the murder of thousands of Laurent Gbagbo's
supporters. The UN and France then effectively installed genocidal ex-World
Bank functionary Alassane Ouattara as President. Innocent, Laurent Gbagbo
remains in a European gaol.
In Honduras, garrisoned by the US military since the
early 1980s, the Organization of American States and the European Union have
recognized the serious failings of the Honduran electoral system. But since the
result favours the US and European candidate, no US troops have been called on
to defend democracy. The rule of law and due process in Honduras were bought
off wholesale a long time ago by the local US friendly oligarchy. So no
decisions will be issued upsetting either corporate elite economic objectives
in the country or the neocolonial political status quo. In effect, Xiomara
Castro's LIBRE party have suffered an electoral coup to prevent them winning
more support for their progressive political programme.
That electoral coup follows the military coup of June
29th 2009. Both are part of an obvious systematic global pattern of aggression,
abuse and injustice. The unjust imprisonment of the Cuban Five, the UN and
French military coup against Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast and the electoral
coup against Xiomara Castro in Honduras all have the same result. They defend
the global system of elite controlled corporate capitalism against the interests
of humanity's impoverished global majority.
Clearly, other examples of that seamless global
reality abound, most obviously in Haiti, for example, or in Syria. In that
adverse global context, revolutionary and progressive political movements in Central
America and the Caribbean have
dramatically improved social and economic conditions for the region's
impoverished majority. They have done so by defeating decades of determined
resistance by the US and its allied local elites of the kind so obvious over
the last couple of weeks in Honduras.
In Africa especially, the US, France, Britain and
their allies are now having to resort to the same kind of destabilization,
electoral manipulation and military occupation of which, in Central America,
Honduras is the clear prototype. Recently former South African President Thabo
Mbeki revealed that former UK Prime Minister, supreme war criminal Tony Blair,
worked on plans to attack Zimbabwe. That gives a keen ideological edge to
Zimbabwe's election this year by the European Union's African, Caribbean and Pacific
partners as co-president of the influential joint standing committee on
political affairs of the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly.
The world remains an enormous ideological battleground
between corporate capitalist elites and the global majority. That reality is
one of permanent brutal conflict. For the Cuban Five, tireless efforts to free
them by their families, the Cuban government and their international supporters
face the implacable inhumanity of the US authorities. Xiomara Castro's LIBRE party
in Honduras has to work out how to win a structural majority in Honduras in a
system rigged by multinational corporate elites and those elites' local allies
to stop them. In Ivory Coast, the France and its UN cronies resist the only
chance of genuine political progress and reconciliation there, namely, the
liberation of Laurent Gbagbo.
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