The biases in international law that favored the powerful and prosperous also tended to protect and encourage persecutors, especially when these groups intertwined and overlapped. In fact, the social mechanisms of genocide -- that is, how it is actually carried out -- aborted the development of international law and precedents that might otherwise have restricted genocides, particularly after World War I. Thus, the law and crime became caught in a cycle in which the law facilitated the crime, and the crime, in turn, helped institutionalize a form of law with which it could coexist. The losers in this vicious circle were the ordinary people, children, and rebels who have always borne the brunt of tyranny. -- Christopher Simpson, _The Splendid Blond Beast_ (1995)

As death rains over the Serbian state in the former Yugoslavia, the corporate spinmeisters work overtime to convince the world that the rain of fire over the land is justified to protect the "ethnic minority" of the Kosovars. While it is indeed possible that the Kosovars are under severe Serbian repression, isn't it odd that the Western powers chose this conflict to "resolve"? Isn't it strange that these same powers have, for half a century or more, turned a blind eye to virtual holocausts throughout the charnel houses of Europe?
Where were the Western powers when the Kurds have been savaged, herded and decimated by the border states of Turkey, Iraq and Iran? The fate of the Basques in the borders between France and Spain is, for all intents and purposes, off the table. National ethnic minorities continue to be treated like the trash of Euro-states; Consider the Roma (so-called Gypsies) who are seen, perceived and treated as the "white niggers" of Europe.
Even as we see NATO dropping metallic death on Serbia because of their mistreatment of "ethnic minorities," the cities and towns of Europe are doing all that they can to make immigration as difficult as possible for people seeking asylum. According to CARF (the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism) [No. 49 April/May 1999] several European states have pursued a strategy of Exclusion, dispersal and state xenophobia. This is seen in the proposed Asylum and Immigration Bill before the British parliament, described by CARF as "draconian," which treats asylum-seekers as "non-persons in a segregated society" who come to their country only to "sponge off the welfare state" [CARF Editorial,p.3].
The Asylum and Immigration Bill presently going through parliament is a draconian piece of legislation which, by denying asylum-seekers access to mainstream benefits, renders them non-persons in a segregated society.... When the state says that it is natural to fear foreigners, because foreigners are indeed out to defraud our welfare state, then it puts its imprimatur on xenophobia and the racists at Dover have won. In the 1960s racism was institutionalised into the apparatuses of the state via the Immigration Acts. The same phenomenon is being repeated today, although now state racism is directed not just against black Third World asylum-seekers but the "lesser white breeds" of eastern Europe. The government can't face both ways: it can't fight institutionalized racism, on the one hand, while institutionalising xenophobia on the other. We have been here before. Never again. [fr. CARF EDITORIAL, "Fight State Xenophobia," p.3]
While the rights of "ethnic minorities" is being bandied about to justify the bombing and strafing of the Serbian heartland, one is forced to wonder, how are the rights of "ethnic minorities" protected in the European nation-states? To most in America, the name of Semira Adamu is unknown, but this is not the case in Belgium. There, she was rejected as an asylum-seeker and "suffered a heart attack brought on by a brain hemorrhage" after Belgian immigration police attempted to deport her by using the notorious "pillow restraint method." They held the Nigerian woman down, as she tried to object, with "...gendarmes laughing and cracking jokes while suffocating Adamu with a cushion" (CARF, p. 12).
According to CARF, out of a total of 45 deaths in 1998, 29 were of asylum-seekers or undocumented workers whose deaths arose as a direct consequence of immigration and asylum policies which deny individual rights. Of these, 7 were of Roma killed either by the cops or in racially motivated incidents in eastern or central Europe. Three deaths documented in 1998 were of Kosovar Albanians and occurred because Germany deported them back to Serbia, where they were greeted by a firing squad.
This was just one instance of death by deportation.
In Toulouse, France, a 17-year-old of North African origin was shot to death by police, while allegedly trying to steal a car. Habib Muhammed was shot to death by a cop who didn't even bother to report it. A passerby found the body of the teen lying in the gutter.
The nation that we call Serbia exists today because of the intervention of France and Britain into the affairs of the Ottoman Empire. As noted Arab scholar Albert Hourani noted in "A History of the Arab Peoples" (Harvard, 1991), the Western European powers brought trade, but their interests were of colonial domination, for: "Behind the merchant and the sailor there stood the armed power of the European states" (p. 266).
Serbia was thus established in 1830, after an anti-Ottoman revolt that was stimulated and provoked by Western European powers, to split the empire. The conquest was so complete that a French colonialist would come to say, "there is no longer an Arab people, there are now men who talk another language than ours."
What is happening today in Serbia is an echo of what happened over a century ago.
What is happening today in Serbia, is but a darker reflection of what is happening in all of Europe, where the foreigner is treated shabbily, and the stranger is excluded.
Some "ethnic minorities" are favored, while others are damned to the ignominy of history.

Copyright 1999 Mumia Abu-Jamal. All Rights Reserved.

Carnage comes to the windswept hills of Colorado, and a nation stands mesmerized by a horror that is but a mirror of all that truly is America, reflected from the hairless faces of boys, their faces marred into the permanent, scowling grimace of hatred. Predictably, the carnage at Columbine High School has elicited howls of searing grief, as well as the questions that, by now, have more rhetoric in them than reason.
How? Why? How could this happen -- here?
And implicit in the questioning, lies the barely shrouded suggestion that these kinds of events are meant to happen in the inner cities of the damned, where all else of little value is purged and partitioned, but not here! In an age when the poor are damned to the permanence of squalor, and when millions grow like bubbles on the edge of a rolling brook, there is a social acceptance of loss, of death, of poverty's grip on the psyche.
But things do not occur as they are supposed to occur, and consciousness does not easily lie within closed doors of social class. In contemporary society, consciousness passes through barriers, walls, and ages, and nothing pervades the national consciousness as much as the ubiquity of violence.
We live in a nation which was weaned on the mother's milk of dark and bitter violence, and of an ethnic cleansing that was a pattern of those to come. We live on land fed by Indian and African blood, sweat and tears, and white-washed away as if it never really happened. We live in a nation that is bombing civilians with joyous alacrity, all the while crowing, "collateral damage"; "collateral damage," as if these words justify the killing of innocents on a bus, or in a house who are guilty of nothing but being in a country that NATO is determined to pulverize for imperial interests. It has been fourteen years since the infernal bombing of the MOVE house in Philadelphia, and to date, not a single killer cop has ever seen a single charge for the most premeditated of murders against men, women and babies.
In this nation, young boys grow up learning that there are several kinds of violence, state violence, and personal violence; and state violence is okay. Why else would one of the killers of Columbine have sought, unsuccessfully, to have joined the Marines several days before the carnage? Unable to participate in the state's violence, the boys gleefully engaged in personal violence, and instead of being called a "hero" for killing the enemy, they are called "killers" for killing their classmates.
Meanwhile, the reasons and motivations are ignored, only the acts, as if they stand alone, inviolate. And, in this age, when images flit across nations at the speed of light, aren't motivations important?
They are not monsters, but boys of an America where legalized violence is bred in the bone. They are truly America's children. And they are but a harbinger of what is to come.
For, are not children but living reflections of that which is the darkest and brightest of their parents? Do they not, like burnished mirrors, reflect all of those who came before them?
The shooters of Columbine High School are exemplars of what we have come to call alienated youth. In that whirlpool of hormonal surges that is the agony of adolescence, when they stand at the terrible vestibule of becoming, nothing is as frightening as the fear of failure; the failure of manhood; the absence of potency that is the very definition of American man. They are at the cusp of completion, wondering, and fearing that they may not match their dreams.
Man, as projected by popular American culture and myth, is he who is the destroyer; he who kills. Denied membership in the club of professional killers (soldiers), they wanted to prove they were indeed real American men.
The carnage of Columbine is the direct result.
The real tragedy is that they are but boys, all-American boys, and there are millions who share their alienated spirit.
Copyright 1999 Mumia Abu-Jamal. All Rights Reserved.

"The people long eagerly for 2 things - bread and circuses." - Juvenal (Roman poet; 60-140 A.D.)

In the upcoming U.S. Presidential campaign, the candidacy of George W. Bush is being touted as an exemplar of what the store-bought media calls "compassionate conservatism." Hearing the phrase brings to mind the exchange heard on the House floor during the recent impeachment debate: "When a politician claims it ain't about the money, it's about the money!" Similarly, when a politician claims he's a "compassionate conservative," it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that there ain't no such animal.
As Governor of Texas, Bush had ample opportunity to show his "compassion" to the born-again rehabilitated Karla Faye Tucker. Instead, he dispatched her to the gallows. Texas leads the nation in the number and pace of executions.
An upcoming execution case in the Lone Star state is a real test of compassion.

Larry Robison is a young man who spent years in institutions due to documented mental illnesses, such as manic depression and schizophrenia. On his 18th birthday he was automatically released from the mental institution, despite the pleas of his parents. Institutional administrators explained that they had no choice in the matter, as Larry had no history of violence.
He was released. His mental illness worsened.
He killed 5 people. He's on Death Row.
When he was released from the mental institution, his parents were told if any incidents of violence occurred, he would be returned to the institution for further treatment.
He did involve himself in acts of violence, but he was sent to prison instead; to Death Row. His demonstrable mental illnesses meant next to nothing to his jury; perhaps even less to politicians who use state-sanctioned killings to further their political careers.
What will the short, tortured, manic life of Larry Robison mean to the politician who boasts of his "compassion"? The man who wishes to be President plans to sacrifice Robison on the altar of political ambition, by killing him on Aug. 17, 1999. If you oppose this, make your voices heard.
*1999 MAJ

"Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed." -- Journalist I.F. Stone (1907-1989)

With the recent revelation that FBI agents fired several "incendiary devices" into the flimsy, wooden home, headquarters and church of the Branch Davidian religious commune near Waco, Texas, began renewed charges that the agencies and operatives of the U.S. Government sparked the deadly conflagration that left 80 men, women and children incinerated.
For over 6 years the U.S. Justice Department said no such flammable canisters were used at any time on April 19, 1993. For over six years government officials lied, insisting that the Branch Davidians killed themselves by setting the fire in any orgy of suicidal violence.
Now, who can really say? The "incendiary devices" story was broken, not by a major U.S. newspaper, or network, but by an independent filmmaker and journalist. The national media is just following somebody else's play.
When the state attacked MOVE headquarters on May 13th, 1985, they also blamed MOVE people, saying they set their own home and headquarters aflame, incinerating themselves!
To date, almost 15 years after the police mass murder of MOVE men, women, and children (11 people), the *only* person to serve even an hour of jail was MOVE survivor Ramona Africa, "guilty" only of surviving.
Similarly, the WACO survivors have been socked into prison for exorbitant periods of time, based, at least in part, on FBI and government lies at trial.
According to at least one source, there was U.S. Army Delta Force members active at WACO. The magazine "Soldier of Fortune", as early as its August 1996 issue, reports Delta wasn't some background, observing outfit. "SOF" cites sources which claim Delta actually talked U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno into the chemical and armored assault on Mount Carmel. The magazine quotes a Department of Defense attorney saying the Delta unit members were "forward deployed" on the inner perimeter surrounding Mt. Carmel, adding that Delta's role in the assault was "much more advisory than observatory; active, not passive."
And now, the same government promises to, once again, "investigate" Waco. We are witnessing the birth of but another, "new and improved," whitewash.
@1999 Mumia Abu-Jamal