International news in brief

ITALY
200,000 say ‘no U.S. base expansion’

Some 200,000 people, far more than organizers expected, marched in Vicenza, Italy, on Feb. 17 to protest plans to nearly double the size of the U.S. military base in that city, from 2,750 to 4,500 troops. The Pentagon plans to keep in Vicenza the entire 173rd Airborne, a rapid deployment force now split between Vicenza’s Camp Ederle and Ramstein in Germany. The 173rd answers to the European Command, which can send U.S. forces into an area of almost 22 million square miles, including 90 countries.

Vicenza’s citizens had been protesting plans to build the larger base for months, as it threatens their environment and the tranquility of the city. But people came from all over Italy to join the national protest because the new base also threatens to make Italy a source of U.S.-NATO aggression throughout the African continent and nearby Asian countries as well as Eastern Europe. Many Italians demonstrating have said this also makes Italy and especially Vicenza a target, since it will house the aggressors.

In the weeks before the demonstration, the Italian government and its right-wing opposition violence-baited the protesters, recalling the anti-globalization protest in Genoa in the summer of 2001—when demonstrators clashed with police, who brutally attacked the protest and even shot one youth to death. These slanders were repeated in the Italian corporate media. The U.S. Embassy also butted in with a letter “warning” U.S. citizens to stay away from Vicenza as the demonstrators were “anti-American.”

A group of U.S. expatriates organized from Florence exposed these slanders with an open letter to the ambassador, saying the contents of his letter “disseminate fear and ignorance and are offensive to the intelligence of U.S. citizens in Italy.” The group, U.S. Citizens Against War (Florence), also participated in the Vicenza march.

The authorities had a 1,300-person force of local police and carabinieri (federal police) on hand to repress the marchers, if necessary. This time, despite all the baiting and provocations from the government, there were no confrontations.

The massive protest has also caused problems for the “center-left” government led by Romano Prodi, because parties that make up his ruling coalition—including the Refoundation Communist Party and the Greens—joined the protest. These parties had not broken with the government over its decisions to keep Italian troops in Afghanistan and send troops to Lebanon.

PHILIPPINES
Health workers demand national budget funds

Doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers from dozens of hospitals, clinics and health offices marched to the Department of Budget and Management in Manila to protest the refusal of the government of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to release the funds approved by the Philippine Congress for 2006. The health care group joined other government employees in demanding a 3,000 Philippine peso across-the-board salary increase instead of the promised 10-percent increase. “This is not even enough to cover the recent increase in prices of basic commodities,” said Emma Manuel, president of the Alliance of Health Workers. The AHW says that the government is continuing to decrease the health budget, privatize government hospitals and increase hospital fees, while not allocating benefits.

GUINEA, WEST AFRICA
State of siege called against strike

Faced with a resumed general strike that was taking shape as a political uprising, Guinean President Lansana Conté called a state of siege. The strike resumed because Conté had appointed a close ally as prime minister instead of sticking to the agreement to share power with opposition parties, which had ended an earlier strike. Hundreds of civilians have been killed by the military since early January, when the strike struggles first broke out. (See WW, Feb. 15)

During the state of siege, the military has carried out raids and arrested 278 people as of Feb. 16, according to a government source, including leaders of all the opposition parties and some trade-union leaders. A spokesperson for one of those opposition parties, the Union of the People of Guinea (RPG), told the French Press Agency on Feb. 18 that “more than a half of our federal and regional leadership have been arrested or found it necessary to take exile in other cities.” The state of siege originally had a curfew that allowed movement only six hours during the day, though it has subsequently been slightly relaxed.

RWANDA, CENTRAL AFRICA
French judge exposes U.S. role in 1994 events

In a report to French prosecutors late last year that broke into the news in mid-February, French Magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere accused Paul Kagame, who is now president of Rwanda, of ordering the 1994 assassinations of the presidents of Burundi and Rwanda. The deaths of the presidents, who were attempting to negotiate a peace agreement, sparked a civil war and led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda’s people, who now number 9 million.

Kagame is a U.S. client who in 1994 was leading an army called the Rwandan Patriotic Front, made up of Rwandan exiled Tutsis who had invaded their home country from Uganda. He was treated at the time as a hero in the U.S. media and by U.S. government figures. Kagame had been trained at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Leavenworth, Kan., before returning to Uganda to lead the RPF.

Bruguiere’s report calls attention to the competition between French colonial interests on one side and U.S.-British support for the RPF as contributing to the ensuing massacre in the former Belgian colony. The ruling RPF made English an official language in Rwanda in 1996 along with French and the local language.

The 67-page French report includes charges that U.S. and U.N. officials, to protect Kagame, helped cover up earlier inquiries. It presents testimony from exiled Kagame bodyguards, spies and commanders. They identified a commando team that allegedly shot down the plane that killed the two presidents. “Kagame deliberately chose a modus operandi that, in the particularly tense environment ... between the Hutu and Tutsi communities, could only cause bloody retaliation against the Tutsi community,” says Bruguiere’s report. The implication is that Kagame accepted a probable massacre of Rwandans and even of his own Tutsi ethnic group as a price for seizing power in the country.

Since 1994, imperialist apologists have used the Rwandan massacre as a propaganda weapon to justify intervention from Western countries in Africa, most recently in Somalia and Sudan, and other parts of the world—for example, the Balkans from 1995 to 1999—as alleged peacekeepers. Bruguiere’s report exposes the Western imperialist role as oppressor in Africa and competition among the imperialists as a key factor in the deaths.