The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON, DC–The indigenous North American hippie population has expanded to the point that its teeming herds are endangering the planet’s fragile freakosystem, warned a Department of the Interior report released Monday.

According to the report, over the past 20 years, the wide-ranging, largely migratory hippies have more than tripled in population, insidiously infiltrating nearly every other U.S. subculture while venturing far beyond their natural Vermont and Colorado habitats.

“Due to the species’ lack of predators, willingness to live almost anywhere and rabbit-like breeding habits, the hippie has become the most prevalent feature on the American countercultural landscape,” Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said. “If we do not soon find a way to thin their herds, they will overwhelm every other subculture on the continent, potentially leading to freakological disaster on a mass global scale.”

Experts say the hippie-related environmental damage has largely been the result of their sheer numbers. Long regarded as a mere nuisance species, the hippies have grown over the past 10 years into one of the most populous in North America, numbering close to 20 million. Further, because of the hippie herds’ normal daily cycle of waking, bongo-playing and large-scale grass consumption, followed by a brief period of torpor and then aggressive nutritive replenishment, their freakological impact is enormous.

“Each summer, the hippie herds migrate north to Boulder, wiping out 80 to 90 percent of the hummus supply of the regions through which they pass,” National Park Service director Roger Kennedy said. “In certain parts of Colorado, by mid-August, the patchouli reservoirs are entirely drained.”

The burgeoning herds–identifiable by their dreadlocked hair, hemp jewelry and distinctive tie-dyed markings–have greatly affected the quality of life of people living in these areas of high hippie concentration.

“They’re everywhere,” said Linda Hewson of Albany, NY. “Last night, when I went to take out the trash, I found one of them foraging through my garbage cans for Dead bootlegs. I shooed it away, but a bunch more came by later scavenging for discarded twirling sticks.”

2006: A noose is hung from a “Whites Only” tree in a Jena, Louisiana high school.

September 20th, 2007: tens of thousands descend on Jena in an outraged and joyful protest.

October 9, 2007: a noose is hung at Columbia Teacher’s College as part of a spate of nooses, racist threats and brutality lashing back across the country. A white supremacist website has published the home addresses of the Jena Six, encouraging people to take “justice” into their own hands.

TODAY: Time for everyone who refuses to go backwards and worse to stand up, resist, and take the future into OUR hands!

What are NOOSES?

NOOSES — are an open threat of racist terror rooted in generations of slavery: children auctioned out of their mother’s arms, feet mutilated to prevent against escape, backs scarred with welts from whips.

NOOSES–are in line with a whole system of white supremacy enforced by courts that have warehoused nearly a million Black people into prison, carried out by brutal police who see “driving while Black” as a crime punishable by death, and reinforced through countless daily insults and discrimination large and small.

NOOSES–are a message to Black people as a whole, but particularly Black youth, that the U.S., the so-called “leader of the free world,” has no future for them other than massive criminalization, gangs, dead-end and disappearing jobs, imprisonment, early death or know-nothing-bible-banging.

The hanging of this noose at Columbia also takes place after the appearance of racist graffiti lashing out at communists and advocating “nuk[ing] Mecca, Medina, Tehran, Baghdad, Jakarta, and all the savages in Africa,” and a whole atmosphere of fascist intimidation and thuggery being whipped up and mobilized in the upcoming “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” October 22–26th initiated by David Horowitz. This week involves over 100 campuses, speakers like Ann Coulter, Daniel Pipes, Rick Santorum and is ominously being called “the biggest conservative protest ever.” Invoking progressive themes like “free-speech” and combating “the oppression of women in Islam” as a cover, they plan to harass Muslim Student Associations and Women’s Studies departments, and silence anyone that questions the Bush regime’s official narrative, including even those concerned about global warming.

The people planning this week are the ideological foot-soldiers of a whole fascist clamp-down on society right at a time when the Bush regime is neck-deep into a deeply unpopular and genocidal war in Iraq and is preparing a new potential war against Iran. David Horowitz himself waged a campaign against reparations by crowing that Black people should be grateful for slavery! Horowitz is planning to come and speak at Columbia, along with Fox News host Sean Hannity on October 26th.

This fascist assault will not “just go away” and cannot be ignored. It must be exposed, confronted with the truth about who the real fascists are, and politically defeated.

If anything cried out with urgency for a revolutionary movement and massive political resistance it is the world today: the nooses, the legalized torture, the wars for empire, the moves towards a dark ages theocracy for women and gays and science, and the massive grinding up of human lives and human potential in the vast sweatshops, swelling shanty-towns slums, and whole regions left to waste in disease and disaster.

We have learned from the righteous history of rising up and fighting against the oppression of Black people, against unjust wars, the oppression of women and from revolutionary struggles for emancipation the world over–power concedes nothing without a struggle!

Two futures are being posed for this generation…what will you do? The direction of the whole world is being fought over–campus life cannot go back to normal.

It is time for a new generation to wake up and fight for a whole different world!
What could be more important than that?

Who Is David Horowitz?

It is worth reprinting this description from Revolution Newspaper:

Horowitz is a self-described “battering ram” against any thinking in academia that challenges a whole range of lies this system has perpetrated. He’s played a major role in slandering, hounding, and even ending the careers of progressive teachers. Horowitz established his credentials with the ruling class by renouncing his involvement in the 1960s movements for social change in a series of slanderous articles, books and conferences. He “made his bones” in the ’90s, by waging a high-profile campaign against reparations for African-Americans, with the theme that Black people should be grateful for slavery! Horowitz took out huge ads in campus newspapers proclaiming this vicious lie and to this day makes it a major part of his attack. He wrote a book on the “art of political war” that Karl Rove distributed to key Republican campaign operatives. He is a vitriolic defender of everything from the extermination of the Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people, to the savage and criminal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and the torture of those whom this regime deems to be terrorists. He has set up a website that clamors for the arrest and imprisonment of revolutionaries, radicals, dissenters and liberals and reports every slander, rumor, lie and innuendo that comes his way. And, bankrolled from the ruling class, he has organized the falsely named “Students for Academic Freedom,” which literally takes notes on lectures and rips things out of context in an attempt to get professors who do not sufficiently bow down to the Bush agenda fired. The modern-day Nazi-type student groups inspired by Horowitz organize so-called “games” like “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” on campus. In short, Horowitz defends every crime that this system has ever committed and is now preparing to justify even more, and to intimidate and silence any who would question or resist this.

Since we are among the precious few who have watched FOX business shows, from Neil Cavuto to the “Cost of Freedom,” we know what a joke the so-called business coverage is. Melanie at the News Hounds has documented the coverage for years. Paris Hilton, strippers, sex diaries — all critical business functions.

“Was his death by fratricide an accident or a homicide? After all, he had reportedly advised fellow Rangers to vote for John Kerry and, on his next leave, was looking forward to meeting Noam Chomsky.”– Robert Lipsyte, Tomdispatch, January, 2007

If the sports media ever decides to get serious about its ranting, the Pat Tillman case would be perfect. The promising young pro football player with a reputation as a risk-taker and free thinker, Tillman was no Bush poster boy when he joined the Army after 9/11. He was a patriot. The spinning of his death in Afghanistan three years ago as a heroic defense of his comrades was yet another act of deadly cynicism and/or desperation by the current administration — particularly after it was discovered that he had been killed by friendly fire.

And then it got much worse. This summer, while we were counting down Bonds and counting out Vick, the Associated Press, using documents dug up through a Freedom of Information request, reported just why the Army had buried the findings of a post-mortem on Tillman. He had been shot three times in the forehead at close range.

According to the AP on July 27, “U.S. Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman’s forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former professional football player’s death amounted to a crime…; The doctors — whose names were blacked out — said the bullet holes were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.” Oh, and by the way, “No evidence at all of enemy fire was found at the scene — no one was hit by enemy fire, nor was any government equipment struck.”

How could this bombshell explode so quietly? Where was the sports media? Where was the media period? Forget about the relative importance of this story compared to drugs, dingers, dogs; just think about the chance to rumble and rant

You don’t even have to be a casual viewer of CSI to deduce that Tillman could well have been murdered by another U.S. soldier. You can imagine the detectives’ hunches — a soldier who hated him or his politics, maybe one who went psycho or thought Tillman was leading them into a trap, took him down at close range. And then there could be room for more Belichickian paranoia: Officers ordered Tillman killed to prevent him from coming home and telling people what he had seen and how he now felt about the war.

Nobody picked it up and ran with it. Too dangerous? Too political? Are sportswriters too lazy, too wussy, or just too smart? Landis and Donaghy and Bonds and Vick can’t hurt you so long as you carp from a distance. Karl could kill you by text-message.

I’m no fool. I’m going to keep this story alive in fiction. Change names, do it as a movie, which I want to develop with Steven Soderbergh, David Cronenberg, and Peter (“Friday Night Lights”) Berg.

The shooting would then become a hit ordered by Karl Rove for reasons that are revealed after the Tillman character miraculously recovers from his wounds and comes home to lead us into the second American Revolution.

In a motor home called Liberty Two, he drives the NASCAR circuit telling crowds of more than 200,000 what he has learned of the government’s greed and betrayal. This audience is particularly responsive because it’s their siblings, children, relatives, and friends who have been doing most of the fighting — and dying.

In the last scene, as Tillman heads for Washington, D.C. leading a convoy of more than one million vehicles, Karl Rove shows up to offer his services.

While I wait for the green light to write up the script, I’ll be keeping an ear cocked toward the NFL. Last month, a group of veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan asked Commissioner Roger Goodell to help obtain all the documents in the Tillman case.

10/08/07 “Common Dreams” — — Iran has never manifested itself as a serious threat to the national security of the United States, or by extension as a security threat to global security. At the height of Iran’s “exportation of the Islamic Revolution” phase, in the mid-1980’s, the Islamic Republic demonstrated a less-than-impressive ability to project its power beyond the immediate borders of Iran, and even then this projection was limited to war-torn Lebanon.

Iranian military capability reached its modern peak in the late 1970’s, during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlevi. The combined effects of institutional distrust on the part of the theocrats who currently govern the Islamic Republic of Iran concerning the conventional military institutions, leading as it did to the decay of the military through inadequate funding and the creation of a competing paramilitary organization, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command (IRGC), and the disastrous impact of an eight-year conflict with Iraq, meant that Iran has never been able to build up conventional military power capable of significant regional power projection, let alone global power projection.

Where Iran has demonstrated the ability for global reach is in the spread of Shi’a Islamic fundamentalism, but even in this case the results have been mixed. Other than the expansive relations between Iran (via certain elements of the IRGC) and the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, Iranian success stories when it comes to exporting the Islamic revolution are virtually non-existent. Indeed, the efforts on the part of the IRGC to export Islamic revolution abroad, especially into Europe and other western nations, have produced the opposite effect desired. Based upon observations made by former and current IRGC officers, it appears that those operatives chosen to spread the revolution in fact more often than not returned to Iran noting that peaceful coexistence with the West was not only possible but preferable to the exportation of Islamic fundamentalism. Many of these IRGC officers began to push for moderation of the part of the ruling theocrats in Iran, both in terms of interfacing with the west and domestic policies.

The concept of an inherent incompatibility between Iran, even when governed by a theocratic ruling class, and the United States is fundamentally flawed, especially from the perspective of Iran. The Iran of today seeks to integrate itself responsibly with the nations of the world, clumsily so in some instances, but in any case a far cry from the crude attempts to export Islamic revolution in the early 1980’s. The United States claims that Iran is a real and present danger to the security of the US and the entire world, and cites Iranian efforts to acquire nuclear technology, Iran’s continued support of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran’s “status” as a state supporter of terror, and Iranian interference into the internal affairs of Iraq and Afghanistan as the prime examples of how this threat manifests itself.

On every point, the case made against Iran collapses upon closer scrutiny. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), mandated to investigate Iran’s nuclear programs, has concluded that there is no evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Furthermore, the IAEA has concluded that it is capable of monitoring the Iranian nuclear program to ensure that it does not deviate from the permitted nuclear energy program Iran states to be the exclusive objective of its endeavors. Iran’s support of the Hezbollah Party in Lebanon – Iranian protestors shown here supporting Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah during an anti-Israel rally – while a source of concern for the State of Israel, does not constitute a threat to American national security primarily because the support provided is primarily defensive in nature, designed to assist Hezbollah in deterring and repelling an Israeli assault of sovereign Lebanese territory. Similarly, the bulk of the data used by the United States to substantiate the claims that Iran is a state sponsor of terror is derived from the aforementioned support provided to Hezbollah. Other arguments presented are either grossly out of date (going back to the early 1980’s when Iran was in fact exporting Islamic fundamentalism) or unsubstantiated by fact.

The US claims concerning Iranian interference in both Iraq and Afghanistan ignore the reality that both nations border Iran, both nations were invaded and occupied by the United States, not Iran, and that Iran has a history of conflict with both nations that dictates a keen interest concerning the internal domestic affairs of both nations. The United States continues to exaggerate the nature of Iranian involvement in Iraq, arresting “intelligence operatives” who later turned out to be economic and diplomatic officials invited to Iraq by the Iraqi government itself. Most if not all the claims made by the United States concerning Iranian military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been backed up with anything stronger than rhetoric, and more often than not are subsequently contradicted by other military and governmental officials, citing a lack of specific evidence.

Iran as a nation represents absolutely no threat to the national security of the United States, or of its major allies in the region, including Israel. The media hype concerning alleged statements made by Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has created and sustained the myth that Iran seeks the destruction of the State of Israel. Two points of fact directly contradict this myth. First and foremost, Ahmadinejad never articulated an Iranian policy objective to destroy Israel, rather noting that Israel’s policies would lead to its “vanishing from the pages of time.” Second, and perhaps most important, Ahmadinejad does not make foreign policy decisions on the part of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is the sole purview of the “Supreme Leader,” the Ayatollah Khomeini. In 2003 Khomeini initiated a diplomatic outreach to the United States inclusive of an offer to recognize Israel’s right to exist. This initiative was rejected by the United States, but nevertheless represents the clearest indication of what the true policy objective of Iran is vis-à-vis Israel.

The fact of the matter is that the “Iranian Threat” is derived solely from the rhetoric of those who appear to seek confrontation between the United States and Iran, and largely divorced from fact-based reality. A recent request on the part of Iran to allow President Ahmadinejad to lay a wreath at “ground zero” in Manhattan was rejected by New York City officials. The resulting public outcry condemned the Iranian initiative as an affront to all Americans, citing Iran’s alleged policies of supporting terrorism. This knee-jerk reaction ignores the reality that Iran was violently opposed to al-Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan throughout the 1990’s leading up to 2001, and that Iran was one of the first Muslim nations to condemn the terror attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001.

A careful fact-based assessment of Iran clearly demonstrates that it poses no threat to the legitimate national security interests of the United States. However, if the United States chooses to implement its own unilateral national security objectives concerning regime change in Iran, there will most likely be a reaction from Iran which produces an exceedingly detrimental impact on the national security interests of the United States, including military, political and economic. But the notion of claiming a nation like Iran to constitute a security threat simply because it retains the intent and capability to defend its sovereign territory in the face of unprovoked military aggression is absurd. In the end, however, such absurdity is trumping fact-based reality when it comes to shaping the opinion of the American public on the issue of the Iranian “threat.”

10/08/07 “Khaleej Times” — — NUCLEAR-armed states are criminal states. They have a legal obligation, confirmed by the World Court, to live up to Article 6 of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which calls on them to carry out good-faith negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely. None of the nuclear states has lived up to it.

The United States is a leading violator, especially the Bush administration, which even has stated that it isn’t subject to Article 6.

On July 27, Washington entered into an agreement with India that guts the central part of the NPT, though there remains substantial opposition in both countries. India, like Israel and Pakistan (but unlike Iran), is not an NPT signatory, and has developed nuclear weapons outside the treaty. With this new agreement, the Bush administration effectively endorses and facilitates this outlaw behaviour. The agreement violates US law, and bypasses the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the 45 nations that have established strict rules to lessen the danger of proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, observes that the agreement doesn’t bar further Indian nuclear testing and, “incredibly, … commits Washington to help New Delhi secure fuel supplies from other countries even if India resumes testing.” It also permits India to “free up its limited domestic supplies for bomb production.” All these steps are in direct violation of international nonproliferation agreements.

The Indo-US agreement is likely to prompt others to break the rules as well. Pakistan is reported to be building a plutonium production reactor for nuclear weapons, apparently beginning a more advanced phase of weapons design. Israel, the regional nuclear superpower, has been lobbying Congress for privileges similar to India’s, and has approached the Nuclear Suppliers Group with requests for exemption from its rules. Now France, Russia and Australia have moved to pursue nuclear deals with India, as China has with Pakistan — hardly a surprise, once the global superpower has opened the door.

The Indo-US deal mixes military and commercial motives. Nuclear weapons specialist Gary Milhollin noted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s testimony to Congress that the agreement was “crafted with the private sector firmly in mind,” particularly aircraft and reactors and, Milhollin stresses, military aircraft. By undermining the barriers against nuclear war, he adds, the agreement not only increases regional tensions but also “may hasten the day when a nuclear explosion destroys an American city.” Washington’s message is that “export controls are less important to the United States than money” — that is, profits for US corporations — whatever the potential threat. Kimball points out that the United States is granting India “terms of nuclear trade more favourable than those for states that have assumed all the obligations and responsibilities” of the NPT. In most of the world, few can fail to see the cynicism. Washington rewards allies and clients that ignore the NPT rules entirely, while threatening war against Iran, which is not known to have violated the NPT, despite extreme provocation: The United States has occupied two of Iran’s neighbours and openly sought to overthrow the Iranian regime since it broke free of US control in 1979.

Over the past few years, India and Pakistan have made strides towards easing the tensions between the two countries. People-to-people contacts have increased and the governments are in discussion over the many outstanding issues that divide the two states. Those promising developments may well be reversed by the Indo-US nuclear deal. One of the means to build confidence throughout the region was the creation of a natural gas pipeline from Iran through Pakistan into India. The “peace pipeline” would have tied the region together and opened the possibilities for further peaceful integration.

The pipeline, and the hope it offers, might become a casualty of the Indo-US agreement, which Washington sees as a measure to isolate its Iranian enemy by offering India nuclear power in exchange for Iranian gas — though in fact India would gain only a fraction of what Iran could provide.

The Indo-US deal continues the pattern of Washington’s taking every measure to isolate Iran. In 2006, the US Congress passed the Hyde Act, which specifically demanded that the US government “secure India’s full and active participation in United States efforts to dissuade, isolate, and if necessary, sanction and contain Iran for its efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.”

It is noteworthy that the great majority of Americans — and Iranians — favour converting the entire region to a nuclear-weapons free zone, including Iran and Israel. One may also recall that UN Security Council Resolution 687 of April 3, 1991, to which Washington regularly appealed when seeking justification for its invasion of Iraq, calls for “establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery.”

Clearly, ways to mitigate current crises aren’t lacking.

This Indo-US agreement richly deserves to be derailed. The threat of nuclear war is extremely serious, and growing, and part of the reason is that the nuclear states — led by the United States — simply refuse to live up to their obligations or are significantly violating them, this latest effort being another step toward disaster.

The US Congress gets a chance to weigh in on this deal after the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group vet it. Perhaps Congress, reflecting a citizenry fed up with nuclear gamesmanship, can reject the agreement. A better way to go forward is to pursue the need for global nuclear disarmament, recognising that the very survival of the species is at stake.

Thousands of peace protesters won a victory for civil liberties and told Prime Minister Gordon Brown to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan on Monday.

Police had threatened to ban the Stop the War Coalition rally and march under archaic legislation dating from 1839, but they caved in and allowed it to proceed with just half an hour to go after thousands of supporters flooded into central London.

Speakers from the worlds of politics, trade unionism and entertainment celebrated at a preliminary rally in Trafalgar Square, along with peace and democracy campaigners from Iraq and Iran.

StWC chairman Andrew Murray announced to the crowd that the police had relented just 30 minutes before the rally was due to start.

He added: “This is a tribute to this movement and to everyone who has campaigned to assert our right to hold this government to account for the criminal policies it is following around the world.”

Coalition convener Lindsey German agreed, saying that the authorities and MPs had underestimated the determination of the anti-war movement.

But she warned that Britain was now seeing restrictions on civil liberties as a direct result of the war in Iraq.

Left MP John McDonnell thanked the crowd of “students, pensioners, trade unionists and workers” for attending, declaring: “You’ve won a tremendous victory for our civil rights.

“Gordon Brown will be addressing Parliament about the war today. But nothing he can say will make up for the slaughter in Iraq,” insisted Mr McDonnell.

“The message to Gordon Brown must repeated again and again. It’s not 500 or 1,000 troops withdrawn by Christmas that we want, it’s all of them out now.”

Respect MP George Galloway agreed that the peace movement had won a “significant victory.”

He added: “Gordon Brown might think that Basra is a photo opportunity, but we know it is a graveyard for millions of innocent Iraqi civilians, whose lives are being ruined by the criminal activity of the British Parliament.”

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament chairwoman Kate Hudson pointed out: “Two weeks ago, at the Labour Party conference, Gordon Brown said: ‘I pledge to strengthen our liberties and to uphold our right to protest.’

“He has spent the last two weeks trying to suppress this demonstration, but they have had to cave in and allow it to go ahead. What a victory for our movement!”

Comedian Mark Steel added: “The government justified the invasion of Iraq by the torture and carnage going on under Saddam Hussein. “The extraordinary achievement of the occupation is that there is now more torture and more carnage than under Saddam.”

Just over a year ago, during a high-school assembly in Jena, Louisiana, a black student asked the school’s white principal if it would be all right to sit under an oak tree outside, an oasis of shade known as the “white tree,” because only Caucasian students congregated there. The principal said that the young man could sit where he liked. Later, the student and some African-American friends walked over to the oak and chatted with some white schoolmates. The next day, somebody fixed two nooses to the tree’s branches.

The ropes inaugurated a narrative of conflict and small-town justice in the Deep South known today as the case of the Jena Six, a story populated by a disconcerting number of stock characters from the late Jim Crow era. Its origins signalled a theatrical quality that a swelling cast, including the Reverend Al Sharpton, has managed to sustain; an Off Broadway production (backlit oak tree, gentle wind machines, soliloquies about past and present) seems inevitable.

Although some of the evidence in the Jena case is murky, a cumulative verdict of racial double standards lies beyond reasonable doubt. Between Reconstruction and the end of the Second World War, more than two hundred and fifty people in Louisiana, the great majority of them African-Americans, were lynched. Jena’s recent noosemakers, identified as a trio of white students, were recommended for expulsion by the principal, who was evidently conscious of this history, but a white school superintendent imposed suspensions only, on the ground that the tree display was a prank. In the days leading up to that decision, fights had erupted between black and white students, and the local district attorney, Reed Walters, reportedly gave a speech in which he warned students, “With a stroke of my pen, I can make your lives disappear.”

Last December, at the school, a black student coldcocked a white student, Justin Barker, knocking him briefly unconscious; other black students allegedly kicked the victim while he lay on the ground. Barker was treated for cuts and bruises at a hospital and released a few hours later. The police arrested six black students, aged fourteen to eighteen, and Walters charged them with attempted second-degree murder and a conspiracy count; if convicted, they faced up to seventy-five years in prison.

Jena prosecutors started reducing the charges to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy. Still, last June an all-white jury convicted one of the defendants, Mychal Bell, who was sixteen years old at the time of the assault, of crimes that threatened him with up to twenty-two years in an adult state prison. Michael Baisden, a black syndicated radio talk-show host who normally specializes in romance and its perils, undertook an on-air protest, along with others, which spread across black radio and then to the Internet. In late September, thousands of demonstrators descended on Jena. Last Thursday, Bell, whose convictions had been thrown out, was released on bail, after ten months in jail; Reed Walters has agreed to retry him as a juvenile.

Last week, in the Times, Walters defended his work; he described himself as just “a lawyer obligated to enforce the laws of my state.” A devotion to the sanctity of statutes is, of course, essential in a nation governed by laws, but equally important is the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, derived from an intuitive commitment to fairness and common sense. If Walters had possessed a modest measure of such judgment, he might have rescued himself and the town of Jena from notoriety many months ago.

His bullheadedness, however, does not explain why Jena’s narrative has resonated so broadly. Many African-Americans understand the case not only as the civil-rights era redux but as a stark illustration of a here-and-now problem, one about which whites are mainly silent: the mass incarceration of black youths—America’s “school-to-prison pipeline,” as some scholars have christened it.

The number of blacks in prison has quadrupled since 1980. There are many overlapping causes, among them severe automated federal sentencing rules; a passionate but badly managed “war on drugs” prosecuted most heavily in African-American neighborhoods; and deepening inequalities in personal income and access to education, whose effects fall hardest on urban teen-agers. One study estimates that, if recent trends continue, a third of the black males born in 2001 can expect to do time.

The state of Louisiana, true to its reputation for rococo extremism in all matters political, locks up in prison a higher percentage of its population—black, white, and all other races combined—than any other state in the nation. It might be of some comfort to politicians, then, if the Jena case, like the disgraceful treatment of displaced African-American victims of Hurricane Katrina, could be rationalized as an isolated, swamp-inspired exception to a more temperate American norm.

The opposite is true, however. In July, the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group, released a state-by-state study of prison populations that identified where blacks endured the highest rates of incarceration. The top four states were South Dakota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Vermont; the top ten included Utah, Montana, and Colorado—not places renowned for their African-American subcultures. In the United States today, driving while black—or shoplifting while black, or taking illegal drugs, or hitting schoolmates—often carries the greatest risk of incarceration, in comparison to the risk faced by whites, in states where people of color are rare, including a few states that are liberal, prosperous, and not a little self-satisfied. Ex-slave states that are relatively poor and have large African-American populations, such as Louisiana, display less racial disparity.

BAGHDAD, Oct. 7 — The Iraqi prime minister’s office said Sunday that the government’s investigation had determined that Blackwater USA private security guards who shot Iraqi civilians three weeks ago in a Baghdad square sprayed gunfire in nearly every direction, committed “deliberate murder” and should be punished accordingly.

Iraqi investigators, supported by Iraqi witness accounts, have said unofficially that they could not find evidence of any attack on the Blackwater guards that might have provoked the shooting on Nisour Square, which the Iraqis say killed 17 and wounded 27. But the statement by Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the prime minister, is the first indication that the government considers its investigation completed and the shootings unprovoked.

“This is a deliberate crime against civilians,” Mr. Dabbagh said. “It should be tried in court and the victims should be compensated.”

Those conclusions contradict Blackwater’s original statement on the shooting, which said that a convoy operated by the company’s guards “acted lawfully and appropriately in response to a hostile attack.” The Iraqi findings are also at odds with initial assertions by the State Department that the convoy had received small-arms fire.

Blackwater provides security for American diplomats in Iraq. A convoy carrying diplomats was approaching the square when a second Blackwater convoy, positioned on the square in advance to control traffic, opened fire.

“Not even a brick was thrown at them,” said Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassim, the Iraqi defense minister. “And until now we have been examining this matter.”

But in an indication of the legal uncertainties surrounding the case in Iraq, where the law gives American contractors virtual immunity, Mr. Dabbagh said decisions on specific legal steps would wait until the Americans completed their own investigation of the shooting and conferred with the Iraqis. It is not clear which provisions of American law would apply in this case.

American officials have cautioned against drawing conclusions until evidence from all witnesses in the case, including the Blackwater guards, has been compiled.

Mr. Jassim said that little information had come from the Americans and that Iraqi investigators had not been granted access to the guards. But he said the Americans had promised to cooperate.

In previously undisclosed details in the government’s final report, the Iraqi police documented that Blackwater guards shot in almost every direction, killing or wounding people in a near 360-degree circle around Nisour Square.

The thick file amassed for the investigation asserts that bullets reached bystanders who were as far as 200 feet away and nearly on the opposite side of the square.

The police investigation also shows that a second shooting, in which one person was killed and two wounded, occurred about 600 feet from the initial one on the opposite side of the square, along the departure route that the Blackwater team took from the first shooting.

Although American diplomats have worked with personal security companies for most of the time since the American invasion in March 2003, it appears that State Department officials only now have started to thoroughly look at every aspect of the relationship.

As part of that effort, Patrick Kennedy, who heads the State Department’s team reviewing the relationship with personal security companies, met in recent days with the private security industry in Iraq. He posed nearly 20 questions to representatives of the firms that make clear that American diplomats have been largely in the dark about some of the most basic procedures of the people who protect them. A list of the questions was provided by a participant.

Using abbreviations for the Department of State and personal security company, among the questions he posed were: “Do we provide weapons for P.S.C.’s? Does the D.O.S. travel outside the Green Zone too much? What is the ultimate method of discipline for P.S.C. individuals?”

Mérida, (venezuelanalysis.com)- Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro sharply criticized Washington at the UN General Assembly yesterday for increasing threats against Iran and for its actions in the war on terrorism. Maduro also met with US officials on Monday to discuss the delicate relations between the two countries.

Maduro spoke in place of President Hugo Chavez, who had canceled his trip to the UN at the last minute.

In his speech, Maduro warned General Assembly representatives of a campaign on the part of Washington “to demonize the Iranian people and government” and called for an end “to the madness of the war in Iraq.”

“We have seen how, in a dangerous fashion, they are making threatening statements against the peaceful people of Iran,” he said. “Has the world thought about what would happen if this total madness on the part of the elites in the United States government led to an attack on the peaceful nation of Iran?”

Maduro assured the assembly that “there is still time” to stop the campaign and prevent a war between the United States and Iran.

Calling the war in Iraq “foolish” and “irrational”, Maduro pointed to the amount of money the United States has spent on the Iraq war, and emphasized the number of houses, schools and hospitals that could have been built for the poor people of the world.

“If we add up all the direct results of this foolish and irrational war we would have to say that this war has brought death, destruction, instability, and has created more havens for terrorism,” he said. “Those 600 billion dollars invested in the occupation of Iraq during the last six years could have been for progress, equality, and justice for the Iraqi people, but the results are very evident. Just look at it.”

Maduro went on to denounce Washington for its “hypocritical” policy of fighting terrorism, while at the same time protecting “one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists,” referring to Luis Posada Carriles, the Cuban anti-Castro terrorist responsible for various terrorist attacks, including the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airline that killed 73 people.

The minister renewed Venezuela’s request to extradite Posada Carriles to Venezuela to be tried for his involvement in the bombing. Posada Carriles was a CIA-operative who once worked inside Venezuela and is accused of plotting the bombing of the Cuban airliner that took off from Venezuela. He has also been connected to other crimes, including the bombing of hotels in Havana and an attempted bombing in Panama. US authorities have denied the extradition request, however, alleging that Posada Carriles would be “tortured” in Venezuela.

“He is free and protected by the US government in Florida. This terrorist has served the CIA for 40 years,” said Maduro. “This two-faced behavior shows the hypocrisy of a government that is supposedly fighting a war against terrorism, but in their own country they protect one of the most dangerous terrorists of the western hemisphere.”

Maduro called on the representatives of the General Assembly to help build a “multipolar” world without “imperial hegemony,” insisting that building another world is urgent and possible. He also renewed Venezuela’s calls for a reform of the United Nations.

“We believe this organization has to be rebuilt. It has to be constructed to be a faithful instrument at the service of a multipolar world, of equality, of peace, of a world without hegemonies,” he said.

Despite his harsh criticisms of Washington, Maduro met with top US envoy for the Americas Thomas Shannon at the UN headquarters on Monday, in what has been described as a “very cordial” meeting. According to reports, the main topic of the meeting was the humanitarian exchange being negotiated with Colombia in which Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has taken an active role.

For 40 years, the French government has been fighting a secret war in Africa, hidden not only from its people, but from the world. It has led the French to slaughter democrats, install dictator after dictator – and to fund and fuel the most vicious genocide since the Nazis. Today, this war is so violent that thousands are fleeing across the border from the Central African Republic into Darfur – seeking sanctuary in the world’s most notorious killing fields

10/07/07 “The Independent” — – I first heard whispers of this war in March, when newspapers reported in passing that the French military was bombing the remote city of Birao, in the far north-east of the CAR. Why were French soldiers fighting there, thousands of miles from home? Why had they been intervening in Central Africa this way for so many decades? I could find no answers here – so I decided to travel there, into the belly of France’s forgotten war.

On the battlefield – Birao

I am standing now on its latest battlefield, looking out over abandoned mud streets streaked with ash. The city of Birao is empty and echoing, for the first time in 200 years. All around are miles of burned and abandoned homes, with the odd starved child scampering through the wreckage. What were all these buildings? On one faded green sign it says Ministry of Justice, on a structure reduced to a charcoal husk. In the market square, the people who have returned are selling a few scarce supplies – rice and manioc, the local yeasty staple food – and talking quietly. At the edges of the town, there are African soldiers armed and trained by the French, lolling behind sandbags, with machine guns jutting nervously at passers-by. They are singing weary nationalist anthems and dreaming of home.

To get here, you have to travel for eight hours on a weekly UN flight that carries eight passengers at most, and then ride on the back of a rusting flat-top truck for an hour along ravaged and broken roads. It is hard to know when you have arrived, because you are greeted only by emptiness and silence. What has happened here? Sitting amid the mud and dust and sorrow, I find Mahmoud, one of the 10 per cent of Birao’s residents who have returned to the rubble.

He is a thin-faced 45-year-old farmer, and explains, in a low, slow voice, how his home town came to this. “I woke up for morning prayers on 4 March and there was gunfire everywhere. We were very frightened so we stayed in the house and hoped it would stop. But then in the early afternoon my brother’s children came running to our house, screaming and crying. They told us the Forcés Armées Centrafricanes [Faca – the army trained and equipped by the French, on behalf of their friendly neighbourhood strongman, President François Bozize] had gone into their house. They wouldn’t calm down and explain. So I ran there, and I saw my brother on the floor outside, dead. His wife explained they had forced their way in and rounded him up, along with three men who lived nearby. They took them out on to the street and shot them one by one in the head.”

Mahmoud’s friend, Idris, lived nearby, and feared he, too, would be shot. He says now: “We could see the villages burning and the children were screaming and really scared, so we ran two kilometres out into the jungle. From there we could see our whole city on fire. We fled along the river and stayed out there. We ate fish, but there weren’t many. Some days we couldn’t catch anything and we starved. The children were so terrified. Still, when they hear a loud noise, they think there are guns coming and they start shaking.” Idris looks off into the distance and continues: “On the fourth day, we saw the French planes come. They each had six rockets that they fired. The explosions were loud. We don’t know what they were targeting, or why. Then the French soldiers arrived.” A military truck filled with French soldiers rumbles by not long after, its tanned troops wearing designer sunglasses and a “why am I here?” anxiety.

As Mahmoud and Idris talk it gets dark, and a suffocating blackness and silence falls on the city. There is no electricity and no moonlight. They explain in this blackness that the French-backed troops began firing and the French military began bombing in March for one reason: the desperate locals had begun to rise up against President Bozize, because he had done nothing for them. People here were tired of the fact that “there are no schools, no hospitals, and no roads”. “We are completely isolated,” they explain. “When it rains, we are cut off from the world because the roads turn to mud. We have nothing. All the rebels were asking was for government help.” As I stumble around Birao, I hear this every time: the rebels were simply begging for government help for the hungry, abandoned people. Even the bemused French soldiers and the Bozize lackeys sent to the area admit this privately. Yet the French response was with bombs against the rebels’ pick-up points. Why? What is there here that they want?

I look out towards the jungle and realise many of Birao’s residents are still hiding out there, risking the wild beasts. In the similarly burned-out areas in the north-west, I drive out into the jungle with Unicef and find these clusters of starving families scattered everywhere. In one cleared patch, I find a group of four men with their wives and mothers, clearing an area of ground with their bare hands where they will try to plant peanuts. They are living in handmade huts and set traps to catch mice to eat. Ariette Nulguhom is cradling her eight-month-old grandson with his distended little belly and praying he will survive another night. She tells me: “He’s been sick for a long time. We tried to get him to a nurse but there aren’t any. We think it is malaria but there is no medicine here. We don’t know what will happen… We are all weak and feverish. We’re exhausted because we work all day, every day. I have not eaten for days now.” When they left behind their houses, they left behind access to clean water, electricity, and medicine. When the Faca burned those homes, they burned away the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries for these families, too.

This is a forgotten corner of a forgotten country. Birao lies and dies in the far north-east of the Central African Republic. CAR itself has a population of just 3.8 million, spread across a territory bigger than Britain’s, landlocked at the exact geographical heart of Africa. It is the least-reported country on earth. Even the fact that 212,000 people have been driven out of their homes in this war doesn’t register on the global radar. In Birao, I realise I am too close to the immediate horror to find the deeper explanations for this war. I only begin to uncover the origins of this story when I stumble across a very rare find in the CAR – an old man.

A country of children – Paoua

In the CAR, you have beaten the odds if you live to be 42. There are times when this seems like a country of children, swarming around with guns and hardened laughs, without an adult in sight. So when I see Zolo Bartholemew limping past the wreckage of another burned-out town – this time in the distant north-west, outside the city of Paoua – he seems like a mirage. He has no teeth and a creased face, and when I ask, he does not know his age. But he remembers. He remembers the tail-end of the first time the French were here – and why.

“I watched my parents forced to work in the fields when I was a child,” he says in Sango, the local language. “When they got tired, they were whipped and beaten and made to go faster. It was constantly like this.” The French flag was first hoisted in the heart of Africa on 3 October 1880, seizing the right bank of the Congo for the cause of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité – for the white man. The territory was swiftly divided up between French corporations, who were given the right effectively to enslave the people, like Zolo’s parents, and force them to harvest its rubber. This rubber was processed into car tyres for sale in Paris and London and New York. A French missionary called Father Daigre described what he saw: ” It is common to meet long files of prisoners, naked and in a pitiful state, being dragged along by a rope round their necks. They are famished, sick, and fall down like flies. The really ill and the little children are left in the villages to die of starvation. The people least affected often killed the dying, for food.”

Zolo nods when I mention this. “When the whites were here, we suffered even more,” he says. “They forced us to work. We were slaves.”

One horrified French administrator wrote in the 1920s that the locals reacted to being enslaved by the corporations by becoming “a troglodyte, subsisting wretchedly on roots until he starves to death, rather than accept these terrible burdens”. Areas that had “only a few months ago been rich, populous and firmly established in large villages” became, he wrote, “wasteland, sown with dilapidated villages and deserted plantations”.

But in the 1950s, men like Zolo rose and refused to be enslaved. “We followed Boganda,” he says. Barthélemy Boganda was born in a Central African village near here in 1910, and, as a child, he saw his mother beaten to death by the guards in charge of gathering rubber for a French corporation. He rose steadily through the Catholic priesthood, married a French woman, and, quite suddenly, became the leader of the CAR’s pro-democracy movement. He would begin his speeches to the French by introducing himself as the son of a polygamous cannibal, and then lecture them on the values of the French Revolution with a fluency that left them stunned and shamed. He crafted a vision of a democratic Africa beyond tribe, beyond race and beyond colonialism. He was passionate about the need for a plurality of political parties, a free press, and human rights. He rhapsodised about his vision of a United States of Africa, linking together the countries of Central Africa into a USA Mk II.

“And they killed him,” Zolo says, shaking his head and kicking at the earth beneath his feet. On 29 March 1959, not long after the French era of direct rule had ended, President Boganda’s plane was blasted out of the air. The French press reported that there had been “suspicious materials ” found in the remains of the fuselage – but on the orders of the French government, the local investigation was abandoned. The French installed the dictator David Dacko in his place. He swiftly shut down Boganda’s democratic reforms, brought back many French corporations, and reintroduced their old system of forced labour, rebranding it “village work”. French rule over the CAR – the whippings Zolo remembers – did not end with “independence”. It simply mutated, into a new and slippery form, and it is at the root of the current war.

But the clues to this lie far to the west, in the capital city. ” Nothing happens in this country without somebody pulling a lever in Paris,” a taxi driver tells me as I leave to travel to Bangui at the bottom of the country, driving through clouds of red-dust and past swarms of street-children. I have an appointment with an underground figure in the opposition to keep.

A tortured president – Bangui

Bangui looks like a city that rose with a heave from the jungle a century ago, and has been sighing back into it ever since. Every building appears to be rusting away, and great eruptions of vegetation are shoving the homes and shops aside, reaching for the sky. On corner after corner there are huge, hideous caricature-statues of black people, showing them as thick-lipped and kinky-haired, giving the city the ambience of a Ku Klux Klan garage sale.

Every few hours, the power supply dies, and the city stammers to a halt. People dawdle in the streets, playing cards and wiping away their sweat with the back of their wrists. It is during one of these blackouts that I arrive at the office of a leader of the opposition with a delegation from the British campaigning group Waging Peace. His office is above a parade of shops, and it is a simple room filled with African carvings and pictures of past and faded glories. He walks towards us in a green suit, and – although he does not say it – we all know he is taking a huge risk by meeting us secretly like this. Last year, 40 political figures who criticised the government of President Bozize were tossed into jail and tortured. ” They tried to kill my son. They are trying to assassinate me,” he says, with a matter-of-fact shrug. He gives the long, horrible details. I cannot repeat them here because they would identify him – and become a death sentence.

“The country is in a dire situation,” he says. “We have been described by the magazine Foreign Policy as one of the worst failed states in the world, after Iraq and Afghanistan.” He says the CAR is now ” a total and ferocious dictatorship” under the absolute command of Bozize. The roots of the wars in the north-east and north-west are, he says, simple. “Local people in these regions are rebelling against the government, because the government provides them with nothing. There are no services. There aren’t even roads. So the rebels rise up to get attention – and the government retaliates by rampaging through the area, killing civillians and burning homes.”

So who is this Francois Bozize, and why are the French supporting him with batallions and bombs? I telephone the vast presidential palace to meet the man who stares out from behind a smartly-trimmed moustache in the pictures hanging on every wall, and the President’s press officer eventually gets back to me. “Call me back, I am running out of credit on my mobile phone,” he snaps. Then he promises a meeting with the President, but finds mysterious “complications” that lead him to cancel every time. There are rumours across Bangui that Bozize is becoming ever-more paranoid and locked down, employing food tasters to check for poison before every meal and refusing to meet strangers. So I look instead to the few scraps of independent journalism that survive here for clues as to who this French love-child really is.

Le Citoyen is distributed on rough photocopied paper every day and sold on street corners for a few pennies – but it is one of the bastions of Central Africa’s remaining freedoms. Its editor Maka Obossokotte has a neat grey beard, square cheekbones, and balls of steel. He has been jailed for criticising the President and his cronies more than once, but he insists I quote him on-the-record and by name. “In jail, you were given rotten fish to eat. I got gout. The toilets…” he shakes his head. “It is hell.” He says he knows now that “it is very likely somebody from the presidential clan will kill me… Every morning when I wake up, I think there are three beds I could end up in tonight. Back here at home, the hospital, or the morgue.” But he says: “I will not be afraid. It is when you are afraid that you lose.”

Sitting in a delicious cloud of smoke, puffing away on high-tar cigarettes, Maka talks me through the President’s biography. He was born in nearby Gabon, the son of a police officer from the CAR. He wasn’t smart at school, but he managed to get a coveted job as bodyguard to Jean-Bedel Bokassa, one of the vicious dictators flattered and fawned over by the French. Bokassa was famously mad, declaring himself “Emperor of the CAR”, eating the leader of the opposition, and opening fire on a group of children who were protesting for help to buy their school uniforms. Bozize carried Bokassa’s cane and his bag, and, Maka explains: “It was through watching him that Bozize got his taste for power.” The “Emperor” promoted him to the rank of general.

After a while, Bokassa’s foaming madness made him an unreliable servant of the French, so they backed a coup against him. Bozize left to study at the Ecole Spécial Militaire de Saint-Cyr in France, and returned only to stage a farcical coup attempt of his own. In 1982, he seized control of one of the national radio stations and announced that he was now President. Everybody laughed; Bozize fled. A few years later he was deported back to Bangui to be punished. “They tortured him,” Maka says. “They pissed in his mouth, they broke his ribs, they really mistreated him for three years.”

Eventually, they let him go back to France for medical treatment – and the French government swiftly began to build him up as an alternative president, in case their current pick became too disobedient and got ideas of his own. From being a poor man, Bozize suddenly had the money to run a huge presidential campaign. He ran, and he lost. So in October 2002, he paid for a vast private mercenary army (you might wonder – with whose money?) to invade the CAR from neighbouring Chad, depose the sitting president and install himself as the supreme ruler. Since then, he has “won” a disputed election he arranged for himself and bathed in French approbation.

“France sees the CAR as a colony,” Maka says. “The presidents are selected by France, not elected by the people. The presidents do not serve the interests of this country; they serve the interests of France.” He lists the French corporations who use the CAR as a base to grab Central African resources. This French behaviour is, he reasons, at the root of the wars currently ripping apart the north of the country. Whoever becomes president knows his power flows down from Paris, not up from the people – so he has no incentive to build support by developing the country. Rebellions become inevitable, and the president crushes them with the house-burnings and French bombs I learned about in Birao.

“The country will only be able to develop when France stops putting in place these dictators and the people choose,” Maka adds, stubbing out his cigarette into an overflowing ashtray. “The CAR will only progress when the president is scared of his people, not the French.”

Into rebel country – Bossangoa

I am driving now through the skin-sizzling heat of Bossangoa, the home-town of Bozize – and the last outpost of his power before you stumble into bandit-and-rebel territory. The Marie Celeste villages stretch for miles once more. Silence. Walls eaten by fire. Dead towns. In the houses there are smashed pots, abandoned as their residents fled Bozize’s marauding murderers. I find a stray shoe sitting alone in one. In another village, the bell that calls children to school is still hanging from a tree, forgotten. On the blackboard is the final lesson, still there: a map of the CAR in chalk.

But then, after an hour of driving beyond Bossangoa into the jungle, there are signs of life. In yet another burned village, there are 20 young men, all sweat and Kalashnikovs. We pull up, and realise we are in an unexpected rebel camp. The boys’ leader strolls toward us – an elder, at the age of 24 – and shakes our hands. He explains they are part of the rebel Army for the Restoration of the Republic and Democracy (French acronym APRD), who have taken this area. His “troops” are dressed oddly. One is swearing ski glasses and a ski hat, in a place as far from a ski slope as any on earth. Another is wearing nothing but bright red swimming trunks, and half a dozen strings of bullets around his neck. He is wearing a single woman’s flip-flop, silver and glittering in the sun.

They explain they are not allowed to make statements – only their leader can do that – but they are eager to have their photographs taken. As soon as I agree, they contort themselves into wild poses. They stick bullets in their mouths, flex their muscles and screw their faces into a fake rage, like they are recreating a Rambo poster. The baby-faced soldier in the corner, they tell me casually, is 13. They look like teenagers on any street corner anywhere in the world, playing at being rebels. Except these are real rebels, with real guns. A 13-year-old with a gun is a comic sight – until he points it towards you and smiles strangely.

Why, I ask, did you join the rebellion? “Bozize killed my father, my mother and my brother,” their leader steps forward to say, in a low voice. He peels up his vest and shows an angry scar where he says he was bayoneted. “They thought I was dead, so they left me.” I ask what the rebels want. “We want peace, we want schools, we want roads,” the leader says. Most of them nod. Do you want power? “That’s up to God. We want roads and schools.”

With that, we drive away, and they cheerfully wave their guns in our direction. I follow the trail of burned homes up to Paoua, a town at the top of the north-west – and I am sitting now on a bench with the man who ordered so many to be torched. A lieutenant of the Garde Présidentiel (GP) is chewing gum in the sun, behind barbed wire and sleeping security guards. The GP is the jagged spike of the country’s military accountable only to President Bozize – his own private militia. When you see them approach on the streets, with their wild eyes and ready guns, pulses surge and spines stiffen. In the market-square in Paoua, a GP “officer” put a gun to the head of a Médecins sans Frontières doctor and told him: ” We will do what they did in Rwanda.” And I am making small talk with one of its bosses.

He is wearing long shining purple robes and a white fez, and he tells us haltingly that he will be interviewed, yes, but we cannot use his name. He is young – 33 – with hunched shoulders. His bodyguard is a muscled ripple of anxiety, and he watches every move we make, as if ready to pounce. So, lieutenant, why do you think people join the rebels and fight against you? He makes eye contact only with his bodyguard. “I don’t know.” Chew, chew. Why do you think people are so scared of the GP here? ” There have been a few undisciplined elements, but we have dealt with them.” Chew, chew, chew. So it is only undisciplined soldiers who burn all these thousands upon thousands of homes? You don’t order them to? “If they burn homes, we deal with them.” How have you dealt with them? “We use discipline.” He stops leaning and sits up. Really? How many people have you disciplined? When? His bodyguard doesn’t like this question; he glares at me. “I had an officer who went to the market when he was not supposed to. I disciplined him.” That’s it? “We have disciplined.”

That’s not what people in the villages say, I comment. They are terrified. ” Show me the villages. I will show you how we have done good.” After we drive away from his compound, we meet up with two pale, disturbed workers from the Italian charity Coopi. They explain that as the lieutenant was assuring us his forces are disciplined, a GP officer drove up on a motorbike and waved a gun in their faces.

At every one of these scenes, the question keeps coming back: why? Why are the French providing military support and training for these militia? The French government says it is in the CAR because it signed a military agreement back in the 1970s to protect the country from external aggression. The rebellions in the north are, they say, supported by Sudan – so this counts. Mes amis, we are protecting a democratically elected President from a tyrannical and genocidal neighbour.

But I couldn’t find anyone in the CAR – not a single person, not even the most pro-French – who thought Sudan had anything to do with the rebels. So I arrange to meet up in Bangui with Louise Roland-Gosselin, an Anglo-French director of the group Waging Peace, who has been studying the Central African Republic. “The policies here in the CAR are part of a much bigger approach by France towards Africa,” she says. “We call this system ‘Franceafrique’, and it was set up by Charles de Gaulle to replace the former colonial system. There is clear continuity from the imperial system to the present day.”

The motives for this war are, Roland-Gosselin says, drenched in dollars and euros and uranium. “The overarching goal is to take African resources and funnel them towards French corporations,” she says. “The CAR itself is a base from which the French can access resources all over Africa. That is why it is so important. They use it to keep the oil flowing to French companies in Chad, the resources flowing from Congo, and so on. And of course, the country itself has valuable resources. CAR has a lot of uranium, which the French badly need because they are so dependent on nuclear power. At the moment they get their uranium from Niger, but the CAR is their back-up plan.” So this is, in part, a war for nuclear power? ” Yes, but also a lot of this money has been funnelled, through corruption, straight back into the French political process. Say somebody needs a road built here in the CAR. The French government will insist on a French company – and the French company back home donates a lot to the ‘right’ French political party.”

This neo-imperial war reached its psychotic apogee in 1994, when the French government used the CAR as a base to fund and fuel the Rwandan genocide, the most bloody since the death of Adolf Hitler. Vincent Mounie is a leading figure in Sur Vie, a French organisation monitoring its government’s actions in Africa. He explains: “The French were totally complicit in the genocide. There were French troops there before, during and after the genocide, backing the most extreme Hutu forces as they murdered the Tutsis. You know the identity cards that divided the Rwandan population into Hutus and Tutsis in preparation for the slaughter? They were printed in Paris.”

The French military base in Bangui had to be abandoned in 1996 after it was burned down by enraged locals, tired of the French ramming tyrants down their national gullet. Today the old base is overgrown, and the French military has shifted to new camps in Birao. But I stare at it now. The French planes that backed the Rwandan holocaust left from here.

President François Mitterrand began his career supporting one genocidal force, and he ended it supporting another. As a young man he rose through the ranks of the Hitler-hugging Vichy regime, only quitting and joining the Resistance when it became obvious the democrats would win. He then became nominally a Socialist and, finally, President – when at last genocide entered his life again. The French government had long seen the Hutu nationalists in Rwanda as Their Men, the people most friendly to French demands for military and corporate access. So when, starting in 1989, the Tutsi refugees who had been driven out decades before started to demand their right to return to their homes, the French were furious. Mitterrand saw this Tutsi rights movement as a creation of the CIA, designed to displace a pro-French regime and replace it with a buddy of Uncle Sam. His own aides told him there was no evidence of a link to the CIA – but he refused to listen. He announced that the Tutsis were a “Khmer Noir” , an evil anti-French force, and began to rapidly build up the Hutu Power forces to fight back.

In just four years, starting in 1990, the French buffed up the Hutu nationalist military forces in Rwanda from 10,000 to more than 40,000. The moderate forces within Rwanda began desperately trying to broker a power-sharing agreement between the two sides, “And the French government deliberately destroyed any attempt at a peace deal,” Mounie says. Then the hacking up of Tutsi men, women and children began. Mitterrand extended bigger loans to the Hutus, which they used to buy more weapons and ammunition. He publicly mocked anyone who talked about a Hutu-led genocide.

Then, when the international outrage became so great even Mitterrand could not ignore it, the French announced they would send in a military force to stop the killing. “It was France’s last lie, and the most cruel,” Mounie adds. “Even at this point, Mitterrand’s real aim was to recapture Kigali and restore the Hutus to power.” In Birao today, many of the soldiers patrolling the city are veterans of this “rescue operation”. I am sipping sweet tea in one of the local bigwig’s ramshackle houses when a group of local soldiers on patrol arrive. They are working-class men from the Paris and Lyons banlieues, and in the course of the small talk, they admit that they were in Rwanda – and they are still traumatised by what they were ordered to do by Mitterrand and his men. ” Children would bring us the severed heads of their parents and scream for help,” one says, “but our orders were not to help them.”

A year after the holocaust ended, Mitterrand told an aide: “Nobody in France cares about the genocide.” These disturbed soldiers, sitting in the waning sunlight, show the old cynic was wrong, at least, about that.

Mother, do not beat us – Bangui

In the red-dusted heart of Bangui, there is a rusting, collapsing metaphor for this war – and where it is going. On one side of the road is the vast stadium the French government built for Bokassa in the 1970s, so he could crown himself Emperor of Central Africa and Lord of All He Surveyed. It is falling down now, a dangerous wreck. Opposite, there is a gleaming new sports stadium with plush seating and marble floors. It was built by the Chinese. France is only one slice of this new great game, this global scramble for Africa’s resources. Every swaggering world power – the US, Britain, China – is grabbing Africa’s remaining riches now, shunting aside democracy and human rights to get to them. But even the Chinese dictators remember to toss some of the loose change from the riches they have pillaged to Bangui. The French have long since given up even on that. They come only with bullets and bombs.

As I prepare to leave the CAR, I am told by senior French and African sources that Paris could be getting ready to ditch President Bozize. Like a string of Central African dictators before him, he has been tugging too hard on the French leash, imagining he is the independent ruler of an independent country. He has decided to nationalise some of the energy companies operating here, including the French mega-corporations Total and ELF. ” If he wants the French to crush his rebellions and keep him in power, he has to do what they say,” my source says. Bozize is trying to deal with this pre-emptively, by offering the rebel leaders a place in his cabinet. As I drive past his presidential palace for the last time, I wonder if the paranoia that kept me from meeting him was justified all along.

But as my plane finally propels me away from this place, one CAR voice – angry, crazed – seems to follow me. In the jungles around Paoua, I was taken to the entrance to a remote burned-out village to meet Laurent Djim-Woei, the spokesman for the rebels in the north-west. He is a man talked about in awe by his followers – and his enemies.

A group of young men greeted us. They were carrying spears alongside their ski hats and scars. Silently, they beckoned us to follow them through more charcoal villages and dense foliage and beyond. Eventually we reached a clearing. Laurent was dressed in stained combat gear. He had a big smile that was marred by the absence of almost all his teeth. There were three cellphones hanging from his neck. He led an inspection of his rag-tag forces for our benefit, getting them to stand to attention and yelling hoarse orders at them in Sango. Then Laurent told us to sit down and embarked on a rambling, barely comprehensible lecture.

There were only a few of us in a silent jungle, but he looked beyond us and boomed, like he was addressing a stadium full of supporters. The CAR needs ” a guard dog” to “bark about justice” and not “the kind of dog that leads you, which we have had in the past”, he said. It is the first of a string of odd metaphors. I kept trying to draw him back to specifics: what does he want? He would only use abstract nouns – justice, peace – but then occasionally he voiced his grievances succinctly, before they were doused in metaphor and burned into incomprehensibility again: ” Bozize is burning our villages. A country shouldn’t burn its own country’s villages. It is like a mother and a child, a mother does not burn her child, it would be madness.” His eyes danced nervously around the jungle as we spoke, as if he was waiting for a raid.

“France is the mother of Central Africa, and we are the child,” he said, oddly picking up the old racist metaphor and making it his own. ” The French must now change sides and support us, not Bozize. The French are our parents, we want them to be good parents.” This is a sentiment that kept cropping up in the rubble of France’s interventions – an appeal to the French to suddenly become a benevolent mother, acting on the side of good, despite all the evidence. France and the CAR are, it strikes me at last, locked in a sick embrace. The French crave the riches offered by this lush, hungry patch of Africa, and the people of Central Africa pine for a deus ex machina to enter stage right and resolve their internal disputes with raw force.